Environmental Engineering Reference
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cardoon and the thistle, informed Wells's narrative of alien invasion, and Wells's
fictional hybridisation of the features and habits of real plant species enabled his
Martian red weed to become a multiple-habitat-spanning super-invasive. This
process of amplification also took place on the level of language. Scientists such as
Darwin and Hamilton had already adopted the terminology of invasion by aliens
in their discussion of introduced species. However, by transposing these terms into
a fictional tale in which the introduction of new species entailed the near-conquest
of humanity by monstrous extra-terrestrials, Wells intensified the meanings that
these terms carried.
These intensified meanings could then feed back into the non-fictional discourse
surrounding introduced species. That the grafting of the fictional to the scientific
could amplify the rhetoric surrounding introduced species in non-fiction texts is
demonstrated by Wells's own popular science writing. The Science of Life , a
compendium of modern biological knowledge published by H. G. Wells, Julian
Huxley, and G. P. Wells in 1929-1930 and intended for a general audience, offered
an account of the prickly pear in Australia. The authors describe the prickly pear
as 'overrunning the country and ousting not only native plants, but man and his
agricultural efforts as well' (Wells et al ., 1931: 237). They recount:
A few prickly-pears introduced into Eastern Australia as a botanical curiosity
(and for a time propagated and spread by a kindly society who thought that
cactuses in pots might brighten the homes of immigrants' wives) covered
thousands of square miles in the course of a few years. At the height of its
multiplication the prickly-pear was invading a new acre of Australian land
every minute of the day, until, as Dr. Tillyard says: 'The vision arose of Eastern
Australia becoming in a hundred years' time a vast desert of prickly-pear, with
a few walled cities holding out against it.'
(ibid.: 598)
The inclusion of this final dystopian image borrowed from Tillyard illustrates the
way in which an amplified science-fictive perspective might gradually infuse
the discussion of introduced species in non-fiction accounts, pre-conditioning
responses to the phenomena described. That this process continues to this day is
demonstrated by newspaper titles such as 'The War of the Weeds: The Invading
Aliens Are Already Among Us', a discussion of invasive plant and animal species
that takes the 2005 film adaptation of Wells's novel as its starting point (Burdick,
2005).
The rhetoric that surrounds introduced species has an impact on the decisions
that we make regarding how to engage with these organisms. Sensationalist rhetoric
inevitably intensifies our responses and, in so doing, potentially narrows our
conception of the interactions that are possible. Wells is a useful case study for an
examination of the amplification of rhetoric surrounding the representation of
introduced species, for he was not only a writer of sensational science fiction
narratives but also a populariser of science, a spokesman for science education, and
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