INVASION ECOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 3

INVASION ECOLOGIES
The nature/culture challenge
Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman
In 1984, the American comedy/horror film Gremlins hit the screens across the
world. A little furry animal, Mogwai, is given to Billy Peltzer as a pet with
instructions to keep it away from light, not to let it get wet and never to feed it
after midnight. But Billy inadvertently spills water on the creature, causing it to
multiply, and the beguiling animal also tricks its human companions into a late-
night feeding. Instantly the cute fur-ball is transformed into a reptilian gremlin
whose rapid reproduction changes the scenario from controlled domesticity to
explosive over-population. The proliferating gremlins then run amok in Billy's
hometown, altering the landscape to suit their own needs. The town swimming
pool, for example, becomes a fertility site, its waters seen by the creatures as a
perfect breeding place to accelerate their expansion. Gremlins proceed to frighten
the residents, destroy the shops and go berserk through the schools. In short, they
become a threatening invasive species, which has to be dealt with by Billy and the
town folk.
All the key elements of invasion are present in this story. There is the link with
humans who willfully move this biological species out of one habitat into their
own. A new environment is provided for the animal, where it appears to be right
at home, so long as it is contained within human rules. Water and food are
environmental cues that trigger its multiplication. Invasion is shaped by the
fecundity of the species. All of these things move rapidly out of synchrony with
the host community. And as the conditions of life alter this biological entity, its
interactions with humans change too. Relations between species shift from
congenial to fearful as the animal's transformation into an invader becomes evident.
Where it had once been a companion, it was now regarded as dangerous matter
out-of-place. Christopher Smout sums this up in saying 'to be an alien is not a
biological characteristic, like being blue or having a square stem; it is a character
implied by man' (Smout, 2011).