INVASION ECOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 4

In other words, it is the way that species interact within bio-cultural environ-
ments, rather than their individual biological characteristics, that results in the
formation of invasion ecologies (Hobbs et al ., 2006). These formations are not
restricted, however, to isolated local places. They also include multilayered
geographies. A series of sites, identified by Haripriya Rangan and Christian Kull
(2009a), are connected by the global movement of the acacia species, camels and
cameleers around the Indian Ocean. In this example, these plants and animals
transferred between India, South Africa and Australia. They moved along with
bundles of knowledge that constantly remade places at a range of geographic scales:
local, regional, national and global (Kull et al ., 2007; Kull and Rangan, 2008;
Rangan and Kull, 2009b). These conditions are always understood in relation to
human cultural discourse—whether they emerge from science, management,
history, economics, or the environments themselves. Each configuration is as
specific as it is complex.
Not surprisingly, one influential account of the origin of the Anthropocene—
the first ever human-shaped geological era—has it begin in 1784 with the develop-
ment and use of the steam engine (Robin and Steffan, 2007: 1699). Fundamental
atmospheric change in the form of increased greenhouse gases and global warming
are viewed as an unintended outcome of this revolution in human ingenuity.
Another of the human-driven changes of the Anthropocene, however, arises from
the rampant overabundance of introduced species around the globe, a diaspora of
nature resulting, in some cases, in the crippling of the new country's ecological
health and balance. The results of this process have become generally known as
invasion ecologies (Mooney, 2005; Mooney et al ., 2005; Richardson, 2011).
Research from the sciences and social sciences has been at the forefront of refining
both the concept of an Anthropocene era and the emerging community under-
standings about what living with its consequences will mean for the future
(McNeely, 2001; Rotherham et al ., 2011).
The chapters in this topic build on this achievement by demonstrating how
research derived from a humanities perspectives can transform our understandings
of the character and implications of invasion ecologies (Hall, 2003; Robbins, 2004a;
Head et al ., 2005). Furthermore our contributors are in agreement that modern
environmental approaches that treat nature with naïve realism or as a moral
absolute, unaware or unwilling to accept its entanglement in cultural and temporal
values, are doomed to fail. We need rather to investigate the complex interactions
of ecologies, cultures and societies in the past, present and future if we are to
understand and solve the current problems of the global environmental crisis
(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000; Parker, 2001; van Dooren, 2011; Rose et al .,
2012). During the Anthropocene time frame, environments of the new world—
over both land and sea — have become testing grounds for the introduction of new
assemblages of people and plants, economies and animals, cultures and coastlines
(Beinart and Middleton, 2004, Johnson, 2010). The resultant environmental
changes often led to unexpected and enduring ecological and social impacts, some
adverse, some beneficial: impacts that we now know to be dynamic, unpredictable