Environmental Engineering Reference
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and often contradictory. Above all, our authors interrogate the complex and
ongoing community concerns about invasive species and their ecological and
cultural impacts that we will together have to face in a climate-changing world.
At the same time our topic does not pretend to survey the invasion ecologies
field in all its facets but, rather, to explore a linked set of themes that have become
particularly salient in our time. How, we ask, will biological and cultural invasions
of the past influence the present and futures of climate-changing places? How
should we think about the more-than-human roles of camels and carp, or of
willows and baobabs? What became of the plants, animals, people and ideas that
traveled and re-made other countries and places in the pursuit of empires? From
the late eighteenth century onwards the New World countries of Australia, New
Zealand, Africa and the Americas all became laboratories for western science and
colonization (Fullagar, 2012). As a result, these postcolonial places furnish especially
rich examples of where the movement of biota has disrupted, degraded and altered
ecosystemic relationships across the globe.
Another of our aims has been to multiply disciplinary conversations within the
burgeoning field of the environmental humanities in order to explore how
conceptual understandings of invasion ecologies can be infused with a variety of
literary and artistic narratives, gendered tropes and moral fables, as well as with
more familiar political, legal, and sociological inflections. Human beings, cultures
and natures have been, and remain, deeply entangled and interdependent in these
new landscapes of empire and post-empire in ways that only the environmental
humanities can uncover.
Charles Elton's (1958) classic study,
The Ecology of Invasions by Plants and Animals
,
signaled a major shift in the understanding of the global movement of biological
species during what we now think of as the Anthropocene (Elton, [1958] 2000;
Richardson, 2011). Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new plants,
animals and humans migrated to settler colonies at the same time that biological
materials and ideas about nature were transiting to other parts of the world. Some
of these migrating species became threats to local environments wherever they
lodged. Famously framed by Alfred Crosby as 'the Columbian exchange' (1972)
and 'ecological imperialism' (1986), this tidal wave of people and their non-human
accompaniments surged across the globe as empires came and went during the
period from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. By the 1950s, however, the
resulting acclimatization and naturalization movements were being challenged by
new scientific attempts to manage the unforeseen ramifications of changes to
landscapes, environments and ecologies (i.e. the study of relationships between
living organisms and their environments).
Scientific-based approaches to invasive species were consolidated in the 1980s
with the advent of invasion biology and the related disciplinary fields of
conservation biology and restoration ecology (Simberloff and Rejmánek, 2011).
These new disciplines focused dispassionately on the non-human world to analyze
relations within natural ecosystems on both land and sea (Mooney
et al
., 2005). Yet
wherever humans had remade local places in ways that compromised functionality,
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