Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
more complex, revealing that new ecosystems may be detrimental to some actors,
while others can be energized by these same disrupted, hybrid or changing
environments (Davis et al ., 2011).
Part II Invasion and the Anthropocene
Few would dispute that the environmental problems we face today link directly to
the Age of Empires from the eighteenth century through to the present. In Chapter
2, distinguished historian Harriet Ritvo explores the back story to global ecological
change by investigating the imperial movements of biological species. Colonial
acclimatization movements that were set up to facilitate transfers of useful or
economic plants and animals into new worlds provided much of the ideological
and infrastructural momentum for such change. Ritvo focuses on starlings and
camels as subjects of acclimatization, each with their own histories of global travel.
Acclimatization stories of this kind can be multiplied for species and nations, across
and between empires and in oceans and soils of the earth. Here we see one
compelling example of how anthropoi animated the new geological era of the
Anthropocene.
The concept of the Anthropocene intersects with invasion ecologies in a variety
of other ways as well. In Part II, we also situate invasion ecology within wider
historical and scientific frameworks in order to explore the broader narratives and
languages of nature and scientific work that the field encompasses, and which have
helped to shape its history and shadow its future. We range from the vast geological
and historical time scales of the new age of the Anthropocene, to the more recent
and widely invoked scientific concept of resilience, to the microcosmic landscape
changes that can be traced in particular local sites.
Racial formations in a globalized world, for example, are shown to resonate
throughout the metaphors and allegories of invasion. Gilbert Caluya's Chapter 3
presents lively provocations from a postcolonial perspective to the ways that the
concept of the human has been deployed in recent articulations of the Anthropocene,
a concern that he extends even to Chicago historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's essay, 'The
Climate of History: Four Theses', published in 2009 in Critical Inquiry . Despite its
great synthesizing power, Caluya warns, the concept of a unified humanity implicit
in the definition of the Anthropocene risks returning us to a universal metanarrative
that sweeps aside the sharp distinctions that continue to operate within the
structures of race and class under advanced capitalism.
Historian of science and environment Libby Robin analyzes the pervasive
scientific concept of 'resilience' in relation to invasion biology in Chapter 4.
Tracing the historical biography of 'resilience', Robin shows how the concept
emerged, was adopted and extended by influential scientists, and was ultimately
shaped through the interplay of experiences within a range of arid and desert
ecosystems. In the process she shows how scientists have oscillated between global
uses of the term and applications derived from intimate local understandings of
place. Resilience, Robin predicts, will remain a pivotal idea for ecological invasion
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