Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
study as long as the environmental conditions in the Anthropocene continue to
present urgent challenges for humanity.
Where Caluya and Robin focus mainly on global applications of the
Anthropocene concept, in Chapter 5 geographers Eric Pawson and Andreas
Aagaard Christensen illuminate the histories of a fascinating local site, the Banks
Peninsula on the South Island of New Zealand. Here they trace the changing
interrelations between the land and its flora with the temporal layers of human
occupation, demonstrating the ways that valued introduced species of grasses and
other fodder plants actively displaced indigenous forests. To the local Maori clans
the materiality of these newly remade places was experienced as a form of
colonization that displaced their clans in tandem with the trees. Yet Pawson and
Christensen also show that what was celebrated by generations in one period could
be vilified as invasive in the next. Concluding with an examination of the biotic
formations on the Banks Peninsula today, they suggest that in the future the locality
is likely to be dominated by hybrid environments where a patchwork of meanings
compete within the same spatial zones.
Part III Everyday life in invasion ecologies
Managing proliferating weeds, pests, invaders and aliens has often evoked the
hyperbole of crisis and disaster. However, when responding to the challenges of
climate change on more local scales, humans are likely in future to have to adapt
their environments and behaviors without reference to idealized images of past
ecologies. In particular, we may need to think more flexibly about the cultural
values entailed in supposed ecological invasions. Removing whole populations of
invasive species is unlikely to prove as viable and defensible as it has in the past.
Hard questions of ethics will generate robust debate, in which humanities scholars
will undoubtedly feature. At the same time we must be prepared to scrutinize our
own practices and work to generate collaborations that reach across the disciplinary
divides.
Once animals and plants are perceived to move from naturalized or stable
populations to become invasive, such a classification demands that they be
managed. Since the nineteenth century the multiplicity of different kinds of
invasion have produced an array of different techniques and technologies of
intervention, eradication and restoration, including experiments with poisons,
biological controls, human labor and machines.
Practices and technologies like these must of course operate within particular
rules, regulations, and legal systems that set parameters designed to bring invading
biota under control. Our contributors also interrogate a range of such everyday
problems and potential solutions. How might garden weeds help us to think
through what is needed for the future? What new plant management ideas can
emerge from situations where people reconcile themselves both to living with
change and to experimenting within degraded environments? How have colonized
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