INVASION ECOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 9

peoples responded over the years to the many new species that have entered and
reshaped their landscapes?
In Chapter 6, cultural geographer Lesley Head uses garden weeds to think
freshly about invasion ecologies. If we cannot live without weeds, the garden is
one space where we can understand what it means to live with them. In their
troublesome encounters, people experience the agency of plants. Weed manage-
ment requires considerable investment of labor and vigilance. The most successful
and contented garden weed managers accept that plants have a life of their own
and do their own thing. Above all Head urges the need for us to relinquish nostalgic
ideals of pristine pasts and accept that we face contradictory, uncertain, and weedy
futures.
By investigating the work of an experimental station in western New South
Wales, in Chapter 7, historian Cameron Muir brings a very different perspective to
the invasion ecologies question. Rather than focusing on a specific species, which
here might be wheat and the environmental degradation it often produces, he
demonstrates the ways that scientific thought and experimental work operated
within a discursive framework that ran counter to that of the Europeans who lived
in and worked the region. Without shying away from the intergenerational destruc-
tion caused by the clearing of native vegetation in the pastoral economy, Muir
complicates the standard picture by telling the story of Robert Peacock, whose deeply
practical experience shaped the kinds of experiments undertaken at Coolabah.
In Chapter 8, geographers Haripriya Rangan, Anna Wilson and Christian Kull
confront the complicated story of another invader—the introduction of prickly
acacia in northern Queensland. Beginning with an outline of the 'native versus
alien' debate within Queensland, they show how national narratives of land
changed with the emergence of the new programmes, 'Landcare' and 'Caring for
Our Country'. They explore these ideological developments within the context of
the everyday experiences of the people who have to live within the altered
landscapes, demonstrating that responses to invasive species are formed fluidly
within a complex nexus of policy, larger economic forces, and lived practices.
Part IV Ecological politics of imagining otherwise
When a plant or an animal is identified as 'out-of-place', humans invariably
generate an array of ways to imagine the intruders differently. These imaginings
can range from dreams of landscapes without invaders to nightmares of escalating
catastrophe. Imagined worlds of this kind tend to embody the anxieties, hopes and
fears of different generations about invasive species, ecologies, landscapes and
peoples. In Part IV, we examine how a series of invasion ecologies are imagined
to be 'otherwise'. Although such imaginings are most evident within speculative
literature and film, where strange and different futures and pasts can be explored
alongside critiques of the human condition, we also explore how scientists and
policy-makers similarly employ imagined futures to articulate invasion ecologies in
order to promote their scientific research and communicate with their publics.