INVASION ECOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 10

Christina Alt takes us into the realms of early science fiction with her Chapter
9, on the cross-over between late nineteenth-century scientific knowledge about
invasive species and their simultaneous literary imaginings. Alt shows how the red
weed evoked in H. G. Wells's (1898) War of the Worlds drew on contemporary
knowledge about South American prickly pear Opuntia spp and Canadian
waterweed Elodea canadensis . While Wells's machines and technologies carry one
message about science, Alt argues, the multispecies environment of invasion proved
equally important to the enduring social impact of the story.
In Chapter 10, Morgan Richards eloquently confronts us with the cultural
impact of an equally bizarre real-life invader in order to demonstrate how an inno-
vative use of documentary filmmaking can present a range of counter-hegemonic
ideas about invasiveness and invasive species. Here she focuses on Mark Lewis's
celebrated and wryly comical pair of films about the remorseless march through
Australia of the species of poisonous cane toads, Bufo marinus , originally introduced
from South America to control the north Australian cane beetle. Although cane
toads are popularly reviled and spectacularly slaughtered, Richards shows that they
have also evolved into culturally ambiguous creatures that shape the imaginaries of
the humans around them, as much as they disrupt actual material ecologies.
In Chapter 11, Peter Marks takes us into the haunting dystopian environments
of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake , inhabited by cyborg people and bio-
manufactured animals that would make the cane toad seem cuddly. Atwood, Marks
argues, raises concerns about invasive species in the age of the Anthropocene that
have potential futures as well as identifiable pasts. The notion that new hybrids of
humans and animals might emerge from future biotechnological processes crys-
tallizes a sharp contemporary cultural contradiction: the idea that the technological/
scientific matrix can solve all the toxic problems that it has itself created. Ecological
invasion is invariably shaped by biological, ecological and environmental forces that
are always subjected to the human desire for mastery. Yet, as Bruno Latour (2000)
has observed, the unruliness of biological life continually surprises in our more-
than-human worlds.
Part V Unruly natives and exotics
'Native', 'indigenous', 'exotic' and 'foreign' are concepts that have been mobilized
all over the world in debates in order to ground both the science and the manage-
ment of invasive species (Subramaniam, 2001; Chew and Hamilton, 2011). Rhetoric
about species assists both community members and scientists to frame responses to
invasion (Frawley, 2007; Keulartz and Weele, 2008; Smout, 2011). Clear demarca-
tions between those who belong and those who invade have shaped eradication
programs, policies and legislation, as well as the ways that human communities
respond to changed environments (Smout, 2003; Tigger et al ., 2008, Lavau, 2011).
However, the use of such stark binaries denies the dynamism of ever changing
environments (Head and Muir, 2004; Beinart and Wotshela, 2012; Lennox et al .,
2012). Natives can and do become invaders in the very same ways that exotics can