Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
become overabundant. Conversely exotics can also be invasive in foreign places
while being endangered in their native habitats (Frawley and Goodall, 2013).
The chapters in Part V challenge us to think more closely about the way that
plants, animals and humans interact with one another and with different kinds of
environments. Ritvo's Chapter 2 traced the historical origins of acclimatization, a
mode of human activity that relied on the movement of biological material to
reshape new places under Empire. Here, too, histories of crocodiles, ducks, spiders
and trees demonstrate that close attention to local cases can disrupt both the native
and exotic categories so often used within the rhetoric of invasion ecologies.
Our contributors show the value of opening up our thinking to more-than-
human approaches (Whatmore, 2002; Probyn, 2011) and beyond these to the
challenging perspectives of the more-than-animal and the more-than-plant as well.
Thinking about natives and exotics also challenges us to encompass a range of scales
since changing impacts on local peoples and species can carry through to regions,
nations and ultimately to global communities.
In Chapter 12, Peter Hobbins tackles the ontological quandary of how invasive
species become visible to the communities they inhabit by exploring how
Latrodectus spiders in Australia and New Zealand acquired their venomous reputa-
tions. After tracking through archival records of redback spiders in Australia and
Katipo spiders in New Zealand, he conjures up a revisionist history of migrant
arthropods. In the process he reveals that getting to know spiders through the sites
of painful contact has much to tell us about human interrelations with non-
charismatic animals in colonial environments, as well as about the tenuousness of
the creatures' strange ontologies.
Though less confronting than venomous spiders, Australian trees of the genera
Acacia , Casuarina , Eucalyptus and Hakea that have found their way to South Africa
are there both praised for their contribution to domestic economies and vilified as
exotic invaders. In Chapter 13, Brett M. Bennett offers a detailed account of how
the trees originally migrated to South Africa through governmental exchanges of
knowledge, seeds, seedlings and plants. Forestry departments in South Africa used
modern techniques of silviculture to match regional microclimates between the
two countries in order to enhance the capacity for these particular tree species to
survive and flourish in their new habitats.
The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area of the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia
represents a particularly charged site for debates about invasive species because
changing government water regulations have caused the issue to become entangled
in acrimonious environmental disputes over irrigation rights. Emily O'Gorman's
Chapter 14 contextualizes this political contest by analyzing the persistence of ideas
about the invasiveness of ducks and other water birds within the agricultural
ecologies of twentieth-century rice growing when biologists James Kinghorn and
Harry Frith were enlisted to study ducks at different times. She shows how
particular duck species were categorized as invasive by scientists enlisted to defend
grower interests, even when the birds' destructive properties were disputed by
dissenting scientists and rice farmers.
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