Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Imperial ecology and invasion biology
Nowhere is this more visible than in the fact that the fantasy of invasion is a central
trope for managing both non-white peoples and plants and animals. Here the
sense of more-than-human is always already doubled, coupling the non-human
(fauna and flora) with the infra-human (non-European descendants). We see this
in, for example, the Australian Research Council's National Research Priority
'Safeguarding Australia', which is described as 'Safeguarding Australia from
terrorism, crime, invasive diseases and pests'. Recalling the wider use of viral
imagery to portray criminality and terrorism, this fortress imagination of Australia
is based on the mixing of terrorism and criminality with pests and diseases, which
are conceptualised as simply different threats operating under the same security
logic. Both crime and disease are major sites for racially divergent immigration
processes in Western border security regimes, which ask questions about the
criminal and medical histories of the applicants. Here, 'invasion' rhetoric naturalises
the security logics of managing non-Western populations with reference to disease
control.
Coming from the other side of the divide, 'invasion' rhetoric in biology can also
borrow from human forms of discrimination (specifically racism). Recently, a group
of ecologists signed their protest against the discrimination marshalled under
invasive species rhetoric. Entitled 'Don't judge species on their origins', a pun on
Charles Darwin's classic,
On the Origin of Species
, the 19 scientists claim there is a
'pervasive bias against alien species' across science, government, policy-makers,
conservationists and the public in which 'non-native' species are vilified for driving
beloved 'native' species to extinction' or 'generally polluting “natural” environ-
ments' (Davis
et al
., 2011: 153). They point out that 'invasion biology' gained
prominence in the 1990s, often deploying militaristic metaphors and exaggerated
crises to 'convey the message that introduced species are the enemies of man and
nature' (ibid.: 153). While there are indeed instances of introduced species
becoming threats to the local environment, they continue, 'recent analyses suggest
that invaders do not represent a major extinction threat to most species in most
environments' and 'in fact . . . non-native species have almost always increased the
number of species in a region' (ibid.: 153). They conclude that classifying biota
'according to their adherence to cultural standards of belonging, citizenship, fair
play and morality does not advance our understanding of ecology' (ibid.: 153).
The imagined 'natural' ecological system that is being protected is often
historically specific. Policy-makers in settler colonial countries do not imagine
recreating the environment to the way it was
prior
to colonisation but rather to
maintain the status quo. Significant attention is paid to protecting core agricultural
products of the economy, which more often than not are non-native species
introduced via histories of colonisation. In other words, invasive biology rhetoric
often takes for granted the 'naturalness' of human colonisation, even as it claims to
be concerned about the 'unnaturalness' of non-human colonisation.
The fact remains that the most invasive species, the one that has wrought large-
scale destruction of diverse habitats of millions of other species, the predator that
Search WWH ::
Custom Search