FRAGMENTS FOR A POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 37

has asymmetrically controlled its prey for thousands of years is in fact humans. But
of course when scientists and governments complain about invasive pests, they
never once consider humans to be the issue. Indeed, humans who have questioned
scientists' and governments' right to destroy natural environments and experiment
on other non-human animals are labelled 'eco-terrorists'.
In part, this has to do with the historical trajectories within which ecology
emerged. Ecology and conservationism are themselves artefacts of empire, often
inspired by colonial settlements (see Griffiths and Robin, 1997). Colonial islands
were central environments through which new conceptions of nature were
developed, paving the way for conservationist criticisms against the Empire (Grove,
1995). But the rhetoric of preservationism was also used to racially discriminate,
such as the distinction between white 'hunting' and black 'poaching' in colonial
Africa (McKenzie, 1997).
The terms 'native' and 'alien' were transposed from British common law to
botany in the 1840s to distinguish 'true' British flora from others (Davis et al ., 2011:
153). In other words, the language of British migration, a system for managing
racial populations through the nation-state, becomes the primary language for
imagining flora. The growth of ecology from 1895 drew on the machinations of
British imperial administrative and political culture, funded by colonial govern-
ments and companies to conduct various surveys and expeditions (see Anker, 2001,
particularly Chapter 3).
By the time Charles Elton published The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants
in 1958, in Britain, a seminal text of invasion biology, post-war England was
undergoing its own internal debates about mass non-white post-war migration to
the heart of the Empire. Indeed, Elton's work was heavily influenced by his teacher
at Oxford, Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, a British biologist and sociologist, who
was at one time secretary of the British Eugenics Education Society. In particular,
Elton was influenced by Carr-Saunders' (1922) topic, The Population Problem , a neo-
Malthusian work which contended that the population problem was largely due to
primitive peoples reproducing at higher rates because of lower mental and physical
capacity, which in turn endangered the standard of living among the higher races
(and for which he was appointed to a Chair in Social Science at University of
Liverpool). As Peder Anker argues in his brilliant study of imperial ecology, many
of the ideas central to Carr-Saunders' topic reappear in Elton's schema (Anker,
2001: 93-94, 101-102).
To be clear, I am not suggesting that Elton transported wholesale Carr-Saunders'
eugenicist politics simply because he borrowed certain concepts. However,
precisely because the conceptual framework and language are similar, Elton's
invasion biology lends itself to analogies with human systems of managing racial
populations. Such analogies are not simply linguistic but carry material weight
when applied in systems of control. This is exemplified in the continued use of
invasion narratives to manage both animals and humans in contemporary Australian
border security regimes, to which I now turn.