LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 64

LANDSCAPES OF THE
ANTHROPOCENE
From dominion to dependence?
Eric Pawson and Andreas Aagaard Christensen
In his now-classic book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants , Charles Elton
writes of returning home to Britain from Wisconsin shortly before the Second
World War. He had with him some large American acorns which he intended
to keep as mementoes. A few days later, chafer beetle grubs began to emerge
unexpectedly from the acorns, forcing him to drop them all promptly into boiling
water. The telling observation is that which follows: 'When the customs officer
had asked me if I had anything to declare, it never occurred to me to say “acorns”,
and I am not sure if he would have been interested if I had' (Elton, 1958: 111).
This anecdote may seem remarkable today when border biosecurity controls are
increasingly strict. But the free mobility of plant material in the hands of humans
was for long a characteristic feature of the Anthropocene, being the basis of
agricultural experimentation and improvement throughout much of the world.
These were intimately connected to practices of 'enclosure', which saw large parts
of northern Europe being reordered spatially so as to align rural land use with the
emerging capitalist social order (Clout, 1998). A parallel development took place
in the European colonies at the time, with the export of the modern capitalist
landscape model across the globe, including to the Americas and Australasia. Elton
himself wrote of New Zealand that 'No place in the world has received for such a
long time such a steady stream of aggressive invaders' (Elton, 1958: 89), due to the
permeability of its territorial borders for many years. This enabled the assembly of
what Alfred Crosby (1986: 270) described as a 'portmanteau biota' of plant and
animal species as the basis of making newly improved landscapes.
The aim of this chapter is to explore the dramatic increase in the power of
human agency over the environment through an analysis of landscape change. It
discusses the processes that have shaped new landscapes in the capitalist world
before focusing on one place that is characteristic of the shifting balance of
ecological agency in favour of humans during the Anthropocene. Banks Peninsula