Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
fascists, this political legacy is, as Barbour put it, disquieting. “How slippery the slope,” said Gould,
between love of the familiar and hatred of the foreign.
5
After World War II ended, the Cold War seemed only to increase the hysteria about mysterious and
threatening invaders, which often involved alien plants as themes. In John Wyndham's 1951 novel
The
Day of the Triffids
, a South American plant genetically engineered by Russian scientists takes over the
world after learning how to walk and kill humans. In the 1956 film
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, auto-
maton versions of humans hatch from giant seedpods and take on the identity of the first person they
encounter.
Despite such cultural resonance, Elton's topic did not immediately attract much attention. But it did
gain traction as wider environmental concerns grew at the end of the 1960s. Stanford University's Peter
Vitousek, who has been a prominent writer on alien species throughout his career, told
New Scientist
magazine that reading it as an undergraduate in 1969 persuaded him “not to be a political economist
but to be an ecologist.”
6
It inspired others of his generation, like Paul Ehrlich, author of
The Population
Bomb
, and is often set alongside Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
as a key scientific text that underpinned
new environmental thinking. It also spawned popular topics on alien species themselves, such as Caro-
lyn King's
Immigrant Killers
, which described their impact on native birds in New Zealand, and Alex-
andre Meinesz's
Killer Algae
, on
Caulerpa taxifolia
in the Mediterranean.
7
Excited language, replete with military and xenophobic metaphors, has continued to feature in the
everyday discourse of scientists investigating alien species, and it even appears in their research papers.
It may not sound very dispassionate or scientific, but it reflects the assumption, widespread since Elton,
that foreign species are up to no good and that their being alien means their impacts can be assumed to
be bad. They are guilty until proved innocent. In scientific journals, where researchers normally strive to
use neutral language, those who call themselves “invasion biologists” stand out. The subjects of their in-
quiries “explode” on arrival, killing, eradicating, assaulting, and decimating native species, while over-
running, flooding, and devastating their new habitats. They secure beachheads and fight battles.
Daniel Simberloff of the University of Tennessee, currently the most prominent successor to Elton,
began an article for the National Academy of Sciences on “biological invasions” by warning in large
type that “an army of invasive plant and animal species is over-running the United States” and noting
darkly that the zebra mussel had come “from the former Soviet Union.”
8
The demise of the Soviet Union
did not change the rhetoric much. After 9/11, researchers were soon describing alien species as conduct-
ing terrorist attacks on the environment.
Simberloff admits that “some US nativists in the past lumped introduced species with human immig-
rants as objects of scorn.” But he insists that “this does not mean that everyone concerned about intro-
duced species was a xenophobe or racist.”
9
Of course not, but some have been. And it does not help his
case that Cornell's David Pimentel, whose influential economic demonization of alien species a decade
ago is covered later in this chapter, was at the same time a prominent supporter of a faction within the
Sierra Club, the conservation organization, that opposed any further human migrants from Latin Amer-
ica to the United States. With human and biological aliens somehow fused in the popular imagination,
it was hardly surprising that George W. Bush, as president after 9/11, moved staff responsible for invas-
ive species from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service into his newly created Department of
Homeland Security, whose mission is “to secure the nation from the many threats we face.”
Search WWH ::
Custom Search