Tom Griffiths - Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies

cover

cover

title:

Ecology and Empire : Environmental History of Settler

Societies

author:

Robin, Libby

publisher:

Edinburgh University Press

isbn10 | asin:

1853311995

print isbn13:

9781853311994

ebook isbn13:

9780585193120

language:

English

subject

Ecology--Europe--Colonies--History, Land settlement-

Europe--Colonies--History, Europe--Colonies--History.

publication date:

1997

lcc:

QH135.H38 1997eb

ddc:

577/.09

subject:

Ecology--Europe--Colonies--History, Land settlement-

Europe--Colonies--History, Europe--Colonies--History.

cover

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Page i

Ecology and Empire

Environmental History of Settler Societies

Edited by

Tom Griffiths And Libby Robin

KEELEUNIVERSITYPRESS

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in this edition, Keele University Press

22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in Linotype Stempel Garamond by

Carnegie Publishing, Preston and

printed and bound in Great Britain

A CIP record for this book is available

from the British Library

ISBN I 85331 199 5

The right of the contributors to be identified

as the authors of this work has been asserted

in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988)

The publication of this book was assisted by

Australians Studying Abroad and Qantas Airways Limited

The publications programme of the Sir Robert Menzies Centre

for Australian Studies is sponsored by BTR plc.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book grew out of a co-operative project that was initiated while the editors were working at the Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London. We thank the Menzies Centre, its former and current Heads, Professors Brian Matthews and Carl Bridge, and also the staff of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies for their support. Corporate sponsorship from Australians Studying Abroad and Qantas Airways Limited was greatly appreciated.

We are grateful to our publishers for their enthusiastic support for the project from its inception, especially Richard Purslow, Nicola Carr and Nicola Pike. We would also like to thank Rodney Mace, Edel Mahony, Luisa Prcopo and Alan Platt.

The greatest pleasure in editing this book has been in working with our contributors, all of whom have brought insight, energy and enthusiasm to the project.

TOM GRIFFITHS AND LIBBY ROBIN

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Ecology and Empire: Towards an Australian History of the World Tom Griffiths

Part I

Ecologies of Invasion

Chapter 1

Frontiers of Fire

Stephen J. Pyne

Chapter 2

The Nature of Australia

Eric Rolls

Chapter 3

The Fate of Empire in Low and High-Energy Ecosystems

Timothy F. Flannery

Part 2

The Empire of Science

Chapter 4

Ecology: A Science of Empire?

Libby Robin

Chapter 5

Ecology and Environmentalism in the Anglo Settler Colonies

Thomas R Dunlap

Chapter 6

Vets, Viruses and Environmentalism at the Cape

William Beinart

Chapter 7

Enterprise and Dependency: Water Management in Australia

J. M. Powell

Part 3

Nature and Nation

Chapter 8

Nationhood and National Parks: Comparative Examples from the Post-Imperial Experience

Jane Carruthers

Chapter 9

Scotland in South Africa: John Croumbie Brown and the Roots of Settler Environmentalism

Richard Grove

Chapter 10

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Mawson of the Antarctic, Flynn of the Inland: Progressive Heroes on Australia's Ecological Frontiers

Brigid Hains

Part 4

Economy and Ecology

Chapter 11

Ecology, Imperialism and Deforestation

Michael Williams

Chapter 12

Global Developments and Latin American Environments

Elinor G. K. Melville

Chapter 13

The Transvaal Beef Frontier: Environment, Markets and the Ideology of Development, 1902-1942

Shaun Milton

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Part 5

Comparing Settler Societies

Chapter 14

Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse: The Historiography of the Imperial Environment

John M. Mackenzie

Chapter 15

Empires and Ecologies: Reflections on Environmental History

David Lowenthal

Select Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

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INTRODUCTION

ECOLOGY AND EMPIRE:

TOWARDS AN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Tom Griffiths

'Ecology' and 'empire' are words that suggest very different dimensions of life on earth; at times they might appear to be opposites. One is natural, the other social; one is local and specific to place, the other is geographically ambitious; one is often seen to be scientific, amenable to laws and exclusive of humanity; the other is political, quixotic and historical. Brought together under the scrutiny of scholarship, these worlds and world-views make for creative friction. But 'ecology' and 'empire' also had a real relationship. They forged a historical partnership of great power - and one which, particularly in the last 500 years, radically changed human and natural history across the globe.

When, in 1986, the American historian Alfred W. Crosby wrote his important book, Ecological Imperialism, which built on his earlier The Columbian Exchange (1972), he threw those words together in his title and enjoyed the perversity of their pairing, the cheeky conjunction of apparent innocence and power. 1 His book described the biological expansion of Europe and saw humans as a species as well as political beings. That is also the aim of this collection, which acknowledges the inspiration of Crosby's work and is motivated by the conviction that environmental change has been, until recently, 'an unexplored aspect of colonialism.2 This book looks back at European expansion from the so-called colonized 'peripheries', the settler societies, and uses one of those societies

- Australia - to shed new light on comparative environmental history. Crosby himself chose New Zealand as a case-study for his analysis of the intersections of ecology and empire; here we draw particularly on the histories of the United States, South Africa and Latin America, as well as Australia. This introductory chapter scrutinizes changing interpretations of ecological imperialism in the Australian setting to illustrate the way in which environmental histories of the 'edges' of empire are destabilizing traditional narratives of world history. The chapter then discusses concepts of 'settler societies', argues the value of comparing their environmental frontiers and histories, and, finally, introduces the five sections of the book.

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Ecological Imperialism and Australia

Alfred Crosby's book described how Europeans established themselves securely in far-flung but temperate countries and made them into 'neo-Europes': the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Uruguay. These were the 'lands of demographic takeover', those countries where Europeans quickly became numerically dominant over the indigenous peoples, amounting to between 75 and nearly 100 per cent of the populations. 3 Why, asked Crosby, were Europeans able to establish such demographic dominance so quickly and so far from home? The answer, he argued, lay in the domesticated animals, pests, pathogens and weeds that the humans carried with them, an awesome accompaniment of colonizers that the settlers sometimes consciously nurtured and marshalled, but that often constituted an incidental and discounted dimension of imperialism. In Crosby's memorable words: European immigrants did not arrive in the New World alone, but were accompanied by