Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities

Research from a humanist perspective has much to offer in interrogating the social and cultural ramifications of invasion ecologies. The impossibility of securing national boundaries against accidental transfer and the unpredictable climatic changes of our time have introduced new dimensions and hazards to this old issue. Written by a team of international scholars, this book allows us to rethink the impact on national, regional or local ecologies of the deliberate or accidental introduction of foreign species, plant and animal. Modern environmental approaches that treat nature with naive realism or mobilize it as a moral absolute, unaware or unwilling to accept that it is informed by specific cultural and temporal values, are doomed to fail. Instead, this book shows that we need to understand the complex interactions of ecologies and societies in the past, present and future over the Anthropocene, in order to address problems of the global environmental crisis. It demonstrates how humanistic methods and disciplines can be used to bring fresh clarity and perspective on this long vexed aspect of environmental thought and practice.Students and researchers in environmental studies, invasion ecology, conservation biology, environmental ethics, environmental history and environmental policy will welcome this major contribution to environmental humanities.

Auteur

Jodi Frawley is a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia.

Iain McCalman is a Professorial Research Fellow in History, University of Sydney. He is Co-Director of the new Sydney University Environment Institute, Australia.

Résumé
This book presents a new theoretical framework -- what Gernsbacher calls the Structure Building Framework -- for understanding language comprehension in particular, and cognitive processing in general. According to this framework, the goal in comprehending both linguistic and nonlinguistic materials is to build a coherent mental representation or &quote;structure&quote; of the information being comprehended. As such, the underlying processes and mechanisms of structure building are viewed as general, cognitive processes and mechanisms. The strength of the volume lies in its empirical detail: a thorough literature review and solid original data.

Contenu

Part 1 SETTING THE SCENE 1. Ecologies: the nature/culture challenge Part 2 INVASION AND THE ANTHROPOCENE 2. Back Story: Migration, Assimilation, and Invasion in the Nineteenth Century 3. Fragments for a Postcolonial Critique of the Anthropocene: Invasion Biology and Environmental Security 4. Resilience in the Anthropocene: A Biography 5. Landscapes of the Anthropocene: from dominion to dependence? Part 3 EVERDAY LIFE IN INVASION ECOLOGIES 6. Living in a weedy future: insights from the garden 7. Experiments in the rangelands: white bodies and native invaders 8. Thorny problems: Industrial pastoralism and managing 'country' in Northwest Queensland, Australia Part 4 ECOLOGICAL POLITICS OF IMAGINING OTHERWISE 9. Prickly Pears and Martian Weeds: Ecological Invasion Narratives in the History and Fiction 10. Cane Toads: Animality And Ecology In Mark Lewis's Documentary Films 11. Wolvogs, Pigoons and Crakers-Invasion of the Bodysplices in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake Part 5 UNRULY NATIVES AND EXOTICS 12. Invasion ontologies: venom, visibility and the imagined histories of arthropods 13. Naturalising Australian Trees in South Africa: Climate, Exotics and Experimentation 14. Remaking wetlands: rice fields and ducks in the Murrumbidgee River region, NSW 15.Invasion of the crocodiles