Hello my name is Jon Rasmus Nyquist I'll be the one to take you through these next few weeks of
this environmental anthropology class and I very much look forward to meeting you to discuss these
topics very soon and let me just first of all say a few things about the focus for the coming weeks.
You've been through some of the foundational concepts and debates in environmental environmental
anthropology so far and now we're changing gears a little and and we'll turn our focus more towards
what anthropology has to say about the conditions of the world today. So what characterizes human
environment relations in today's world, I have indicated a few things here on the slide which we will delve
deeper into in the coming weeks these are things like global connections
simplification of landscapes and unpredictable landscapes and disasters, ruination,
destruction, and degradation and toxicity and exposure but also maybe hope
and this week's video gets to the first of those topics and I'll talk about a couple of ways to look
at global connections and specifically to kinds of social natural formations that are prevalent in
in the world today namely a Cosmopolitan Nature's and engineered worlds and it will become clearer
what I mean by those in the course of this and the next two videos
so the main idea for this video is the concept of ecological imperialism which points to one kind of
Cosmopolitan nature, it can in simplest terms be understood as the idea that the global spread of
people around the world and especially European people's conquest and domination are not just
economic and political phenomena but ecological and environmental processes too.
In addition to the readings we have this week I'll be drawing a little bit of on this book that
you see on the slide right here is the book called ecological imperialism written by an
environmental historian Alfred ? back in 1986 and is one of the places where this idea was
first articulated
so we know colonialism as the period when European people spread, invaded, conquered, and settled and
many places were made into resource frontiers or extractions souls? and sometimes this is referred
to as exploitation colonialism or resource colonialism whereas in others like Australia the US New
Zealand South Africa had Europeans settled and displaced the indigenous peoples and peoples who live
there
and this is referred to as a settler colonialism and especially this latter type of colonialism has
involved the kind of the takeover european takeover and it's been a takeover in at least two ways
one is demographically and the other in terms of land use
This is a strange phenomenon right it is a strange world in which so many
different areas vastly separated by vast distances are dominated by people from the same place
by the same kind of land use practices namely agriculture, consider how strange it is that in these
three countries you see outlines of right here 80 to 90 percent of the people have European
ancestors only
a few Generations back almost 90% of the people who live in these countries come from Europe and
have only been on the land and now absolutely dominate for a few centuries almost. Australia it's the
most extreme case a landmass that in just 250 years has gone from having zero European inhabitants
to about ninety percent of the inhabitants being of European descent
think about how strange that actually is, and the quote on the slide here is from Crossby and he also
tries to convey how strange this is he Likens the fervor with which European spread across the globe
to fleeing a burning building so this a dramatic demographic takeover is something that begs to be
explain and to understand how this all came to be how humans of European descent
came to dominate such vast parts of the world and to understand what this in turn has led to we must
begin according to Crossby by realizing that the colonizers didn't colonise alone. This picture is
of a flock of sheep in New Zealand and it is illustrated while colonialism in some ways was the
demographic take over a conquest by people it was also an ecological takeover so New Zealand
Is home to about 5 million people today and about 80% of them are of European
descent, but it is also home to about 30 million sheep so not only is it dominated by
European people it is dominated by the European people's companion animals like sheep.
So colonization is not just a political and economic process such as the human process it is
an ecological one as well
and one way that Alfred Crosby tried to demonstrate this is through the concept of
portmanteau biota which I think can be a really useful concept, so what does it mean well a
portmanteau can mean two things it can be a large kind of a bag that you carry along with you or it
can be a specific type of word so-called portmanteau word and in the latter sense a portmanteau word
is a word that's made
up by mashing two other words together like Britain and exit becomes the Brexit and costume and
role play is mashed together into cosplay right so those are portmanteau words and portmanteau biota
is a metaphor that involves two ideas. First the idea of bringing something with you as you would
with the bag and secondly the idea of combining things
That are a combination right so just like a brexit does a combination of Britain and exit so were the
people that settled Australia and America and so on a combination of people, livestock plants,
soil, microbes, bacteria and viruses and so on and those combinations are what colonizing and
they are what we might call a human or non-human working group
and bacteria is especially interesting part of this portmanteau most indigenous people in the places
where Europeans settled didn't have the same kind of immunities that Europeans did and so
epidemics of measles and smallpox and an influenza and other diseases struct indigenous people hard
and in the process made it easier for Europeans to settle and take over the land, and
and so not only did epidemics weaken the indigenous populations but it also in many cases disrupted
their traditional values practices
livestock like cattle and sheep are a really interesting part of this portmanteau, while the
first British settlers struggled to survive on the unfamiliar shores of Australia their cattle and
sheep usually fared much much better and they pushed into the country and found pastures on their
own and cattle have been referred to as the shock troops of colonization and in
both Australia and North America livestock spread far ahead of the settlers frontiers laying the
ground for people to come after them. These animals were as Crosby puts it walking sources of food
leather power and wealth and so once cattle or sheep had pushed on into a new area and Beyond the
frontier it was easier than for humans to follow and he mentions four instances within the few
Months of Europeans having arrived in Australia two bulls and four cows strayed away from the
settlement and a couple of decades later there were wild herds of cattle numbering between three and
five thousand so here the cattle seem to have done the settlement of almost on their own and the
cattle founded the landscapes with good grass and
Good
sources of water and the people followed and these animals were ecosystem engineers of the
sort they changed the landscapes as they spread.
In short European portmanteaus these human non-human working groups drastically changed the lands
they colonized and it was also often the unintended effects of their animals plants and microbes
that made a difference. Some of these were rare species that the Europeans brought deliberately but
just as often with seeds transported on livestock or bacteria or rats
Or stowaway on ships they were companions that Europeans didn't even know that
they had with them and they were simply part of their portmanteau symbiotic combinations that the
Europeans were.
Colonialism was a take over as Crosby argues and it was something that couldn't have been
accomplished by the Europeans without their companion species, their animals, plants, bacteria and
viruses.
This is just to illustrate that the New Zealand colonizing portmanteau if you will and that
human non-human working group that conquered and took over New Zealand it includes sheep as I mentioned
it includes bumblebees from Europe red clover and indigenous people and a lot of the grasslands in
New Zealand's today and are very different than they were before Europeans
arrived they are
now dominated by clover European clover which is an excellent source of feed for sheep and is
pollinated by the European Bumblebee and this was unplanned right it was not like settlers went oh hey
you know our sheep need some clovers and so we need to bring that along with us and it was
rather that Clover seeds were transported on the sheep themselves stuck to their wool.
The birds you see here are European starlings they gather and move enormous flocks with this intricate
and beautiful ripples of collective motion the starlings are native to Europe and parts of Asia and
there's an incredible story behind the introduction of Starlings to the US. So there was a guy in
North America in the 1890s I called Eugene schieffelin and he felt that the new land was lacking
among other things it just didn't have the right birds so what he did was was he set about
trying to introduce all of the birds that were mentioned in all of Shakespeare's works as the story
goes he made attempts to introduce several different birds from Shakespeare and failed with many
of them but with the European starlings he succeeded or "succeeded" in in quotation marks and they
spread rapidly
across the continent, and as you can see there can be quite a lot of these birds and
this clip is from somewhere in the Netherlands but the starlings do form these enormous flocks
across North America too and they become quite a problem for farmers.
I'm not sure the story might be a bit exaggerated we can't be sure to what extent Shakespeare was
this guy's motivation but Shakespeare or not what seems fairly certain is that he was part of a
larger group of people who deliberately set about trying to introduce birds to America in order to
improve the fauna. We can take Shakespeare to be an expression of something more general namely a
desire to create
Comfort and familiarity in the new lands and an assumption that the new lands can be improved
the Shakespeare guy was part of a group called an acclimatisation
society and these were groups that sought to create something more familiar in the new lands and
especially in the US and Australia something that looks familiar feels familiar and sounds less
alien and
so I like to sort of emphasize two things with this example one is the unintended effects that
introducing species from somewhere else can have you bringing a few starlings to one spot on the
American east coast and before you know it there are 200 million of them and they eat whole
fields of wheat, the other point is that often when people mostly Europeans and spread across the
globe with their portmanteau biotas it has been accompanied
and driven by visions and imaginaries of how nature can be changed and in their eyes made
better so what we have then is is an interplay between environmental interventions and imaginaries
about the environment so ecological imperialism is both a material process and the process involving
Global imaginaries wanting all of Shakespeare's birds in America
and more generally that the urge to make the new world a little bit more familiar is one example
of this interplay it involves a global imaginary that access the driver for environmental
interventions and environmental change so imaginaries can support or make sense of changes in the
landscape and in the case of colonialism and the guy who wanted all of Shakespeare's birds in
America
we have narratives of deficiency and malleability in the new lands. Narratives said that the new
Lands weren't good enough and they think that they were shapeable and also narratives that
implies sort of transcends of locality and these underlying support of the introduction of new
species and the changing of the land
and in turn we can regard this interplay between bio-fiscal changes and narratives and imaginaries
as processes that propel the formation or what I'm calling Cosmopolitan ecologies we spread and
travel like portmanteaus which is the process supported by imaginaries and through that spread
we create sometimes inadvertently Cosmopolitan ecologies that is landscape forms that have a global
tendency less localised
Landscapes. Landscapes that transcend or undermine local specificity. Here's one illustration of what
the outcomes or effects can be so here's a picture on the left there's a Monterey Pine growing in
Tasmania and on the right there's some Tasmanian blue gum in the Monterey Bay of Australia
so these places are very very far from each other and in many parts
parts of California these Tasmanian trees are among the most abundant trees they impart really a lot
of character on the landscape and Monterey Pine on the other hand are common Plantation trees in
many parts of Australia so these two in a sense have become Landscapes that have elements of each
other in them. So we might say their companion Landscapes or linked ecologies but they are also a
sign of ecological relations that have a tendency to
travel and to spread and ecological relations that are non-local that transcend locality
and so these are trees that transcend locality at the same time as their names Monterey Pine and
Tasmanian Blue gum ?recall? a localization that doesn't exist anymore, this is how we name things in the
world as if we expect them to stay put at same time as we move them around all the time. Here's
another example which is a bit closer to home and you might know the Sitka Spruce which we have a
lot of in Norway it was planted in massive amounts in the
60s and 70s along the coast especially and Sitka is a name of a town in Alaska and the
Sitka Spruce is actually the official state tree of Alaska and then there's a species on
the other hand species of spruce that is called the Norway spruce which we just called Spruce in
Norway and the Norway spruce has been introduced to and planted all over North America so on
the right here is a landscape with Norway spruce in Great Smoky Mountains which is in the
Southeastern US and apparently in Norway spruce has been planted in the US by paper companies and
the Norway spruce is considered an invasive species in large parts of the US just like the Sitka
Spruce is considered a pest by many people in Norway.
In both cases it has been driven or undergirded by this idea of betterment by the idea that one
can make landscapes better or more productive by introducing species from somewhere else, and an
imaginary there seems to say that as a land manager you have the whole world's flora and
fauna at your disposal that you're not limited to what's present in the place and the conditions of
a
Locality but that species sort of exist in an abstract way outside of where they originated
available for use in engineering better landscapes.
These are cosmopolitan ecologies and they are ecological sets of relations that spanned the
globe that subvert localization or that seemed to have a sort of an urge towards spread across the
globe, the Sitka landscape the Norway spruce landscape the blue gum landscape and Monterey Pine
landscape are all Cosmopolitan ecologies just like the sheep that shape the grasslands in New Zealand
and the starlings that dance across
the skies in the North America, they are less localized landscapes. Landscape forms that tend toward
spanning the globe, landscapes supported by the modern assumption that humans don't have to live
within the limitations of locality.