Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and EmpireHelen Tiffin Rodopi, 2007 - 260 pages Western exploitation of other peoples is inseparable from attitudes and practices relating to other species and the extra-human environment generally. Colonial depredations turn on such terms as 'human', 'savage', 'civilised', 'natural', 'progressive', and on the legitimacies governing apprehension and control of space and landscape. Environmental impacts were reinforced, in patterns of unequal 'exchange', by the transport of animals, plants and peoples throughout the European empires, instigating widespread ecosystem change under unequal power regimes (a harbinger of today's 'globalization'). This book considers these imperial 'exchanges' and charts some contemporary legacies of those inequitable imports and exports, transportations and transmutations. Sheep farming in Australia, transforming the land as it dispossessed the native inhabitants, became a symbol of (new, white) nationhood. The transportation of plants (and animals) into and across the Pacific, even where benign or nostalgic, had widespread environmental effects, despite the hopes of the acclimatisation societies involved, and, by extension, of missionary societies "planting the seeds of Christianity." In the Caribbean, plantation slavery pushed back the "jungle" (itself an imported word) and erased the indigenous occupants - one example of the righteous, biblically justified cultivation of the wilderness. In Australia, artistic depictions of landscape, often driven by romantic and 'gothic' aesthetics, encoded contradictory settler mindsets, and literary representations of colonial Kenya mask the erasure of ecosystems. Chapters on the early twentieth century (in Canada, Kenya, and Queensland) indicate increased awareness of the value of species-preservation, conservation, and disease control. The tension between traditional and 'Euroscientific' attitudes towards conservation is revealed in attitudes towards control of the Ganges, while the urge to resource exploitation has produced critical disequilibrium in Papua New Guinea. Broader concerns centering on ecotourism and ecocriticism are treated in further essays summarising how the dominant West has alienated 'nature' from human beings through commodification in the service of capitalist 'progress'. |
Contents
| 1 | |
CLAUDIA BRANDENSTEIN | 15 |
MEENAKSHI SHARMA | 31 |
HELEN GILBERT | 51 |
ANDREW MCCANN | 71 |
RUTH BLAIR | 85 |
Sympathetic Identification and Self | 113 |
ROBERT DIXON | 131 |
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Aborigines Acclimatisation Societies Acclimatization aesthetic Africa agricultural Anahareo animals argues Australian beaver Blixen British C.E.W. Bean Cambridge Caribbean century colonial Conservation contemporary critical cultural David Rothenberg discourse ecocriticism Ecology economic ecosystems ecotourism ecotourist English environment Environmental History essay ethical European exploitation forest Froude Ganga Ganges global Glotfelty Glover Green Imperialism Green Political Grey Owl Grove Hindu human hunting Indian indigenous industry islands Jamaica John John Glover Journal land landscape literary Literature London Melbourne ment missionaries modern mountain narrative native nature nature-inscription Newby nineteenth-century Oxford Pacific Islands Peel Island plants poem political pollution Polynesian postcolonial practices Queensland Ramachandra Guha relationship representation river Romantic Sandline Sandline affair Science sense settler sheep South Pacific species Studies suggests Sydney Theory tion tour Tourism traditional Travel Writing trees Trollope University of Queensland Van Diemen’s Land West Indies Western wild wilderness wildlife William Wool Track
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Page 3 - Wool made Australia a solvent nation, and, in the end, a free one.