Libby Robin

Ecology and empire : environmental history of settler societies

Ecology and Empire examines the relationship between the expansion of empire and the environmental experience of the extra-European world. For the first time it moves the debate beyond the North American frontier by comparing the experience of settler societies in Australia, South Africa and Latin America. From Australian water management and the crisis of deforestation in Latin America, to beef farming in the Transvaal, this topical book provides a broad comparative historical approach to the impact of humanity on the ecological systems on which settler societies base their livelihood.

Histories for Changing Times: Entering the Anthropocene?

Abstract In 2000, Paul Crutzen proposed that the Earth had entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where humanity is changing planetary systems. Since this time, the Anthropocene has figured prominently (and controversially) in global change science, and increasingly in the humanities. The Anthropocene offers a new way to regard humanity, and provides a locus for a new planetary discourse of our times. This short reflective paper suggests a role for history in understanding the different expertise favoured to manage Earths resources and global change. The discussion focuses on an anthology of historical documents about global change science, The Future of Nature, using this as a ‘worked example’ of history in action.

Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities

The emergence of the environmental humanities presents a unique opportunity for scholarship to tackle the human dimensions of the environmental crisis. It might finally allow such work to attain the critical mass it needs to break out of customary disciplinary confines and reach a wider public, at a time when natural scientists have begun to acknowledge that an understanding of the environmental crisis must include insights from the humanities and social sciences. In order to realize this potential, scholars in the environmental humanities need to map the common ground on which close interdisciplinary cooperation will be possible. This essay takes up this task with regard to two fields that have embraced the environmental humanities with particular fervour, namely ecocriticism and environmental history. After outlining an ideal of slow scholarship which cultivates thinking across different spatiotemporal scales and seeks to sustain meaningful public debate, the essay argues that both ecocriticism and environmental history are concerned with practices of environing: each studies the material and symbolic transformations by which “the environment” is configured as a space for human action. Three areas of research are singled out as offering promising models for cooperation between ecocriticism and environmental history: eco-historicism, environmental justice, and new materialism. Bringing the fruits of such efforts to a wider audience will require environmental humanities scholars to experiment with new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge.

Taxonomic imperialism in the battles for Acacia: Identity and science in South Africa and Australia

ABSTRACT This review analyses the retypification of Acacia Mill. by the International Botanical Congress in 2005, from an African type to an Australian one. It explores the cultural, historical and trans-national context of what proved much more than a routine scientific decision. It contributes to a growing critique of historian Alfred Crosbys thesis Ecological Imperialism, and provides a historical review of the ecological literature leading to the discipline of invasion biology in South Africa, Australia and elsewhere, particularly the work of Charles Elton. The aim of the article is to narrow the gap between the historically ecological and the ecologically historical literature through a closely worked case study that reveals the role of national identity in even the most arcane and international science. The history of the ‘wattle wars’ (or the ‘battle for Acacia’) in Australia, South Africa and the rest of the world reveals a need for a new literacy in both culture and nature and increasingly sophisticated conversations between C.P. Snows ‘Two Cultures’.

An Emu for a nation: a centenary reflection on the journal and its discipline

Abstract The foundation of the Australasian Ornithologists’ Union (later RAOU) coincided with the federation of the Australian States in 1901. Its journal, Emu, reflected many national concerns and anxieties, as well as those of international ornithology. Emu claimed a scope that embraced the region, but in practice Australian content dominated contributions. The interests of oology (egg-collecting) and private skin-collectors lent authority to reports about breeding habits from remote places. Theoretical considerations in early decades included intracontinental biogeography, migration and movement and life histories. Economic ornithology, or the promotion of birds ‘useful’ to primary producers, provided a rationale for increasing legislative protection of indigenous birds, and also for the foundation of the Gould League in 1909. Bird-protection was a major concern of the union. The balance between the popular and the scientifically valuable has varied in Emu over the century. Since 1968, when Stephen Marchant was appointed editor, professional scientific standards (including refereeing) have been required of contributors. In 2001, following a review, CSIRO Publishing took over the management of the journal on behalf of Birds Australia/RAOU. The new subtitle, Austral Ornithology, reflects a regional scope consistent with the aspirations of the unions founders.

Escaping the disciplinary straitjacket Curriculum design as university adaptation to sustainability

Purpose – Curriculum design is often a challenge. It is particularly so when the subject is sustainability, which is an aspirational but contested concept, draws on a range of disciplinary insights and is relatively new to university curricula. There is no single “right way”, or even agreement across the disciplines that inform the collective enterprise about general approaches to sustainability curricula. The likely content is ill‐defined and spans departmental units and budget areas in most traditional universities. Like other societal and institutional attempts at realising sustainability, curriculum design for sustainability is beset by difficulty, yet an essential intellectual activity. This paper aims to focus on these issues.Design/methodology/approach – The paper compares actual curriculum development processes for “sustainability” in two very different Australian universities, as studied using participant observation and qualitative interviews.Findings – The paper draws out some of the common cha...

National Identity and International Science : the Case of Acacia

The article considers the role that history and botanical politics played during the nomenclatural debates surrounding the decision taken at the XVII International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Vienn ...

New Science for Sustainability in an Ancient Land

In this chapter, I want to consider the history of the overlapping revolutions in science and society in Australia that have come together in the partnerships for ‘sustainability’. Although this is a global phenomenon, its local manifestations are subject to the strong biophysical constraints of the Australian continent. Australian environmental conditions, I argue, make for distinctive nuances in the way the science of conservation biology has evolved there. My chapter is in a sense a ‘worked example’ of William M. Adams’s argument that ‘[c]onservation is… geographically diverse, historically changing and contested’.1 It is as Adams says, ‘fundamentally a social phenomenon or social practice’. R.A. Kenchington, an Australian coastal zone scientific manager, put it succinctly: ‘We do not manage the environment’, only the human behaviours that affect its structure and processes.2 It is not just the human behaviours, it is also the nature of the ecological crisis itself. Crisis demands more than ‘just science’, as Michael Soule, a doyen of conservation biology, commented: Conservation biology differs from most other biological sciences … it is often a crisis discipline … In crisis disciplines, one must act before knowing all the facts; crisis disciplines are thus a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information.3

School gardens and beyond: progressive conservation, moral imperatives and the local landscape

Abstract New educational theories swept the British world around the turn of the century. The school child was no longer an ‘administrated unit’ or an ‘information receptacle’, but rather a ‘growing flower’2 There was a growing awareness of Swiss and German theories of the school as a ‘kindergarten’, or flower garden where the flowers were young children, an idea which had also been taken up in various ways by the French and the Americans. ‘With this renewed culture of child-lite, the literal culture of flowers has fitly been keeping trace’, observed the British professor of education, Patrick Geddes. He noted the first steps were an indoor flower-shelf, which prospered despite fears from administrators that ‘watering might wet the floors’, then window boxes developed, then finally a full ‘school garden’ in the playground ‘where even trees may be planted’.3 The British school gardens were very organised. Miss Latters diagram shows eighteen kitchen garden plots, each 4′ × 2′, then on the other side of the 18″ path, eighteen flower garden plots, each 3′ × 4′ 6″, separated by 6″ paths. The layout of this garden was designed to make it clear that it is a serious ‘classroom’ exercise.

Three galleries of the Anthropocene

This paper considers three ‘galleries’ that explore the Anthropocene in cultural ways, and the implications of the Anthropocene idea for cultural institutions and heritage. The first gallery is the 2014–2016 exhibition Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands, [Willkommen im Anthropozän: Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde] at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The second ‘gallery’ of Anthropocene Posters sponsored by the Art Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), placed the Anthropocene in a ‘museum without walls’ in the streets of Berlin in 2013. The third ‘gallery of the Anthropocene’, was not a museum, but rather a landscape gallery (or ‘spectacle’) of in situ industrial heritage in Svalbard. Pyramiden, a town established to mine coal well north of the Arctic Circle in the early 20th century, has been recently transformed as an attraction for climate change science and heritage tourism. Here the hybridized local landscape creates a snapshot of the Anthropocene, bringing together industrial coal-mining heritage buildings, polar tourism and science forged in the geopolitics of the changing Arctic environment.