WEBVTT Kind: captions; language: en-us NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 67% (MEDIUM) 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.050 Hello my name is Jon Rasmus Nyquist I'll be the one to take you through these next few weeks of 00:00:06.050 --> 00:00:11.100 this environmental anthropology class and I very much look forward to meeting you to discuss these 00:00:11.100 --> 00:00:19.950 topics very soon and let me just first of all say a few things about the focus for the coming weeks. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 80% (HØY) 00:00:19.950 --> 00:00:25.300 You've been through some of the foundational concepts and debates in environmental environmental 00:00:25.300 --> 00:00:32.599 anthropology so far and now we're changing gears a little and and we'll turn our focus more towards 00:00:32.599 --> 00:00:39.900 what anthropology has to say about the conditions of the world today. So what characterizes human 00:00:39.900 --> 00:00:46.300 environment relations in today's world, I have indicated a few things here on the slide which we will delve 00:00:46.300 --> 00:00:50.250 deeper into in the coming weeks these are things like global connections NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 74% (MEDIUM) 00:00:50.250 --> 00:00:58.000 simplification of landscapes and unpredictable landscapes and disasters, ruination, 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:04.750 destruction, and degradation and toxicity and exposure but also maybe hope NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 79% (HØY) 00:01:04.750 --> 00:01:11.200 and this week's video gets to the first of those topics and I'll talk about a couple of ways to look 00:01:11.200 --> 00:01:19.900 at global connections and specifically to kinds of social natural formations that are prevalent in 00:01:19.900 --> 00:01:27.800 in the world today namely a Cosmopolitan Nature's and engineered worlds and it will become clearer 00:01:27.800 --> 00:01:32.550 what I mean by those in the course of this and the next two videos NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 82% (HØY) 00:01:32.550 --> 00:01:40.600 so the main idea for this video is the concept of ecological imperialism which points to one kind of 00:01:40.600 --> 00:01:47.800 Cosmopolitan nature, it can in simplest terms be understood as the idea that the global spread of 00:01:47.800 --> 00:01:54.450 people around the world and especially European people's conquest and domination are not just 00:01:54.450 --> 00:02:00.900 economic and political phenomena but ecological and environmental processes too. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 80% (HØY) 00:02:00.900 --> 00:02:05.800 In addition to the readings we have this week I'll be drawing a little bit of on this book that 00:02:05.800 --> 00:02:10.800 you see on the slide right here is the book called ecological imperialism written by an 00:02:10.800 --> 00:02:17.500 environmental historian Alfred ? back in 1986 and is one of the places where this idea was 00:02:17.500 --> 00:02:19.950 first articulated NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 90% (HØY) 00:02:19.950 --> 00:02:28.900 so we know colonialism as the period when European people spread, invaded, conquered, and settled and 00:02:28.900 --> 00:02:35.700 many places were made into resource frontiers or extractions souls? and sometimes this is referred 00:02:35.700 --> 00:02:42.900 to as exploitation colonialism or resource colonialism whereas in others like Australia the US New 00:02:42.900 --> 00:02:49.300 Zealand South Africa had Europeans settled and displaced the indigenous peoples and peoples who live 00:02:49.300 --> 00:02:49.750 there NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 79% (HØY) 00:02:49.750 --> 00:02:57.200 and this is referred to as a settler colonialism and especially this latter type of colonialism has 00:02:57.200 --> 00:03:05.000 involved the kind of the takeover european takeover and it's been a takeover in at least two ways 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:09.200 one is demographically and the other in terms of land use NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 85% (HØY) 00:03:09.200 --> 00:03:16.800 This is a strange phenomenon right it is a strange world in which so many 00:03:16.800 --> 00:03:24.900 different areas vastly separated by vast distances are dominated by people from the same place 00:03:24.900 --> 00:03:32.000 by the same kind of land use practices namely agriculture, consider how strange it is that in these 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:38.300 three countries you see outlines of right here 80 to 90 percent of the people have European 00:03:38.300 --> 00:03:39.300 ancestors only NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 84% (HØY) 00:03:39.300 --> 00:03:47.400 a few Generations back almost 90% of the people who live in these countries come from Europe and 00:03:47.400 --> 00:03:54.400 have only been on the land and now absolutely dominate for a few centuries almost. Australia it's the 00:03:54.400 --> 00:04:02.450 most extreme case a landmass that in just 250 years has gone from having zero European inhabitants 00:04:02.450 --> 00:04:07.300 to about ninety percent of the inhabitants being of European descent NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 70% (MEDIUM) 00:04:07.300 --> 00:04:14.000 think about how strange that actually is, and the quote on the slide here is from Crossby and he also 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:22.350 tries to convey how strange this is he Likens the fervor with which European spread across the globe 00:04:22.350 --> 00:04:29.800 to fleeing a burning building so this a dramatic demographic takeover is something that begs to be 00:04:29.800 --> 00:04:37.500 explain and to understand how this all came to be how humans of European descent NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 91% (HØY) 00:04:37.500 --> 00:04:45.300 came to dominate such vast parts of the world and to understand what this in turn has led to we must 00:04:45.300 --> 00:04:53.600 begin according to Crossby by realizing that the colonizers didn't colonise alone. This picture is 00:04:53.600 --> 00:05:00.400 of a flock of sheep in New Zealand and it is illustrated while colonialism in some ways was the 00:05:00.400 --> 00:05:07.450 demographic take over a conquest by people it was also an ecological takeover so New Zealand NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 76% (HØY) 00:05:07.450 --> 00:05:14.200 Is home to about 5 million people today and about 80% of them are of European 00:05:14.200 --> 00:05:24.100 descent, but it is also home to about 30 million sheep so not only is it dominated by 00:05:24.100 --> 00:05:32.299 European people it is dominated by the European people's companion animals like sheep. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 91% (HØY) 00:05:32.299 --> 00:05:40.200 So colonization is not just a political and economic process such as the human process it is 00:05:40.200 --> 00:05:42.850 an ecological one as well NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 73% (MEDIUM) 00:05:42.850 --> 00:05:48.900 and one way that Alfred Crosby tried to demonstrate this is through the concept of 00:05:48.900 --> 00:05:57.300 portmanteau biota which I think can be a really useful concept, so what does it mean well a 00:05:57.300 --> 00:06:04.500 portmanteau can mean two things it can be a large kind of a bag that you carry along with you or it 00:06:04.500 --> 00:06:11.800 can be a specific type of word so-called portmanteau word and in the latter sense a portmanteau word 00:06:11.800 --> 00:06:13.400 is a word that's made NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 83% (HØY) 00:06:13.400 --> 00:06:23.200 up by mashing two other words together like Britain and exit becomes the Brexit and costume and 00:06:23.200 --> 00:06:31.200 role play is mashed together into cosplay right so those are portmanteau words and portmanteau biota 00:06:31.200 --> 00:06:37.600 is a metaphor that involves two ideas. First the idea of bringing something with you as you would 00:06:37.600 --> 00:06:43.700 with the bag and secondly the idea of combining things NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 74% (MEDIUM) 00:06:43.700 --> 00:06:51.200 That are a combination right so just like a brexit does a combination of Britain and exit so were the 00:06:51.200 --> 00:06:59.000 people that settled Australia and America and so on a combination of people, livestock plants, 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:08.700 soil, microbes, bacteria and viruses and so on and those combinations are what colonizing and 00:07:08.700 --> 00:07:12.900 they are what we might call a human or non-human working group NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 88% (HØY) 00:07:12.900 --> 00:07:20.400 and bacteria is especially interesting part of this portmanteau most indigenous people in the places 00:07:20.400 --> 00:07:27.000 where Europeans settled didn't have the same kind of immunities that Europeans did and so 00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:35.150 epidemics of measles and smallpox and an influenza and other diseases struct indigenous people hard 00:07:35.150 --> 00:07:42.650 and in the process made it easier for Europeans to settle and take over the land, and NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 79% (HØY) 00:07:42.650 --> 00:07:50.200 and so not only did epidemics weaken the indigenous populations but it also in many cases disrupted 00:07:50.200 --> 00:07:54.150 their traditional values practices NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 85% (HØY) 00:07:54.150 --> 00:08:01.500 livestock like cattle and sheep are a really interesting part of this portmanteau, while the 00:08:01.500 --> 00:08:09.600 first British settlers struggled to survive on the unfamiliar shores of Australia their cattle and 00:08:09.600 --> 00:08:16.400 sheep usually fared much much better and they pushed into the country and found pastures on their 00:08:16.400 --> 00:08:24.100 own and cattle have been referred to as the shock troops of colonization and in NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 77% (HØY) 00:08:24.100 --> 00:08:32.100 both Australia and North America livestock spread far ahead of the settlers frontiers laying the 00:08:32.100 --> 00:08:39.700 ground for people to come after them. These animals were as Crosby puts it walking sources of food 00:08:39.700 --> 00:08:47.200 leather power and wealth and so once cattle or sheep had pushed on into a new area and Beyond the 00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:54.050 frontier it was easier than for humans to follow and he mentions four instances within the few NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 70% (MEDIUM) 00:08:54.050 --> 00:09:01.200 Months of Europeans having arrived in Australia two bulls and four cows strayed away from the 00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:09.100 settlement and a couple of decades later there were wild herds of cattle numbering between three and 00:09:09.100 --> 00:09:17.200 five thousand so here the cattle seem to have done the settlement of almost on their own and the 00:09:17.200 --> 00:09:23.600 cattle founded the landscapes with good grass and 00:09:23.600 --> 00:09:24.050 Good NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 80% (HØY) 00:09:24.050 --> 00:09:30.400 sources of water and the people followed and these animals were ecosystem engineers of the 00:09:30.400 --> 00:09:35.200 sort they changed the landscapes as they spread. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 78% (HØY) 00:09:35.200 --> 00:09:43.600 In short European portmanteaus these human non-human working groups drastically changed the lands 00:09:43.600 --> 00:09:51.600 they colonized and it was also often the unintended effects of their animals plants and microbes 00:09:51.600 --> 00:09:58.300 that made a difference. Some of these were rare species that the Europeans brought deliberately but 00:09:58.300 --> 00:10:05.600 just as often with seeds transported on livestock or bacteria or rats NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 86% (HØY) 00:10:05.600 --> 00:10:11.700 Or stowaway on ships they were companions that Europeans didn't even know that 00:10:11.700 --> 00:10:18.000 they had with them and they were simply part of their portmanteau symbiotic combinations that the 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:20.300 Europeans were. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 85% (HØY) 00:10:20.300 --> 00:10:28.200 Colonialism was a take over as Crosby argues and it was something that couldn't have been 00:10:28.200 --> 00:10:35.500 accomplished by the Europeans without their companion species, their animals, plants, bacteria and 00:10:35.500 --> 00:10:37.300 viruses. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 83% (HØY) 00:10:37.700 --> 00:10:48.300 This is just to illustrate that the New Zealand colonizing portmanteau if you will and that 00:10:48.300 --> 00:10:55.100 human non-human working group that conquered and took over New Zealand it includes sheep as I mentioned 00:10:55.100 --> 00:11:02.000 it includes bumblebees from Europe red clover and indigenous people and a lot of the grasslands in 00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:06.300 New Zealand's today and are very different than they were before Europeans 00:11:06.300 --> 00:11:07.400 arrived they are NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 79% (HØY) 00:11:07.400 --> 00:11:17.400 now dominated by clover European clover which is an excellent source of feed for sheep and is 00:11:17.400 --> 00:11:26.100 pollinated by the European Bumblebee and this was unplanned right it was not like settlers went oh hey 00:11:26.100 --> 00:11:30.900 you know our sheep need some clovers and so we need to bring that along with us and it was 00:11:30.900 --> 00:11:37.450 rather that Clover seeds were transported on the sheep themselves stuck to their wool. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 86% (HØY) 00:11:37.450 --> 00:11:45.500 The birds you see here are European starlings they gather and move enormous flocks with this intricate 00:11:45.500 --> 00:11:53.300 and beautiful ripples of collective motion the starlings are native to Europe and parts of Asia and 00:11:53.300 --> 00:12:00.000 there's an incredible story behind the introduction of Starlings to the US. So there was a guy in 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:07.700 North America in the 1890s I called Eugene schieffelin and he felt that the new land was lacking NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 76% (HØY) 00:12:07.700 --> 00:12:15.600 among other things it just didn't have the right birds so what he did was was he set about 00:12:15.600 --> 00:12:22.300 trying to introduce all of the birds that were mentioned in all of Shakespeare's works as the story 00:12:22.300 --> 00:12:28.800 goes he made attempts to introduce several different birds from Shakespeare and failed with many 00:12:28.800 --> 00:12:36.100 of them but with the European starlings he succeeded or "succeeded" in in quotation marks and they 00:12:36.100 --> 00:12:37.349 spread rapidly NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 80% (HØY) 00:12:37.349 --> 00:12:43.700 across the continent, and as you can see there can be quite a lot of these birds and 00:12:43.700 --> 00:12:49.950 this clip is from somewhere in the Netherlands but the starlings do form these enormous flocks 00:12:49.950 --> 00:12:55.349 across North America too and they become quite a problem for farmers. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 82% (HØY) 00:12:55.349 --> 00:13:03.000 I'm not sure the story might be a bit exaggerated we can't be sure to what extent Shakespeare was 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:09.700 this guy's motivation but Shakespeare or not what seems fairly certain is that he was part of a 00:13:09.700 --> 00:13:16.200 larger group of people who deliberately set about trying to introduce birds to America in order to 00:13:16.200 --> 00:13:23.600 improve the fauna. We can take Shakespeare to be an expression of something more general namely a 00:13:23.600 --> 00:13:25.250 desire to create NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 76% (HØY) 00:13:25.250 --> 00:13:32.650 Comfort and familiarity in the new lands and an assumption that the new lands can be improved 00:13:32.650 --> 00:13:39.300 the Shakespeare guy was part of a group called an acclimatisation 00:13:39.300 --> 00:13:46.100 society and these were groups that sought to create something more familiar in the new lands and 00:13:46.100 --> 00:13:52.700 especially in the US and Australia something that looks familiar feels familiar and sounds less 00:13:52.700 --> 00:13:55.250 alien and NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 90% (HØY) 00:13:55.250 --> 00:14:03.400 so I like to sort of emphasize two things with this example one is the unintended effects that 00:14:03.400 --> 00:14:09.700 introducing species from somewhere else can have you bringing a few starlings to one spot on the 00:14:09.700 --> 00:14:15.200 American east coast and before you know it there are 200 million of them and they eat whole 00:14:15.200 --> 00:14:21.000 fields of wheat, the other point is that often when people mostly Europeans and spread across the 00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:25.250 globe with their portmanteau biotas it has been accompanied NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 90% (HØY) 00:14:25.250 --> 00:14:32.800 and driven by visions and imaginaries of how nature can be changed and in their eyes made 00:14:32.800 --> 00:14:41.400 better so what we have then is is an interplay between environmental interventions and imaginaries 00:14:41.400 --> 00:14:48.650 about the environment so ecological imperialism is both a material process and the process involving 00:14:48.650 --> 00:14:55.200 Global imaginaries wanting all of Shakespeare's birds in America NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 91% (HØY) 00:14:55.200 --> 00:15:01.300 and more generally that the urge to make the new world a little bit more familiar is one example 00:15:01.300 --> 00:15:07.400 of this interplay it involves a global imaginary that access the driver for environmental 00:15:07.400 --> 00:15:14.700 interventions and environmental change so imaginaries can support or make sense of changes in the 00:15:14.700 --> 00:15:20.200 landscape and in the case of colonialism and the guy who wanted all of Shakespeare's birds in 00:15:20.200 --> 00:15:21.599 America NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 75% (MEDIUM) 00:15:21.599 --> 00:15:29.500 we have narratives of deficiency and malleability in the new lands. Narratives said that the new 00:15:29.500 --> 00:15:35.100 Lands weren't good enough and they think that they were shapeable and also narratives that 00:15:35.100 --> 00:15:43.000 implies sort of transcends of locality and these underlying support of the introduction of new 00:15:43.000 --> 00:15:46.550 species and the changing of the land NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 79% (HØY) 00:15:46.550 --> 00:15:54.700 and in turn we can regard this interplay between bio-fiscal changes and narratives and imaginaries 00:15:54.700 --> 00:16:02.000 as processes that propel the formation or what I'm calling Cosmopolitan ecologies we spread and 00:16:02.000 --> 00:16:07.800 travel like portmanteaus which is the process supported by imaginaries and through that spread 00:16:07.800 --> 00:16:14.900 we create sometimes inadvertently Cosmopolitan ecologies that is landscape forms that have a global 00:16:14.900 --> 00:16:17.200 tendency less localised NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 79% (HØY) 00:16:17.200 --> 00:16:25.400 Landscapes. Landscapes that transcend or undermine local specificity. Here's one illustration of what 00:16:25.400 --> 00:16:33.400 the outcomes or effects can be so here's a picture on the left there's a Monterey Pine growing in 00:16:33.400 --> 00:16:39.800 Tasmania and on the right there's some Tasmanian blue gum in the Monterey Bay of Australia 00:16:39.800 --> 00:16:47.150 so these places are very very far from each other and in many parts NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 89% (HØY) 00:16:47.150 --> 00:16:54.100 parts of California these Tasmanian trees are among the most abundant trees they impart really a lot 00:16:54.100 --> 00:17:00.100 of character on the landscape and Monterey Pine on the other hand are common Plantation trees in 00:17:00.100 --> 00:17:07.800 many parts of Australia so these two in a sense have become Landscapes that have elements of each 00:17:07.800 --> 00:17:14.200 other in them. So we might say their companion Landscapes or linked ecologies but they are also a 00:17:14.200 --> 00:17:17.200 sign of ecological relations that have a tendency to NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 78% (HØY) 00:17:17.200 --> 00:17:24.650 travel and to spread and ecological relations that are non-local that transcend locality NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 77% (HØY) 00:17:24.650 --> 00:17:32.100 and so these are trees that transcend locality at the same time as their names Monterey Pine and 00:17:32.100 --> 00:17:38.700 Tasmanian Blue gum ?recall? a localization that doesn't exist anymore, this is how we name things in the 00:17:38.700 --> 00:17:45.300 world as if we expect them to stay put at same time as we move them around all the time. Here's 00:17:45.300 --> 00:17:50.900 another example which is a bit closer to home and you might know the Sitka Spruce which we have a 00:17:50.900 --> 00:17:55.350 lot of in Norway it was planted in massive amounts in the NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 89% (HØY) 00:17:55.350 --> 00:18:04.900 60s and 70s along the coast especially and Sitka is a name of a town in Alaska and the 00:18:04.900 --> 00:18:12.500 Sitka Spruce is actually the official state tree of Alaska and then there's a species on 00:18:12.500 --> 00:18:18.500 the other hand species of spruce that is called the Norway spruce which we just called Spruce in 00:18:18.500 --> 00:18:25.300 Norway and the Norway spruce has been introduced to and planted all over North America so on NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 74% (MEDIUM) 00:18:25.300 --> 00:18:32.800 the right here is a landscape with Norway spruce in Great Smoky Mountains which is in the 00:18:32.800 --> 00:18:40.900 Southeastern US and apparently in Norway spruce has been planted in the US by paper companies and 00:18:40.900 --> 00:18:48.500 the Norway spruce is considered an invasive species in large parts of the US just like the Sitka 00:18:48.500 --> 00:18:52.950 Spruce is considered a pest by many people in Norway. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 88% (HØY) 00:18:52.950 --> 00:19:00.400 In both cases it has been driven or undergirded by this idea of betterment by the idea that one 00:19:00.400 --> 00:19:07.100 can make landscapes better or more productive by introducing species from somewhere else, and an 00:19:07.100 --> 00:19:13.900 imaginary there seems to say that as a land manager you have the whole world's flora and 00:19:13.900 --> 00:19:22.600 fauna at your disposal that you're not limited to what's present in the place and the conditions of 00:19:22.600 --> 00:19:23.000 a NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 67% (MEDIUM) 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:29.900 Locality but that species sort of exist in an abstract way outside of where they originated 00:19:29.900 --> 00:19:34.450 available for use in engineering better landscapes. NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 89% (HØY) 00:19:34.450 --> 00:19:40.900 These are cosmopolitan ecologies and they are ecological sets of relations that spanned the 00:19:40.900 --> 00:19:48.000 globe that subvert localization or that seemed to have a sort of an urge towards spread across the 00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:54.900 globe, the Sitka landscape the Norway spruce landscape the blue gum landscape and Monterey Pine 00:19:54.900 --> 00:20:02.800 landscape are all Cosmopolitan ecologies just like the sheep that shape the grasslands in New Zealand 00:20:02.800 --> 00:20:05.000 and the starlings that dance across NOTE Treffsikkerhet: 84% (HØY) 00:20:05.000 --> 00:20:13.200 the skies in the North America, they are less localized landscapes. Landscape forms that tend toward 00:20:13.200 --> 00:20:19.850 spanning the globe, landscapes supported by the modern assumption that humans don't have to live 00:20:19.850 --> 00:20:23.300 within the limitations of locality.