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“What is the Earthly Paradise?”
“What is the Earthly Paradise?”
Ecocritical Responses to the Caribbean
Edited by
Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING
“What is the Earthly Paradise?”: Ecocritical Responses to the Caribbean, edited by Chris Campbell and
Erin Somerville
This book first published 2007 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2007 by Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-238-0; ISBN 13: 9781847182388
What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two
weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at
sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral
shirts beating Yellow Bird and Banana Boat Song
to death?
— Derek Walcott,
“The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ................................................................................................................ix
David Dabydeen
Acknowledgements.............................................................................................xi
“This Sinking Ship”: Environmentality and the Caribbean .................................1
Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville
Part I—Development: Environment in Practice
Problems Concerning Islands.............................................................................10
Greg Garrard
Beach, Bush and Beautification: Tourism and the Environment in Dominica...23
Polly Pattullo
A “Welcoming Planet”? Urban Literary Environments and the “Ghetto”
in Kingston, Jamaica ..........................................................................................30
David Howard
“Wild, Yet Prospect”: Inventing Tropical Nature in Victorian Trinidad ...........50
Amar Wahab
Part II—Responses: Literature and Environment
Hating Nature Properly: Naipaul and the Pastoral .............................................74
Graham Huggan
The Problem with Culture: Sam Selvon’s Postcolonial Pastoral .......................85
Erin Somerville
“The Body Grotesque”: the Ecology of Identity in Patrick Chamoiseau’s
Biblique des derniers geste ..............................................................................101
Michael Niblett
viii
Table of Contents
Green Anancy: Derek Walcott’s Drama of Environmental Protest .................119
Chris Campbell
Leaving the Earth: The Young Man and the Sea in N.D. Williams’
“Light of the World” ........................................................................................136
Michael Mitchell
Eco, Feminism: Indo-Caribbean Women and Nature ......................................149
Letizia Gramaglia and Erin Somerville
Contributors .................................................................................................... 167
Index ................................................................................................................169
PREFACE
I had seen nothing on the journey. The jungle was stupendous in its vastness but
I had closed my mind to it and to the spectacle of a sky gorgeous with tropical
birds. . . . I had done the same in Georgetown, refusing the enticements of its
slums and its bars swarming with whores, safely cocooned in my hired taxi or in
my own thoughts. My Priest would have done the same. He would have arrived
in a country of vice and hatred. He would have quickly discovered its brutal
history. The English had shipped over Africans as slaves and worked them to the
bone in their plantations. Then, short of labour, the English had imported
countless coolies from India. The planters set African against Indian, Indian
against African, the English excelling at the training of fighting cocks, fighting
dogs. Above all, my Priest would have realised the real origin of evil, which lay
in the clearing of spaces in the jungle, the draining and ploughing of the land for
the growth of sugarcane. The planters had to suppress Christian conscience, take
up whip and drive their slaves and coolies to work. The jungle was as unruly as
it was vast, hundreds of thousands had to be sacrificed in the effort to tame it.
Only a murderous heart and a mechanical will could bring success to such an
enterprise. And the bush would muffle the sounds of the killings, making them
more bearable. And the planters would be absolved of guilt for the news of the
killing did not travel abroad.
—From Our Lady of Demerara
The Centre for Caribbean Studies opened at the University of Warwick in
October, 1984. It was the first such research centre in the UK to recognise the
significance of the Caribbean region and its historically interdependent linkages
with the UK and the rest of the world. Since its opening it has listed many
notable Caribbean writers as visiting fellows, including Wilson Harris, V.S.
Naipaul, Sam Selvon and Derek Walcott. The work of these writers is now
considered important to the developing field of Caribbean ecocriticism.
I was pleased to have my work considered alongside these formative figures
of Caribbean literature in the “Trouble in ‘Paradise’?: Ecocritical Responses to
the Contemporary Caribbean” conference, hosted by the University on
November 27, 2005. This collection of essays arises from the papers and
discussions of the conference and marks a synthesis of emerging ecological
consciousness in the region.
I rarely have the opportunity to discuss my work as a UNESCO Ambassador
for Guyana within the academic sphere. In addition to reading passages of
environmental representations in my fiction at the conference, I also participated
x
Preface
in a panel with journalist John Mair which considered environmental status and
policy in Guyana. The focus of this panel was Iwokrama, a project promoting
the conservation and the sustainable and equitable use of tropical rainforest in a
manner than leads to lasting ecological, economic and social benefits. Mair
spoke eloquently about the pitfalls the project has encountered; I maintain,
however, the project continues to evolve from an act of extraordinary vision.
In 1996 the Iwokrama Act was passed unanimously by the Guyanese
parliament, enabling the handover of one million acres of pristine rainforest to
the world community. A totally unprecedented move, this surrender of
sovereignty placed the area outside the boundaries of the national law. The
project is a signal to the world that we are part of a global community and that
the inherited nineteenth-century geopolitical borders must be reassessed. In the
age of ecological crisis issues of national concern must be considered alongside
a global ethic of responsibility to the natural world.
Iwokrama should be a source of immense pride and stands as an example to
the rest of the world. It also has the potential to truly become a focal point and
an imaginative inspiration for environmental workers and thinkers across the
earth. I am happy to contribute the preface to this collection not only to promote
the Caribbean environment, but also to forward the ecocritical cause, which I
now see as an increasingly important paradigm of humanitarian studies.
David Dabydeen
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the generous support of the
Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick. We would particularly
like to thank Sue Dibben for all her support.
This collection of essays is based on talks and discussions resulting from the
“Trouble in ‘Paradise’” conference. We would like to acknowledge our debt to
all who attended and participated. James Procter and Clem Seecharan both
delivered stimulating papers that are unfortunately unable to be included here.
We would like to thank Terry Gifford, Richard Grove and Richard Kerridge for
their significant contributions on the day.
The Centre for Caribbean Studies has played a role in this project in
scholarly and financial terms from the onset. We are grateful to Cecily Jones
and David Dabydeen.
Last but not least, special thanks to Benjamin James and Claire Lister.
“THE SINKING SHIP”:
ENVIRONMENTALITY AND THE CARIBBEAN
CHRIS CAMPBELL AND ERIN SOMERVILLE
To destroy our rainforests now is to place our
civilization upon another hill of Calvary. The
three crosses fashioned from trees become the
eloquent masts of a sinking ship . . .
—Wilson Harris1
On November 27, 2005, the University of Warwick hosted a one-day
interdisciplinary conference entitled “Trouble in ‘Paradise’?: Ecocritical
Responses to the Contemporary Caribbean.” The conference brought together
for the first time environmental journalists, cultural geographers, literary critics,
historians, creative writers and environmental activists to discuss the Caribbean
environment. Panels included ecocritical theory, development and tourism,
responses to Caribbean writing, fiction readings and ecohistory; the conference
concluded with a panel discussion that highlighted issues of environmental
immediacy. This was the first conference to be held within Britain devoted
entirely to issues of Caribbean environmentalism.
This collection of essays is a reflection of and an expansion upon conference
proceedings. The structure of this book mirrors concerns raised by conference
discussion focusing on both the need for a greater understanding of the
significance of cultural readings of the environment and a call to action. The
“Development” section of this collection deals with practice and provides both a
close examination of the roots, results and realities of Caribbean environmental
crisis and a case study for similar cultures. The “Responses” section offers close
readings of Caribbean cultural reflections of the environment and discusses
themes and issues dominant in green studies and ecocriticism.
This book contributes to a small but growing list of publications dealing
with the Caribbean environment and provides a new perspective in its
interdisciplinary approach and development-reflection focus. The Caribbean is
no stranger to ecological crisis; the natural precariousness of its geographical
1
Harris, “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination,” 258.
2
Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville
position leave it vulnerable to annual hurricanes, tropical storms and floods.
These regularly have devastating effect on national economic growth and result
in widespread displacement of Caribbean populations. Regional industries
compound these problems; often social deprivation goes hand-in-hand with
environmental degradation. In his recent history of the Caribbean, Gad Heuman
privileges issues of environmentalism in his discussion of significant
contemporary themes in reading Caribbean history. Heuman highlights tourism,
oil extraction and oil refinement, the reliance on agricultural exports and
processes of mineral extraction are major regional social and environmental
concerns:
The skewed economic development of the region has led to serious
environmental degradation. The deforestation of large parts of the Caribbean has
led to damaging soil erosion, most visibly in Haiti, but also elsewhere. Many
smaller plots of land have been subdivided so frequently and farmed so
intensively that the land is no longer productive. When minerals such as bauxite
have been extracted, companies have sometimes left visible reminders of the
damage they have caused: enormous lakes filled with the poisonous residues of
their work.2
Heuman’s comments are significant, as they mark the first time environmental
destruction has been figured as integral to an introduction to the region’s
history. In this way, Heuman’s text brings to a wider audience the relevance of
environmental arguments made by Richard Grove.3
Literary critics express a similar concern. Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the
Earth begins to examine the impact of the colonial legacy on the Caribbean
environment with his reading of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, encapsulated by
the oft-quoted declaration that the “hurricane does not roar in pentameters.”4
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley also
discuss Caribbean environmentalism in Caribbean Literature and the
Environment: Between Nature and Culture. DeLoughrey et al make good use of
the philosophies of writers including Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris and
situate discussion of Caribbean literature around natural histories, myths of
origins, hybridity and creolisation and aesthetics of the Earth. What Caribbean
Literature and the Environment articulates is the link between the history of
human agency/interference and the facts of regional nature; the essays offer “a
sustained ecocritical focus on the ways in which race, gender, and other social
2
Heuman, The Caribbean, 167.
See Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860.
4
Brathwaite, History of the Voice: Development of National Language in Caribbean
Anglophone Poetry, 10.
3
“The Sinking Ship”: Environmentality and the Caribbean
3
vectors help constitute environmental experience.”5 DeLoughrey et al’s
collection is essential reading because of its contribution to the emerging
dialogue between postcolonial and ecocritical studies.6
This book also pairs postcolonialism and the environment to address the
following questions: What will be the relevance to and impact of ecocriticism to
postcolonial theory, a branch of literary criticism to which it is closely linked?
How can ecocriticism help illuminate the environmental and cultural problems
of development and tourism? How can green readings of literature engage with
the social, cultural, technological and gender concerns of environmental issues?
It differs from other collections by considering issues of development practice
and policy alongside literary analysis, as well as discussing writers such as V.S.
Naipaul, Sam Selvon, N.D. Williams and Ramabai Espinet, who have received
little ecocritical attention.
Above all, the essays in this collection collectively stress the link between
European (mostly British) colonialism and the shape of the modern Caribbean.
Because of its youth British ecocritical theory is at a formative stage; its future
stands at important crossroads. British ecocriticism to date has largely dealt with
the nature writing of Romantic poets—now is the time to extend this focus by
acknowledging the role of colonial projects in postcolonial natures, even if the
landscapes that are altered are far from home and easily ignored. This project
evokes John Parham’s insistence for a discussion of racialised landscapes and
imperialism; these essays therefore speak both directly to issues of Caribbean
environmentality and contribute to reappraisals of what a British ecocritical
focus ought to be. The project should not be viewed as compromised because of
its British base; indeed, the role that Britain has played in shaping the Caribbean
environment necessitates a continued interrogation of the cultural, political and
biological relationship between that region and Britain.
Wilson Harris, in his essay “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination,”
speaks to the transnational imperative of discussions of the environmental crisis.
Importantly, at the same time, his image of the sinking galleon reminds us that it
is those who have been placed in the hold of the ship, historically and in the
contemporary world, that will feel the social and economic effects of
environmental change first and foremost.
5
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley, eds., Caribbean
Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, 5.
6
See also Rob Nixon’s seminal essay, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism” in
Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Ania Loomba et al, eds.
4
Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville
Essays in this Collection
Part I—Development: Environment in Practice
This book begins with Greg Garrard’s examination of “Problems Concerning
Islands.” Garrard uses recent theories on island ecology—including David
Quammen’s biogeographical study of “ecosystem decay” on Madagascar, Clive
Ponting’s ecological roots of the implosion of Easter Island culture, Alfred
Crosby’s theory of the ecological imperialism of New Zealand, Richard Grove’s
claim to the birth of global environmentalism in colonial islands like St Vincent
and Daniel Botkin’s warning of ecosystem sensitivity on Isle Royale, Lake
Superior—to outline environmental considerations applicable to the Caribbean
archipelago. Arguing “[i]slands have been ecological crime scenes for
millennia,” Garrard’s essay examines the importance of the island paradigm in
conservation biology and ecocriticism.
Journalist Polly Pattullo’s essay examines a modern island problem: tourism.
In “Beach, Bush and Beautification: Tourism and the Environment in
Dominica,” Pattullo explores the conflict between “cruise shippers” and
ecotourists, or those who “choose to trek across mountain ranges an through
rainforests rather than bake themselves senseless on a beach.” The cruise
shipper’s demand for quick and easy access to stunning scenery jeopardises the
ecotourist’s desire for isolated, untouched landscapes, creating tension within
the Caribbean tourism industry. On Caribbean islands like Dominica which lack
the sea, sun and sand experience typically associated with the region, however,
the popularisation of ecotourism is generating much needed revenue, as well as
fostering a local appreciation of the vulnerability of island environments and a
need to think sustainably. Pattullo’s use of Derek Walcott’s trenchant view of
the way in which Caribbean landscapes are misrecognised and consumed also
inspires the title of this collection.
In “A ‘Welcoming Planet’: Urban Literary Environments and the ‘Ghetto’ in
Kingston, Jamaica,” cultural geographer David Howard examines those sites
little visited by tourists—cruise shippers and ecotourists alike. Exploring the
idea that “space can be shaped by and from the social meaning of people’s
lives,” Howard’s comprehensive examination of literary representations of the
Kingston ghetto argues such reproduction constitutes a powerful spatial
category that informs the everyday lives of its residents, as well as policing and
government policy. Space, he suggests, is produced and confirmed literally as
well as materially—an idea that stresses the importance and influence of an
expanding catalogue of texts (both musical and literary) that use images of the
ghetto to reflect a growing national consciousness and celebration of “modern
blackness,” as well as daily news reports that reinforce images of ghetto
violence and decay.
“The Sinking Ship”: Environmentality and the Caribbean
5
Amar Wahab’s “‘Wild, Yet Prospect’: Inventing Tropical Nature in
Victorian Trinidad” provides a history of the development of the Caribbean
environment before turning to scrutinise Charles Kingsley’s travel narrative of
1871, At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies, and its representation of the
natural landscapes of Trinidad, thereby forming a bridge between this
collection’s two parts. Wahab situates his study within a field of recent
scholarship which examines constructions of nature as a discursive category in
the Caribbean, and provides a historical contextualisation of post-emancipation
imperial anxiety within which Kingsley’s text can be placed. The essay
contends that Kingsley’s inconsistent attitude, in responding to the Darwinian
crisis, reveals the incoherence of colonial authority in nineteenth-century
Trinidad. Wahab demonstrates that his narrative is positioned between attempts
to “re-naturalise” the world as a “wild” product of divine creation and a
contradictory desire to espouse the need for a “civilised,” cultivated landscape
that is the result of colonial intervention. The travelogue is thus shown to form
part of the post-emancipation project of re-inventing Trinidad, where
representations of the cultivated landscape became an integral part of
reinscribing notions of colonial order.
Part II—Responses: Literature and Environment
Until recently, Caribbean literature was largely ignored by ecocritics. In “Hating
Nature Properly: Naipaul and the Pastoral,” Graham Huggan suggests this
neglect may stem from the seeming unsuitability of the pastoral form to the
region: the setting is wrong—plantations are not rolling hills; the weather is
wrong—baking sun replaces the temperate and changing rhythm of seasons;
and, most importantly, the cast is wrong—slaves are certainly not carefree
shepherds. However, Huggan argues this assumption is incorrect: “[i]t would be
a mistake . . . to see Caribbean writers as having turned their backs on the
pastoral.” Huggan’s examination of the work of V.S. Naipaul—“Caribbean
Literature’s original Grumpy Old Man”—illuminates an oeuvre that
systematically engages in the pastoral, culminating with his “ostensibly
pastoral” novel The Enigma of Arrival. Naipaul’s work is used as a test case to
suggest that while the classic pastoral may be difficult to apply to Caribbean
nature, the post-pastoral provides a useful form through which to deconstruct
and recuperate the Caribbean experience, as well as articulating preliminary
tasks and challenges for Caribbean ecocriticism in general.
Erin Somerville also considers the Caribbean pastoral in her essay “The
Problem with Culture: Sam Selvon’s Postcolonial Pastoral.” The essay responds
to Laurence Buell’s theory of a postcolonial pastoral that calls for the rejection
of colonial clichés and vocabulary and a distance from national pride of place
6
Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville
when accurately portraying modern environments. Somerville argues such
caveats are inappropriate when applied to the Caribbean environment, itself a
product of colonisation—both literally through the colonial naming of nature
and physically through the mass transplantation of flora, fauna and humans—
and an inspiration for national identity. Novels such as A Brighter Sun and The
Lonely Londoners complicate Buell’s theory through their simultaneous
evocation and dismissal of Edenic and El Dorado myths, their use of colonial
vocabulary and the depiction of the environment as fostering a sense of national
consciousness.
In his essay, “The Body Grotesque: The Ecology of Identity in Patrick
Chamoiseau’s Biblique des derniers gestes,” Michael Niblett traces how the
author illuminates the processes of cultural erosion that Martinique has
undergone and the attendant facts of environmental despoilation. He sees the
wider project of the novel to be a utopian reclamation of resources that can
nourish an alternative political vision. The essay explores both the identification
of the land as repository for a communal popular history and its role as witness
to legacies of oppression. Furthermore, he argues that the history of externallyorientated structuration has left a legacy of capitalist/colonialist conjunction in
which human subjectivity is abstracted from an objectified nature leaving
people split from the land and its history. Niblett examines Chamoiseau’s
characters who divest themselves of their sovereign corporeal shells and bodily
dissolve into the wider environment. This, he contends, is not a facile call for a
“return to the land” but rather, is presented as a counterpoint to the extreme
rationalisation of over-development. From this position the author articulates a
vision from which promises of self-fashioned collective identity might be
fashioned.
Chris Campbell turns to drama in “Green Anancy: Derek Walcott’s Drama
of Environmental Protest” to provide a reading of the plays Ti-Jean and His
Brothers and Beef, No Chicken, arguing that the environmental ethic advocated
tonally complicates that of Walcott’s poetry. Simultaneously, he suggests that
the plays work to complement the authorial double-vision of human connection
to the Caribbean environments through concepts of both rootedness and
migrancy. The essay then suggests that the trickster figures within each play
serve to act as the agents of resistance to forces of cultural colonisation,
economic corruption and environmental degradation. Through Ti-jean’s actions
it is possible to observe an allegory of national environmental perception and,
similarly, the later play’s interrogation of the ambivalence of notions of
“progress” has at its centre the disruptive energies of the spirit of a green
anancy. Campbell also suggests that the possibilities for staging the plays might
provide an opportunity to unite the processes of green reading with the, often
disconnected, practices of raising environmental awareness.
“The Sinking Ship”: Environmentality and the Caribbean
7
Michael Mitchell’s exploration of the N.D. Williams story “Light of the
World,” and Derek Walcott’s poem to which it alludes, offers some pertinent
insights into the possibilities and limitations of ecocritical focus. “Leaving the
Earth: The Young Man and the Sea in N.D. Williams’ ‘Light of the World’”
addressing Bate’s The Song of the Earth, contributes to ecocritical debate over
politically problematic notions of dwelling, and acknowledges Caribbean
writers’ responses to contemporary environmental realities. However, Mitchell
also articulates a vision of the earth which is inflected by Gnostic myth and its
insistence that an understanding the cycles of organic nature be experienced
alongside awareness of the spiritual urges of human beings towards various
forms of transcendence. The ecocritical approach is a restricted one if it cannot
account for a primal urge to leave the earth. Williams’s narration of new
relationships with the earth pulls into focus the centrality of notions of spiritual
transience and physical departure as much as the nostalgic longing to belong.
While work by female Caribbean writers such as Jamaica Kincaid has been
the focus of ecocritical readings, critics have shied from discussing Caribbean
literature in terms of ecofeminism. In “Eco, Feminism: Indo-Caribbean Women
and Nature,” Letizia Gramaglia and Erin Somerville suggest the reason for this
may be the theory’s unsuitability to some aspects of the female Caribbean
experience. Gramaglia and Somerville argue the liberation found by early
female indentured labourers in their agricultural work established the canecutting women as a figure of freedom—a positive connection between women
and nature illustrated in Ramabai Espinet’s poetry that disagrees with an
ecofeminist link between the oppression of women and the exploitation of the
environment. Likewise, the naturalisation of culturally constructed gender in
Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates the inherent
tension between ecocriticism’s desire for a depiction of nature outside of culture
and contemporary feminism’s reliance on the postmodern dominance of culture.
Works Cited
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. History of the Voice: Development of National
Language in Caribbean Anglophone Poetry. London: New Beacon Books,
1984.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley, eds.
Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens
and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
8
Chris Campbell and Erin Somerville
Harris, Wilson. “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination,” in Selected
Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, edited
by A.J.M. Bundy, 248-60. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Heuman, Gad. The Caribbean (Brief Histories). London: Hodder Arnold, 2006.
Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism” in Postcolonial Studies
and Beyond, Edited by Ania Loomba et al, 233-51. London: Duke
University Press, 2005.
Part I—Development: Environment in Practice
PROBLEMS CONCERNING ISLANDS
GREG GARRARD
One of the first essays in environmental philosophy I ever read was Mary
Midgley’s “Duties Concerning Islands” (1983). In it she imagined the following
entry in Robinson Crusoe’s diary:
19 Sep. 1685. This day I set aside to devastate my island. My pinnace now being
ready on the shore, and all things prepared for my departure, Friday’s people also
expecting me, and the wind blowing fresh away from my little harbour, I had a
mind to how all would burn. So then, setting sparks and powder craftily among
certain dry spinneys which I had chosen, I soon had it ablaze, nor was there left,
by next dawn, any green stick among the ruins . . .1
According to Midgley, such pointless destruction would be absurd even for
Crusoe. No sane person would embark on a mission of complete annihilation
that had no rewards besides mere curiosity. And yet, she argues, conventional
ethical theory, founded as it is in reciprocal duties between rational beings, has
nothing to say about duties towards islands. Nor, indeed, does it have anything
to say about duties towards animals, the dead, people in the future, the insane,
works of art, God, and a whole host of other entities. “As far as sheer numbers
go, this is no minority of beings with whom we have to deal. We are a small
minority of them.”2 For Midgley, Crusoe’s duty towards his island is the
paradigm for a broader conception of duty than that afforded by contractarian,
or even utilitarian, ethics. It is not, in fact, a new conception, since duties
towards deities, ancestors and some of the other members of her list long
predate the origins of modern ethical theory. Rather it is a recognition that the
traditionally broad and inclusive notion of right and duty is not, as the dominant
tradition in ethics has had it, a kind of mistake for a rational theory to correct.
Mary Midgley is the most sensible, and therefore the most useful,
environmental philosopher. Nevertheless, the ecological history of islands sadly
does not support the proposition that a real-life Crusoe would not fire his island
for little or even no reason. Even Charles Darwin seems to have found himself
1
2
Midgley, “Duties Concerning Islands,” 166.
Ibid., 175.
Problems Concerning Islands
11
idly killing naïve island birds: “There is not one which will not approach
sufficiently near to be killed with a switch, and sometimes, as I myself have
tried, with a cap or a hat.”3 And of course, ethical thought experiments aside, the
problem has never been with colonists leaving islands. On the contrary,
sustained human interaction with biological insularity helped found the science
of ecology, and later the discipline of conservation biology. Islands have been
ecological crime scenes for millennia, but then in recent centuries they have also
seen the origins of environmentalism. Island biogeography gave impetus to
campaigns to ward off a vast “extinction spasm,” and also provided the bestknown and most controversial statistical model. In both the technical and the
popular literature of environmental crisis, we can see the emergence of an island
paradigm that has proven analytically powerful, politically persuasive and yet—
from an ecocritical rather than biogeographical perspective—deeply ambiguous.
The essence of the island paradigm is the idea of a field laboratory. As
Robert Whittaker puts it in Island Biogeography,
islands, being discrete, internally quantifiable, numerous, and varied entities,
provide us with a suite of natural laboratories, from which the discerning natural
scientist can make a selection that simplifies the complexity of the natural
world.4
Both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace developed their evolutionary theories
as a direct result of travels to islands such as the Galapagos (most famously), the
Atlantic islands and, in Wallace’s case, the Malay archipelago. Wallace’s
recognition of the difference between the relict mammal species of Bali and
Lombok, for example, with their Oriental and Australian-New Guinean faunas
respectively, was the foundation of historical biogeography. More famously
(and as David Quammen shows, erroneously), Darwin is supposed to have
developed the idea of adaptive radiation from the morphology of Galapagos
finches. In fact, Origin of Species does not mention the finches, but the birds did
later provide a fine illustration of how a single founder species could split into
several that were more specialised. As Quammen puts it, “He brought home
thirty-one puzzling little carcasses [and] shook his head . . . They became
‘Darwin’s finches’ about a hundred years later.”5
But the island paradigm turns out to be more than a scientific phenomenon.
As Alfred Crosby points out, when European sailors began the age of
colonisation in the 14th century, they soon fastened upon islands—specifically
3
Qtd in Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions,
205.
4
Whittaker, Island Biogeography: Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, 1.
5
Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, 230.
12
Greg Garrard
the Atlantic islands known to the ancients as the “Fortunate Isles”—as
“laboratories of a new kind of European imperialism.”6 They tended to be less
torrid than the tropical mainlands, more accessible to seafaring powers and,
most crucially, less likely to be populated by either dangerous animals or
people. Islands were more attractive to the colonisers, as well as ecologically far
more vulnerable, as we shall see.
Moreover, islands play a large role in the cultural imagination, from the
publication of Thomas More’s insular Utopia in 1513, through Shakespeare’s
The Tempest to the founding of an entire literary genre of island narratives with
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe of 1719. The “robinsonnade” became an extremely
popular, less overtly politicised, offshoot of the formal utopia, in which
economic, theological, psychological, imperial and anti-imperial fantasies could
be given an exotic habitation. What is perhaps most remarkable is the part that
the robinsonnade played in the emergence of early environmental thought, a
point to which I shall return in the context of an analysis of five paradigmatic
islands: Madagascar in Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo, Easter Island in
Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World, New Zealand in Alfred Crosby’s
Ecological Imperialism, St Vincent in Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism and
the Isle Royale of Lake Superior in Daniel Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies.
Ultimately I will be questioning both the island paradigm in conservation
biology and the use of ecology as a normative source in ecocriticism.
Madagascar
In Quammen’s work of popular ecology, island biogeography is the key to the
contemporary mass extinction crisis and the global threat to biodiversity. The
book begins by imagining cutting up a beautiful Persian rug into thirty-six
pieces. Is each fragment just a small Persian rug? “No. All we’re left with is
three dozen ragged fragments, each one worthless and commencing to come
apart.”7 And it is clear that islands and other habitat islands are more vulnerable
to extinction, or what Quammen calls “ecosystem decay.” Islands tend to have a
far higher proportion of endemic species than mainlands (i.e. ones found
nowhere else), and their species tend to be exceptionally vulnerable to
extinction. As Whittaker’s figures show, since 1600 extinctions of bird species
are ninety-seven insular to around twenty continental, of mammals thirty-four to
twenty-four, and of reptiles twenty-four to one. For bird species, prehistoric
insular extinctions caused by Polynesians, aboriginal Carib peoples and others
6
7
Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, 71.
Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, 11.
Problems Concerning Islands
13
number 158 at the very least.8 In the Caribbean, nearly all the native land
mammals were driven to extinction, mainly by human predation, including all
three native primates, ground sloths and thirty-eight out of forty-five endemic
species of rodent.
The global problem can be summarised in a sentence: islands have become
less insular, while mainlands are becoming more so. The biological isolation
that fosters speciation and endemism has been largely ended by sea and air
travel, ensuring an effectively global distribution of exotic species from malaria
protozoa through dandelions to feral goats, pigs, cats and mongooses. At the
same time, habitat fragmentation on ecological mainlands risks exposing the
historically-resilient continental populations to the hazards of island living. The
indri and other lemurs of Madagascar are descendants of species that once
inhabited the African continent, but which 165 million years of separation from
the mainland left in insular isolation. Fourteen of the largest species died out
after the arrival of the Malagasy people about 4500 years ago. The remaining
species persist in a handful of tiny reserves in Madagascar, ecological islands on
an island. Quammen explains how a population of only about eighty in a reserve
of only 810 hectares is subject to exceptional risk from a range of disasters,
from natural catastrophes through inbreeding, fluctuations in food supply,
epidemic disease to normal variations in population size and composition.
Species all over the world, reduced to small populations in fragments of habitat,
are jeopardized by . . . uncertainty. . . . Imagine them with the face of a jackal,
yellow brown eyes, black-and-white fur like a giant panda’s. Imagine you know
them as babakota [Malagasy for indri]. They sing. Imagine that the last eighty
live in a little forest reserve called Analamazoatra.9
For Quammen, islands are not only ecological laboratories whose size makes
them scientifically manageable. They are also paradigms of vulnerability that
reveal a more general danger of mass extinctions. The precise—or even
vague—scale of the problem on a global scale Quammen prefers not to discuss
in detail, citing one “rigorous” standard that describes any extinction rate more
than double the background rate as a “mass extinction.” By such a definition, an
anthropogenic mass extinction began at the beginning of the Neolithic age, if
not before. He also cites estimates of rates a hundred or a thousand times the
background rate—although the same authorities appear to have made influential
estimates elsewhere 20,000 to 200,000 times the background rate!
Wisely Quammen stays out of the argument about numbers. His argument
about vulnerability, although solidly grounded in island biogeography, appeals
8
9
Whittaker, Island Biogeography: Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, 228-9.
Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, 520.
14
Greg Garrard
at least as much to what we can imagine. We are to “imagine” that we have seen
the indri, that we are familiar with them, and that we can sense the
precariousness of their island within an island. By implication, we are asked to
extrapolate that vulnerability across the globe. But is the island of the indri a
usable paradigm?
Easter Island
Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World (1991) is one of the most depressing
books I’ve ever read. Essentially it is an awful compendium of the
environmental crimes of humanity throughout recorded history. The story of
Easter Island stands at the beginning of the book as a “grim warning to the
world.”10 It functions, in fact, as a paradigm of ecological irresponsibility in the
face of seemingly obvious resource limitations.
Easter Island is best known for the 600-800 extraordinary stone statues or
moai, carved into the shape of male head and torso, which dot the tiny, remote
Pacific island. As Ponting observes, when Europeans first saw the moai they
could not believe they had been produced by the squalid, starving, degraded
Polynesian culture they found on the island, who were barely surviving by on a
diet of chicken, sweet potato and each other. The “mystery” of Easter Island
consequently gave rise to theories of extraterrestrials and Atlantis-like “lost
continents.” And yet the makers of the statues were indeed the ancestors of the
few remaining desperate cannibals, “a people who, starting from an extremely
limited resource base, constructed one of the most advanced societies in the
world for the technology they had available.”11 From a starting population of a
few dozen, the Easter Island society grew to around 7,000 people, who
dedicated huge amounts of time and energy to the construction of ritual stone
sites or ahu. The moai surrounded the ahu, securing for their makers spiritual
power and prestige. Gradually the thickly forested island was denuded, partly to
supply rollers to help get the moai from the quarry to the various ahu. The
Polynesian people ran out of wood for building and for rollers, and deforestation
affected the soil by allowing erosion and nutrient leaching. Moreover, they also
found themselves trapped on the island, with no trees left with which to build
ocean-going canoes.
So the key to the “mystery” of Easter Island is apparently simple: irrational
competition and short-sightedness led to almost total ecological collapse, which
then led to the implosion of the elaborate culture of the maoi makers. Ponting
accepts that their way of life was
10
11
Ponting, A Green History of the World, 1.
Ibid., 2.
Problems Concerning Islands
15
in many ways a triumph of human ingenuity and an apparent victory over a
difficult environment. But in the end the increasing numbers and cultural
ambitions of the islanders proved too great for the limited resources available to
them. When the environment was ruined by the pressure, the society very
quickly collapsed with it[,] leading to a state of near barbarism.12
The analogy with the global predicament of mankind is clear:
Like Easter Island the earth has only limited resources to support human society
and all its demands. Like the islanders, the human population of the earth has no
practical means of escape.13
Ponting does not state it openly, but it is hard not to perceive an analogy
between the warring clans, each seeking to destroy the ahu of the enemy and
build more and more maoi of their own, and the frenzy of global capitalism. Our
“island,” the earth, may be rather larger, but the limitations it imposes in terms
of resources are no less binding than the forest cover of Easter Island. At the
same time, the very fact that the Easter Islanders apparently failed to see the
impending disaster, leaving dozens of moai uncompleted around the quarry,
bodes extremely ill for us, whose resource needs are so much greater and who
cannot perceive the limits to growth at first hand. Thus Ponting deploys Easter
Island as a paradigm of ecological limits, much like some uses of the image of
the earth from space. But because his historical analysis seems to show how
every human civilisation eventually outstrips its resource base, the Easter
Islanders are also represented to us as our tragic destiny incarnate.
It is a striking ecological parable, but is it accurate? And is it paradigmatic?
It would be rash to suppose that the patchwork of civilisations currently
espousing some version of global capitalism would last forever, but equally it
cannot be assumed that we are simply Easter Islanders in the making. For one
thing, the ecological collapse on Easter Island would not have taken place in a
way that the Islanders could recognise, let alone address. Deforestation took
over 1200 years to complete, and it was accompanied by a “more complete loss
of birds than on any comparable island in Oceania.”14 Without some form of
dramatic population control, the Islanders were doomed long before
deforestation was completed, or possibly even noticeable.15 Moreover, it may
well be that the Easter Islanders were just unlucky. Other Polynesian societies
lived on islands that supported fast-growing coconut and Fiji fan palm species,
12
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 7.
14
Whittaker, Island Biogeography: Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, 238.
15
See Whittaker, 238 for a diagram setting out how deforestation initiated downward
spirals with vicious feedback loops in several spheres of life on the Island.
13
16
Greg Garrard
whereas their island had only the slow-growing Chilean Wine palm that could
not keep up with the development of Easter Island society. Polynesians on the
10,000 other inhabited islands elsewhere in the Pacific had a devastating impact
on insular bird populations, but they did not end up starving in a state of
“barbarism.”16
And is Ponting right to suggest that the earth is effectively an island, and that
resources will set limits to growth? The notion of diminishing resources is a
popular one in environmentalism, especially since the publication of The Limits
to Growth (1972), but it is one that has been challenged very effectively by
economists. Whereas the Limits predicted gold would run out globally in 1981,
silver and mercury in 1985 and zinc in 1990, global reserves in 1998 are greater
than they were in 1972.17 The Easter Island analogy, at least as regards nonrenewable resources are concerned, is wholly inappropriate. As Bjorn Lomborg
points out, “significant scarcities are unlikely . . . because we continually find
new resources, use them more efficiently, and are able to recycle them and to
substitute them.”18 None of which could be said of the unfortunate Easter
Islanders and their palm trees.
New Zealand
Our next paradigmatic island is New Zealand, called by the Maori (apparently
without irony) Aotearoa, or “island of birds.” Alfred Crosby’s Ecological
Imperialism (1986) is a major contribution to environmental and imperial
history that interprets the astonishing colonial expansion of Europe in ecological
terms. As Crosby argues, after the postulated supercontinent of Pangaea broke
apart around 200 million years ago, species started to evolve in greater or lesser
degrees of isolation. Even the Americas could, from the perspective of the
Eurasian-African continent, look like an island, especially after the evolution of
the exceptionally successful hominid Homo sapiens. Old World farmers in the
Neolithic era had to contend with a rigorously competitive biotic environment,
in which their crops and their weeds, their livestock and their parasites, had coevolved over millennia. The various Neolithic colonists of the New World, on
the other hand, were able to expand rapidly into their new habitats, almost
unconstrained by co-evolved pathogens and almost unaccompanied by their own
domesticated crops and animals. It was therefore their insularity that was at first
their opportunity, and later their vulnerability.
16
Lomborg, The Sceptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, 29.
According to this source, there were probably only eleven other islands that suffered
population crashes.
17
Ibid., 139.
18
Ibid., 148.
Problems Concerning Islands
17
The second wave of colonists from the Old World moved much more
rapidly, and compared with the first wave they did not travel light. As Crosby
writes:
The Europeans brought with them fellow life forms, their extended family of
plants, animals, and microlife—descendants, most of them, of organisms that
humans had first domesticated or that had first adapted to living with humans in
the hearthlands of Old World civilization.19
Crosby calls this extended family the colonists’ “portmanteau biota,” arguing
that wherever it prospered ecologically, supplementing or more often replacing
the native biota, “Neo-Europes” were founded: North America, Australasia, the
far south of South America and a handful of other congenial locations. The
success of European colonisation therefore has an ecological component.
New Zealand must have seemed as geographically remote and biologically
alien as could be when Captain Cook visited in 1769. “An amazing 89% of its
native flora is exclusive to New Zealand.”20 The tree ferns and epiphytes were
descended from the rainforests of Gondwanaland, and even after the Maori had
eaten many of the large flightless birds, the island teemed with distinctive
endemic avifauna. Moreover, the native inhabitants were martial and proud,
seeming eminently capable of fending off European invaders.
At first, Europeans came in very small numbers to kill seals and whales in
the ocean surrounding New Zealand. But even at that stage the portmanteau
biota started its insidious work. European weeds accompanied European crops,
and quickly spread beyond the fields, and pigs and goats went feral. The success
of the crops brought by the pakeha induced the Maori to take up cultivation,
which provided money to buy manufactured goods, especially guns. Intertribal
aggression, which had always been widespread, rapidly became considerably
more lethal. But, as elsewhere, the decisive factor was disease:
The Maori, an isolated and relatively diseaseless people, met in the Europeans
perhaps the least isolated people on earth. . . . Great Britain, which would be
New Zealand’s chief point of contact with the Old World, was especially fecund
bacteriologically . . . 21
Tuberculosis, epidemic and sexually-transmitted diseases surged through the
Maori population around the turn of the nineteenth century. In their wake came
European grasses and weeds such as clover, which rampaged across the North
Island in concert with introduced honeybees. The more the Maori sought to
19
Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, 89.
Ibid., 220.
21
Ibid., 232.
20
Greg Garrard
18
adopt European ways—of farming, of warfare, of whaling—the more they
collaborated in the ecological transformation of their island. And the more
attractive they made it to foreigners.
By the mid-nineteenth century, there were already over one-million sheep on
the South Island. They cropped the native grasses to destruction, allowing
European flora to take over in their wake. In human, floral and faunal terms, the
encounter between Europe and Aotearoa was utterly one-sided: Maori, tree
ferns and kiwi taken to Europe survived only as exotic curiosities, while pakeha,
pigs and chickweed rampaged in New Zealand almost unchecked. As Crosby
observes,
The parallel between the widespread usurpation of New Zealand’s biota and the
decline of the Maori was not one missed by the indigenes. . . . They identified
themselves closely with the Maori rat, an age-old companion and the center dish
in many festival meals.22
Just as the pakeha drove the Maori before them, so the Maori rat was virtually
annihilated by the European brown rat.
Crosby stresses that the process of converting Aotearoa into a Neo-Europe,
which was completed in only a century, was not inevitable. The ecological
vulnerability of islands in general and remote ones in particular conspired with a
temperate climate to make it a prime candidate, but the requirements of
European markets and colonial ideologies brought pakeha halfway round the
world to fulfil that biological potential. And yet Crosby’s powerfully
explanatory thesis must radically alter our perception of historical colonialism.
Quite unconsciously, Europeans benefited from the insularity of the regions they
colonised, thanking God for their success rather than their highly competitive
co-evolved portmanteau biota. So does the notion of a fragile island exonerate
European colonialism? And is postcolonial theory ready for biological
materialism?
St Vincent
We have seen that insularity exaggerates evolutionary processes (indeed some
biologists believe there is no speciation at all without it), and that islands are
ecologically vulnerable as well as especially desirable to maritime colonists. But
the coincidence of the empirical biogeography and political economy of islands
with contingent aspects of European colonisation gives rise to one of the more
surprising constructions of insularity: the island as proto-environmentalist
Utopia.
22
Ibid., 265-6.