Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities

Reviews / Votes

We know enough about the ecology of many invasive species to inform management that would make a huge difference. Around the world, the stumbling block is not so much the shortage of knowledge on what to do, it is ways of getting around the many complexities of the human dimensions of biological invasions. This book provides a crucial advance in this direction

-David M. Richardson, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

If Charles Elton's classic, The Ecology of Invasions, changed forever the way we thought about plants and animals, so too Frawley and McCalman's book is a major turning point. Rethinking Invasion Ecologies is a bold set of essays. Assimilation, migration, resilience, habitat, natives - all the conceptual ground that ecology, history and politics share is incisively explored. From crocodiles to humans, cane toads to prickly pears, in new worlds and old, this is environmental humanities at its sharpest.

-Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK

This exciting, timely and important collection illuminates the complex range of human values and actions that emerge from multi-disciplinary reflection. Often construed as relevant only to biologists, by adapting a cultural and historical perspective the innovative scholarship of Rethinking Invasion Biologies from the Environmental Humanities reframes and reconceptualises the entangled, contradictory and ambiguous relationships between people and unruly biota.

-Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, South Africa

This book demonstrates the value of the current turn to interdisciplinary approaches within a world transformed by colonial and postcolonial connections. Seeing human, plant and animal mobilities as thoroughly intertwined products of the Anthropocene, it innovatively bridges nature and culture and merges environmental, cultural and political histories.

-Alan Lester, University of Sussex, UK

With pieces ranging from a biography of the concept of resilience to case studies of our reactions to cane toads, Latrodectus spiders, and salt-water crocodiles, this book argues the humanities have much to contribute to discussions of the Anthropocene. It makes a strong case, and its emphasis on Australia adds, for the rest of us, another voice to the dialogue. A fine collection on a fascinating and timely topic.

-Thomas R. Dunlap, Texas A&M University, USA