Biogeographies: Transcending anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The aim of this virtual issue on biogeographies is to highlight and draw insights from a range of papers that showcase the geographical field's analytical and ethical purchase and relevance. To unify physical and human geography, Wace (1967) first championed biogeography, the newest geographical field in the Australian curriculum at the time, locating human animals as both natural and cultural. Since then, the field has displayed its changing ontology in Geographical Research (named Australian Geographical Studies prior to 2005). Heralding the cultural turn in biogeography that shuns a nature culture dichotomy, Wace's call has been partially taken up by both physical and human biogeographers, but with less unity or critical mass than desirable given the catastrophic impacts of humans on the biosphere. In the interceding period Kirkpatrick (1988, p. 46) has reviewed (primarily plant) biogeography research and traced the shift from regional and formation-based descriptive accounts to mapping species of economic importance, to powerful computer-based geospatial analyses, and the more recent cultural turn in biogeography. He has stressed both the recency and diversity of Australian biogeographies, suggesting cultural biogeography is “one pole of a biogeographic dimension in which the other pole is purely concerned with the natural, insofar as it exists.” Despite such diversity in approach, unification of the field of biogeography has been partially achieved but remains elusive. Reiterating commensalism and the coevolution of humans and nonhuman nature, Kirkpatrick (1988, p. 48) has also pointed out that “people, through their influence on firing regimes, promoted Eucalyptus in the interglacial before ours, replacing the Casuarina so prominent in the penultimate interglacial.” In turn, considering Wace's rejection of the monoclimatic succession sere as ‘natural’ vegetation, Head (2012) has reflected on important scholarship stressing the recency of British colonisation in Australia and previous Aboriginal trading relationships with Asia-Pacific nations, which necessitates attention to Indigenous Australian historical biogeographies and rejecting the notion that ‘invasive’ species are those directly introduced by humans. Wace (1967) also noted the paucity of zoobiogeographical study and a tendency to separate plants and animals. This virtual issue, therefore, specifically focuses on nonhuman animals, whether wild or domestic, introduced, invasive, or some other categorical construction. Following Head (2012), I have sought neither to reinforce species divides nor to homogenise nonhuman difference but rather have worked to bring nonhuman animals into accounts of change already signalled. Foregrounding the zoogeographical research trajectory in Geographical Researchinvolved initially searching for key terms such animal geography/animal geographies, biogeography/biogeographies, more than human/more-than-human, non-human/non-human/nonhuman, nature culture/nature-culture/natureculture, animal agency, animal subjectivity, anthropocentric/anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism, anthropomorphism, animal ethics, animal rights, and animal welfare. This broad search strategy uncovered a wide array of general scholarship while omitting key articles about specific animal species and breeds such as penguins, snails, and livestock (Head, 2000; Le Heron, 2019; Yarwood, Tonts, & Jones, 2010), whose intrinsic value and subjectivities are critical in a virtual issue on the nonhuman animal other. To pare down the list, each issue published from 1988 was manually examined, excluding plants, book reviews, and general terms such as the Anthropocene, climate change, food security, environmentalism, urban political ecology, land and water management, backyard, and biodiversity. This strategy uncovered some research with incidental mention of nonhuman animals (such as ferals/pests), being focused more generally on backyards, gardens, landscapes, domesticity, and rivers. As such, research not specifically featuring nonhuman animals was omitted except for some economic geographies of agriculture, fisheries, and forestry because of such works' important contemporary links with (the increasing) commodification of nonhuman nature in the Anthropocene. Since Kirkpatrick (1988), physical biogeographical research up to 2011 has been primarily that involving habitat mapping, after which time predominately cultural (or critical) animal geographies are typical. Yet, as with most geographical research, there are strong nature culture interconnections within this research. For example, Dyer and Hill's (1990) use of nearest-neighbour analysis of Wedge-tailed Shearwater (Puffinus pacificus) nesting burrows has been borrowed from urban geography (where it was used to illustrate relationships between towns and their neighbours). Such cross-fertilisation between fields of the discipline illuminated a highly significant clustering distribution of birds in habitats that had been modified by humans, and which were less densely populated by the birds. Those researchers suggested colony-nesting species might need social interaction in sparsely populated habitats; a preference similar to human settlement in many rural places, where clusters gather in towns for social and economic interaction. Habitat modelling remains crucially important, characterising geographical knowledge, perspectives, and approaches to nonhuman nature, as well as exemplifying the utility of integrating physical and human geography. Hill and Phinn (1993) have used new high-resolution satellite imagery to show the higher prevalence of the Swamp Wallaby Wallabia bicolour in certain seral stages of revegetated mine sites, in comparison with ‘natural’ habitats. Those sites were “an example of positive transformation of the environment at least for one species of wildlife” (Hill & Phinn, 1993, pp. 11–12). They identify a lack of policy around such positive human interventions for the nonhuman world and evoke the powerlessness of humans to restore the “original vegetation cover as rapidly as possible” (Hill & Phinn, 1993, p. 12) because of the very long temporal scale involved, a conclusion that still applies today. Such recourse to planetary timescales and the need for (continued) mutual coevolution of human and nonhuman nature suggests synthesising empirical and critical approaches to the nonhuman world remains as pertinent today as it was a generation of researchers ago. Analysing a 38-year timeframe of aerial photos, Worth (1996) has shown a 47% loss in a significant koala (Phascolarctos cinereus [Goldfuss]) habitat due to residential expansion and mining, at a time when very little was known of their habitat preferences. Faunal impact statements at the time “justified the destruction of koala habitat … on grounds that other local bushland areas were sufficiently large to act as a reserve,” claimed development was a “short-term loss of habitat” and that “koalas will cross open areas at night” (Worth, 1996 p. 92). Such rationalisations lacked understanding of the need for adequate patch size and connecting corridors, knowledge available through island biogeography principles, reiterating a need for critical reflection on policy and political manoeuvrings alongside empirical evidence in koala biogeographies. Worth (1996, p. 93) has interpreted koala foraging in high risk urban areas as signs that the population was endangered due to “natural and anthropogenic hazards faced by all Koalas.” These predictions have not ameliorated the decline of this iconic species and nothing since gives any reassurance of authorities responding to such evidence and predictions for mitigation of koalas' nationally threatened status. Unifying intra-disciplinary biogeographical research is now even more critical. Even with a widespread, common species such as the Wedge-tailed Shearwater, Carter (1997) has shown that buildings and artificial walking tracks funnel water into their nesting burrows, compromising successful egg hatching. In a signal to the importance of relational thinking beyond the targeted actants, she has noted that, irrespective of the conservation status and range of species, such micro-scale processes nonetheless “are linked and merge across scales” (Carter, 1997, p. 163). This type of observation remains ignored by industry standard standards of assessment and management today. More recently, Pert and Norton (2011) have modelled the distribution of the Red Kangaroo (Macropus rufus), Dunnart (Sminthopsis youngsoni), and European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), showing the critical importance of radioactive elements in the soil and distance to water that had been undetected at the bioregional scale of analysis. The utility of their work is in spatially prioritising field work investment and forecasting the importance of water for nonhumans in arid and semi-arid zones, an increasing challenge with the advent of the Anthropocene and climate-related change. Turning to more overt critical/cultural biogeography, Head (2000) has examined a fundamental contradiction in the environmental restoration of the Summerland Peninsula on Phillip Island, Victoria. Little Penguins (Eudyptula minor) return from fishing to their burrows in the sand during the nightly Penguin Parade, as many thousands watch and photograph ‘nature’ while their own impacts are elided. The costs of substantial infrastructure are derived from the substantial numbers of human visitors, and the “rights of penguins, seals and mutton-birds to undisturbed habitat would never have been recognised in public policy had not the economic health of Phillip Island, and increasingly the tourist industry of the entire State, been dependent on them” (Head, 2000, p. 50). Using government park and environmental documentation, Head highlights the rhetoric used to plan, regulate, and promote the heavily managed area within a nature/culture binary and notes how Aboriginal presence is placed within nature, with the remaining human absence from a ‘wilderness’ ideal requiring “the settled part of settler history to be removed” by compulsory acquisition and demolition of houses (Head, 2000, p. 52). While the purposeful didactics of the signage and ‘interpretive centre’ provide a sound educational experience for visitors, nature and culture are siloed and compartmentalised, rather than interconnected. Her attention to researcher positioning and the embodied loss of “a nature that can be touched, held, eaten, chased and rolled in” is ontologically important in calling for greater understandings of affective impacts and the rights of the nonhuman world (Head, 2000, p. 51). The quest to introduce critical biogeographies illustrates the importance of the nonhuman as subject in, rather than object of, research and suggests a need to consider these subjectivities alongside empiricism. In this vein, Taylor and Carter (2013) have introduced the concept of agency and its application in ‘managed’ human–dolphin encounters. Human struggle to overcome their own exceptionalism is evident in the various ways that dolphin agency is denied, erased, asserted, and celebrated—but always within a ‘protectionist’ discourse. Rather than articulating a relational encounter between hybrid actants, the discourse mandated that human beings ‘allow’ the dolphin to exert its agency and acknowledged a dolphin may be ‘disturbed by humans,’ which frames dolphin behaviour—in terminating an encounter or accepting food—as a biological rather than agentic reaction. A minority of texts described dolphins as “finding humans ‘interesting’,” “actively seeking out” humans, and even “using humans” (Taylor & Carter, 2013, p. 7) suggesting a more thorough recognition of dolphin intelligence and choice. The authors highlight that dolphin agency is beyond human ‘management,’ and dolphin visitors are likened to those of an ambassador from another world. Encounter sites were therefore conceptualised as an inter-species embassy, affording all actants appropriate etiquette and protocols. Nevertheless, the dominant paradigm requires human ‘management’ of ‘nature’ and privileges evidence-based research such as minimum distances and visitor numbers, and ultimately, human safety remains foremost in speciesist decision-making. Instone and Sweeney (2014) have foregrounded dog subjectivities, while juxtaposing human care of dog bodily waste (faeces) with the disposability of dog bodies as waste (through cruelty and euthanasia), both of which erase dog agency in urban spaces. “Institutionalised killing of unwanted but healthy dogs stabilises the city as a human space, one not overrun with dogs, and establishes or re-establishes order in light of the disturbance engendered by ‘too many’ dogs, which would threaten human comfort and convenience” (Instone & Sweeney, 2014, p. 361). Such violent relationalities within co-existing space exonerate human fault in pet overbreeding and perpetuate anthropocentrism through the tragic consequences for dogs. In the research about both dolphins and dogs, the abandonment of human control and ‘management’ is required for flatter, mutualistic relationalities and requires both empirical and critical approaches to advance a posthuman geo-ethic. Combining actor-network theory and assemblage thinking with mixed methods (and unifying approaches traditionally associated with both human and physical geography), Graham (2016) has highlighted horses—and thoroughbreds in particular—as co-constitutive actants of racing and sales festivals. Horses feature in the rural idyll of green, fenced paddocks, co-creating the regional “eque-cultural” place-identity and iconic “equescape” of Scone, New South Wales, as a “premier breeding location” and the ‘horse capital of Australia” (Graham, 2016, p. 216). Overturning local constructions that such events are “celebrations of animals or produce” (Graham, 2016, p. 217), she illustrates horse agency in resisting gates and being ridden and their calmness during parades. Yet dominant social constructions positioned horses as “prized possessions and integral drawcards … this representation as an object, however, provided little attention to the individuality of horses and does not allow for a consideration of the role that horses have played in the construction of their live[d] world” (Graham, 2016, p. 221). Horse positioning within the assemblage is dominated by anthropocentric constructions rather than acknowledging geo-ethics and nonhuman agency in “more than social networks” (Graham, 2016, p. 221). In a turn to regulatory environments, Morgan and Osborne (2016) have recounted how ‘rational’ scientistic logic and evidence required under Queensland planning law forced local activists opposed to the Traveston Dam proposal to abandon other forms of knowing that are local, situated, embodied, and explicitly value-laden. Powerful social factors such as loss of community and sense of place, connectivity, agricultural production, social capital, and Indigenous heritage motivated the activists but were unquantifiable and rejected within positivist planning and policy processes. Consequently, the campaign shifted focus to three species protected under the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999: the Mary River Turtle, (Elusor macrurus), Mary River Cod (Maccullochella mariensis), and especially the Australian Lungfish (Neoceratodus forsteri). National and international scientific assessments of threat to the Lungfish were the only basis for appeal by the activists and, eventually, the Commonwealth Minister overruled the state government to ban the dam. Recourse to Lungfish subjectivity and intrinsic value was not advantageous, and the Lungfish itself remains rarely sighted—in the study as in the field; rather, the ancient fish has been symbolic of anticipated environmental damage. The dominant paradigm and epistemology of planning and environmental laws based on quantifiable evidence defining the Lungfish as endangered allowed its leverage within anthropocentric and positivist impact assessment and approval processes. Such unifying research must continue in a politically structured world. Similarly, Le Heron (2019) has analysed assemblages in which were enmeshed a rare, locally-endemic land snail (Powelliphanta augusta), its habitat, a coal mining company, government departments, regulations, and environmental nongovernment organisations. After the Conservation Minister announced “we have decided to allow the snails to be moved” to permit mining, conflict and competing values variously positioned the snail as noticed, absent, denied, deemed translocatable, protected, not of national value, a disruptive object, voiceless, victim of habitat destruction, existing in many locations including laboratory, a metric in breeding and monitoring, a scientific classification, and resistor of translocation (as a species) (see Le Heron, 2019, p. 215, ad passim). Speciesism featured in that the land snails are native species but have not been equally valued as other native or economic creatures. Snail habitat was both destroyed and seen as translocatable and constructible but recalling Hill and Phinn's (1993) recourse to planetary timescales, human incapacity to recreate snail requirements for dense scrub and undisturbed leaf litter led, finally, to declaration of the snail as functionally extinct (living in laboratory but not in the wild). Conversely, snail conservation politics highlighted its iconic nature without regard to other species that live there—a type of reverse speciesism—within a further species hierarchy invoking the human: “framing of P. augusta's material and discursive plights indicate great reluctance to conceptualise at the outset, worlds where there is equivalence between human needs and non-human needs (voiced in human discourses)” (Le Heron, 2019, p. 227). Over the period under consideration here, global commodification of nonhuman animals has increased. By way of example, Yarwood et al. (2010) have documented nearly a century of numbers and patterns in food and fibre exhibitions at the Perth Royal Show. These data show significant changes in species (for example, Alpacas) and breeds, reflecting traditions and innovations across agriculture and the impact of global factors such as wars, lost and new markets, intensification, and, more recently, diversity and hobby farming. Their article notes the enduring attraction of live animals exhibited to the largely urban attendees. Given the emphasis on rare breeds (especially in poultry, dogs, goats, and so on) and the exquisite care taken of ‘best-in-show’ contenders, the authors caution that the impression taken away by the crowds could be quite misleading compared to the commodifying actualities of industrial, large-scale agricultural productivism of the farmed livestock. In turn, Butt and Taylor (2018) have examined how narrow and static understandings of (increasingly intensified) farming and food production, or what constitutes rurality and authentic (non-industrial and, for some, soil-based) farming practices, underpinned planning processes in peri-urban areas of Victoria to depoliticise conflict in broiler and egg production. What was laid down and policed in established regulatory logics are buffer zones around the factory farms, vehicle movements, and the like to reduce the loss of amenity for neighbours. What was not to be heard in the development approval process were any appeals to nonhuman ethics or welfare in this massive-scale ‘factory’ farming. As with the Lungfish campaign referred to above, nonhuman animal welfare was debated ‘outside’ the formal planning processes, but the regulators redirected such deliberations to the welfare or environmental protection agencies. Advocacy on behalf of the chickens was virtually silent and when presented, ruled extraneous to the achievement of a satisfactory planning consensus. This outcome is despite the inherent slaughter of half of all chicks (the males) in hatcheries for egg laying within intensive broiler systems that commodify up to a million birds as inevitable ‘wastage’ and casualties within an efficient business model. While Holmes (2019) has specifically explored the path-dependent journey of rural occupancy and transformation in specific dairy, beef, horse, and fish farms, cows are anthropocentrically purposeful in terms of explicating to agribusiness the number required to employ a ‘man’ on a small farm—the decline of the small farm typically showing smaller sized or low-yielding herds where cow numbers are an indicator of human ‘success’ in the economically structured world. More recently still, Schouten et al. (2020) have studied honey hunting by Indigenous communities in Sumbawa, Indonesia, in the context of massive logging and habitat degradation, where honey from the target species, the Asian honey bee (Apis dorsata) has provided, on average, more than two-thirds of the annual cash income for their informants. High production costs for maize and rice growing (advocated by government) ensured the greater profitability of honey hunting. Some current harvesting practices threaten the viability of the hives, but (illegal) logging of host trees by corporations is a more significant danger. Specifically, hunters cut brood comb away killing the eggs, larva, and pupa before removing the honey laden comb in buckets. Little attention is given by the hunters to the impact of their harvesting on the viability of raided hives, threats to the queen, and the impact of appropriating almost all stored food for feeding future bee populations. The study notes the hunting communities show a “paucity of ecological data on A. dorsata and specifically on sustainable levels of harvesting” (Schouten et al., 2020, p. 73); this is an important caution against the frequent assumption of robust/resilient/informed indigenous knowledge and inclusive, non-anthropocentric relations with nonhuman others, and more importantly, the need for integration of empirical and critical biogeographies. Finally, fish and other animals have been the objects of disputed human rights and wants (for example, biodiversity values and fishing livelihoods) in a complex legal lakescape across multiple scales, absenting their subjectivities (Gillespie, 2016). Like Gillespie, O'Gorman (2016) has explored the agency of Australian Pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) in co-creating ‘law’ and ‘spatiality’ during a government-sanctioned mass killing of pelicans in breeding sites in the Coorong, South Australia. This conflict involved local fishers, Aboriginal traditional egg collectors, local and especially metropolitan ornithologists, public servants, and law drafters and legislators entangling spatial, legal, economic, and conservation/scientific factors based on early 1920s emerging scientific knowledges of the pelican and other native bird species. The study has shown myriad inconsistencies in the positioning of pelicans for protection and as fishing industry pests, with apparent resolution of competing interests achieved by leasing the nesting islands to the ornithological society. While pelicans exert their agency through ‘adaptability’ and continued efforts at reproduction, their population numbers continue to decline despite more recent laws including Ramsar protection. As with the previous generation of researchers—for example, those predicting the population decline of the koala and problems for even widespread species—time is running short for combining all we have to offer to a posthuman world. To conclude, decades ago, Wace (1967, p. 24) argued that geographers are well used to understanding (co)evolutionary timescales, acutely attuned to study of the “evolution and emergence of man and his enormous impact upon the rest of the biosphere … [and that] … historical explanations of the ranges of many taxa are therefore bound to become more and more reliant on cultural records” and especially on “cultural zoogeography.” The purpose of this virtual issue is to stress the critical need for geographers to collectively draw together all empirical and critical biogeographies knowledge and approaches. There remains a divide between human and physical geography, which may reflect structural rather than actual divides given evidence of bridges across the subdisciplines in scholarship and among individuals identifying simply as geographers (without further qualification). Physical/quantitative biogeographers and critical/cultural biogeographers need to be encouraged to collaborate in specifically designed research and writing teams. It is critical to understand species loss, habitat change, and other matters in gathering public support for listings, providing evidence to hearings, and assessing threats from anticipated climate change, bushfires, urbanisation, and other problems. We also need scholars who focus on animal rights, welfare, subjectivism, or agency in a world with increasing violence toward nonhuman animals. Discipline leaders, editors, research grant teams, and individuals can pursue respectful integration of ‘the two cultures’ to enable a posthuman world in light of the current and coming Anthropocene. Universities and geography departments can mandate biogeography courses within programs such as ecology, planning, or politics as well as in geography per se. The courses themselves need to integrate critical approaches with the study of classic biogeography patterns and processes such as distribution, range, dispersal, colonisation, evolution, and extinction. For example, humans, as animals, have mirrored these processes through their spread, range expansion, colonisation of territories, and causation of extinctions, and the geo-ethics of such worldly dominance by one species requires critical examination. As Head (2012, pp. 172 and 176) has argued, “coming from different directions, there is considerable convergence—if still contradictions of terminology—in posthumanist approaches in human geography, and the conceptualisation of the Anthropocene in physical geography and paleoecology … the infusion of posthumanist perspectives into a more physical biogeography offers great promise.” As such, the great promise of uniting physical and human geography through biogeographies has commenced but critical mass in this endeavour remains a pressing concern.