Culture and Politics of Invasive Species

Abstract

A flurry of recent publications attests to the interest that invasive plant species, whether native or exotic, have come to hold for researchers both with respect to the impact of species invasions on people (Jay, Morad, and Bell 2003) and the role of humans in engendering species invasion (Fine 2002; Aznar, Dervieux, and Grillals 2003). This interest parallels the broader context of invasion, in which the movement of species globally has accelerated in recent years, and the question of whether invasions represent a crisis or a value-neutral change has been hotly debated (Sagoff 2000; Hulme 2003). Ecologists and other biophysical scientists reasonably continue to ask what the implications of a New Pangea--where all ecosystems are effectively connected and species move and invade with increasing freedom (following Mooney and Cleland 2001; Rosenzweig 2001)--are for biodiversity, evolution, and global ecosystem sustainability. These questions are critical, and attention to them has opened doors to new approaches to managing the problem, especially from the perspective of population biology (Conservation Biology 2003). But other questions must also be asked. We might ponder what varying and specific human activities lead to accelerated or retarded rates of invasion. We might ask how the costs and effects of invasion are unequally distributed through human populations, owing to the political ecology of resource use, access, and control. We could further query how differential positions in these human ecologies of invasion lead to differing perceptions of the problem and differing responses and efforts at control. We might better integrate human drivers and responses into the invasion question to begin to understand how to manage our New Pangea not only more sustainably but also more equitably. To allow a strictly ecomanagerial response (Luke 1999) to the problem of invasives, devoid of human, social, cultural, political, and economic issues, is to invite the kinds of modernist mismanagement that helped establish and accelerate undesirable species invasions in the first place (Robbins 2001). Ecologists themselves are beginning to ask for more sustained and intensive attention to the human elements of species invasion (Anderson and others 2003). It is increasingly clear, therefore, that human/environment investigators should be thinking about invasives. These researchers have something unique to contribute to the study of plant species dispersal and the domination of exotic species over landscapes, which biophysical science alone cannot address (see Landscape Research 2003). The articles assembled in this issue of the Geographical Review argue that geographers in particular can and should address the issue of plant species invasion and that they bring a unique perspective to the problem. The fields of cultural and political ecology, with their focus on the detailed interactions between humans and their productive landscapes, seem well suited to the question. As an approach to human/environment problems, these fields tend to utilize landscape-scale thinking, to look toward chains of causality, to investigate both the material characteristics of species and their meaning, and to nest explanation in a broader political economy. …