'Alien' ecologies, the irony of a mutiny, and vegetation as an agent of Empire (Part 2): Mirages of fantastical lands and remaking environments with teletechnique

Anya Zilberstein’s book Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America explores more on British fixation on “land improvement.” In these cases (Kirsten Greer’s work on nineteenth-century scientific “field stations” and British “region-making,” implying a “natural” difference between denizens of different regions), professional(ized) institutions are nodes in networks that bring peripheral ecologies “into being as objects of knowledge” to induct the colonies into imperial life and into a metropolitan classification system that translates “new” worlds for popular contemplation/consumption.

This, of course, was at least partially facilitated by the preceding work of botanist Joseph Banks in instantiating a global network of British “naturalization” and “field” stations, often under the moniker of “botanical garden,” from Barbados and Jamaica to Malaya and the prime station at Calcutta. Plants that could be commodified and sold at industrial scales were prospected for among Indigenous communities of the tropics, and then were dispatched to tinkered with at these stations.

Linking the treatment of prairies and grasslands from Canada to Oceania, Zilberstein’s work also reminds me of the writing on pasture grasses in Aotearoa and Australia. In Zilberstein’s “Inured to Empire” and PG Andersen’s “Grasses tame and wild” (both on manoomin in “Canada”), they discuss how Indigenous erasure and technocratic refashioning of landscape affected manoomin/agriculture 1900-1920 and paved the way for industrial monoculture extraction in the prairies/Great Plains. This reminds me of Brooking and Pawson in “Silences of Grass” (”grass built the British Empire”; Aotearoa will be “the Empire’s dairy farm”), where they also focus on 1900-1940 and describe how sheep herding, dairy farming, landscape portraiture, pop-sci literature, etc. kept alive the earlier eighteenth-/nineteenth-century British fixation on “productive” land.

Of course, a lot of “land improvement” has to do with commodification and profitability (plantations, monoculture, industrial-scale extraction), but it also has to do with imaginative control, too.

This brings to mind Anna Boswell’s writing on “anamorphic ecology” and Aotearoa specifically, where the “alien” ecologies of “strange” endemic species (kiwi, tuatara, etc.) and “putrid” temperate rainforest provoked introduction of non-native species and installation of gardens, pastures, etc. This also implicates the role of monoculture lawns as sometimes-tools of British/US ways to bludgeon and re-make landscape in colonial settings. The lawn makes them feel at home; they’ve transformed the unagreeable exotic ecosystem into a replica of an aristocratic English estate.

So, considered collectively, this web of interconnected histories kinda makes the case that what some people might think of as “antiquated” old-school British/US imperial cosmologies (perhaps more overtly racist/militaristic/silly; “no way, do those old ideas/ideologies still permeate stuff today?”) actually persisted as influential and continue to poison the well of contemporary imaginaries.

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Boswell frames British colonial ecology-altering in Aotearoa as a sort of practice of “transmutation,” and related to vision and mirage, an “anamorphic ecology,” that sees “foreign” or “Indigenous” ecologies and practices as “alien” or “phantasmogorical.”

For me, this immediately brings to mind two other framings:

Most directly, the framing used by Kathryn Yusoff (she of A Billion Black Anthropocenes fame) to describe the US popular and scientific/professional fixation on Antarctic from 1830-ish to the 1890s, in which vision (or, the Anglo-American prioritization of vision, mapping, surveying, surveillance) is entangled with the fantastical. In fact, quite literally: The Navy-sponsored US Exploring Expedition was prompted by a petition to have the US government substantiate John Symmes’s Hollow Earth theory. The Secretary of the Navy was a believer in Symmes’s theory; one of the Secretary’s lectures was attended by the brother of Edgard Allen Poe, who—only a year after that lecture—went on to publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a story about exploring the fantastical Antarctic pole.

Wild.

But also, the framing of vision/the alien reminds me of how Nuria Valverde and Antonio Lafuente describe the bioprospecting of Spanish imperial agents in Latin America in the eighteenth century, when scattered institutions coalesced into wider project to remake/extract the New World via surveys and “economic botany”:

Things were to change when the Spanish court came to view America again as Panacea […]. The overseas expeditions served as the mainstay for the metropolitan project. Institutions that understood these newly emerging requirements gained levels of influence and cultural profiles unthinkable a few decades earlier. Their function ceased to be courtly and became imperial. Their savants no longer resembled collectors or antiquarians, but became instead agents in charge of governing Nature. […] The plants themselves and not their products became the stuff of trade, and what circulated through the networks [...]. Botany began as a technoscope—a way to visualize at-a-distance—but, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was already a teletechnique—a way to act at-a-distance. [...] (Lafeunete and Valverde, “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics.”)

Teletechnique!