Miles Powell

With this book, Timothy Barnard continues to pioneer the field of Singaporean environmental history. Author of the edited anthology, Nature Contained: Environmental Histories of Singapore (NUS Press, 2014), Barnard weaves together histories of nature, science, and colonialism to produce an insightful study of the Singapore Botanic Gardens (SBG). Barnard contends that, following its founding in 1859, the SBG became a key site for “imperial botany,” a branch of science that sought to further the aims of empire through investigation of the floral world (p. 3). Playing off Richard Drayton’s scholarship, which describes London’s famous Kew Gardens as the center of “nature’s government,” Barnard dubs the SBG “nature’s colony” (pp. 5, 7). Using this framework, he reveals how the SBG initially served as a Southeast Asian outpost for the Kew Gardens before a greater degree of independence in the early twentieth century allowed for the pursuit of more self-directed research agendas. Barnard adopts a chronological structure, allowing him to examine how scientific imperatives, government agendas, economic motivations, environmental variables, class and race prejudices, and individual personalities shaped the course of imperial botany at the SBG. He presents the story of an institution that frequently teetered on the brink of ruin but always righted itself, making significant research contributions along the way. Barnard reveals that the SBG began life, not primarily as a research institution, but as a private park for the overwhelmingly white and affluent membership of Singapore’s AgriHorticultural Society. In the 1870s, with the society facing a funding crunch, the government of the Straits Settlements took control of the SBG. They opened the grounds to the public and brought in a series of directors with connections to Kew. Yet despite the efforts of figures like Nathaniel Cantley and Henry Nicholas Ridley to serve colony and empire by researching local forest conservation techniques, they continuously ran up against government funding shortages. A shortlived zoo at the SBG, in which according to Barnard, animal displays served as metaphors for imperial control, also failed to generate sufficient revenues. By the late nineteenth century, the nearly insolvent SBG considered ceasing scientific research altogether. But then Ridley used the grounds to help prove that Brazilian rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) could thrive in Southeast Asia, and he set up the SBG as a major distributor of seeds to aspirant rubber planters in the region. Shipping out more than seven million seeds in total, the SBG played a key role in developing Southeast Asia’s rubber industry. Environmental History 23 (July 2018) 608

In recent years, scholars have demonstrated that affluent societies have a disproportionate environmental impact. A focus on wealth, however, can obscure how poverty also propels ecosystem destruction, particularly when combined - as in colonial Singapore - with uncaring administrators and the ruthless logic of imperialism. In this colony, poor Chinese, Malays, archipelagic South-east Asians and Indians struggled to eke out a living by razing rainforest, because they possessed no better options. As these workers struggled to transform forests into farms, houses and roads, they created an ecology of poverty that had catastrophic consequences for humans and tigers alike. Finding ever less forest in which to hide from humans, the mighty cats instead began to regard some people as prey. Unable to flee, poor Chinese, Malays, archipelagic South-east Asians and Indians sought to protect themselves by killing tigers. In the end, the humans vanquished the cats, but not without enduring hundr...

Beginning during the colonial period, and greatly accelerating following independence in 1965, Singapore has used land reclamation to increase its national domain by nearly 25 per cent. The construction of new land was a key component of the nation's celebrated rise from 'third world' to 'first world' in the postcolonial period. But the economic benefits of remaking Singapore's coastline came at significant ecological and social costs. Nearly all of the original shore, and its attendant mangrove forests and natural beaches, were lost. So too were two-thirds of Singapore's coral reefs. While carrying out this reclamation, the state also erased a number of sites at which people made a living from the sea, including indigenous communities on the outer islands, age-old fishing villages, kelongs (large, traditional offshore fishing platforms) and prawn farms.The history of land construction in Singapore offers a number of important insights concerning the rela...

This paper contends that Aldo Leopold’s pursuit of unpeopled wilderness had a disturbing corollary—a disdain for human population growth that culminated in a critique of providing food and medical aid to developing nations. Although Leopold never fully shared these ideas with the public, he explored them in multiple unpublished manuscripts, and he submitted a first draft of one of these essays to a press. Leopold also exchanged these views with the most popular environmental Malthusian of his day, William Vogt, whose exposition of nearly identical arguments won him national fame. By revealing connections between wilderness thought and callous proposed social policy, this paper identifies a new dimension of what environmental historian William Cronon called the “Trouble with Wilderness.” This manuscript further calls into question whether the concept of wilderness is inherently exclusionary and misanthropic.

Beginning during the colonial period, and greatly accelerating following independence in 1965, Singapore has used land reclamation to increase its national domain by nearly 25 per cent. The construction of new land was a key component of the nation’s celebrated rise from ‘third world’ to ‘first world’ in the postcolonial period. But the economic benefits of remaking Singapore’s coastline came at significant ecological and social costs. Nearly all of the original shore, and its attendant mangrove forests and natural beaches, were lost. So too were two-thirds of Singapore’s coral reefs. While carrying out this reclamation, the state also erased a number of sites at which people made a living from the sea, including indigenous communities on the outer islands, age-old fishing villages, kelongs (large, traditional offshore fishing platforms) and prawn farms.

The history of land construction in Singapore offers a number of important insights concerning the relationship between humans and our environments. First, it reveals how the tensions between an ideal situation (a city or state’s relationship to other places) and a less than optimum site (its physical environment), when combined with a forceful, proactive government, can bring about immense environmental transformations. Related to that, this case sheds light on the ways in which governments – especially in developing nations – can use transformation of terrestrial and marine environments, in the name of progress, as a means of expanding and legitimating their authority. This history also reveals a perhaps unforeseen consequence of bulldozing and burying sites at which humans derived their livelihood from living oceanic resources: the loss of a cultural connection to the sea, based on knowing nature through work. Finally, this history raises the question of how environmental advocates can pursue conservation in a setting like Singapore’s shores, which we can no longer consider pristine or natural. That is to say, the ongoing efforts of environmentalists to protect flora and fauna in Singapore’s waters speak to the necessity of, and challenges presented by, preserving hybrid (neither entirely natural nor entirely artificial) marine environments.

This paper examines the world’s two oldest and largest national shark control programmes, those of South Africa and Australia. Officials from these two countries have spent more than a century trying to dictate the movement and behaviour of sharks to improve bather safety. To this end, people have deployed technologies ranging from barriers, to nets, to drum lines, and even to electrical fields and depth charges. This essay treats these programmes as prime examples of the enduring, perhaps inescapable, tensions between mobile nature and the real and imagined boundaries with which we seek to control and administer it. This topic reveals important new dimensions to trans-boundary environmental history. First, this story highlights the need for environmental histories that consider vast (even transoceanic) scales, while simultaneously maintaining attention to local contexts. Second, bather safety programs provide a useful case study for exploring how efforts to control nature have historically intersected with attempts to discipline and regulate humans. Third, this history demonstrates how changing perceptions of nature and predators have forced policymakers to alter the placement and enforcement of barriers that structure interactions between the human and nonhuman worlds.

In recent years, scholars have demonstrated that affluent societies have a
disproportionate environmental impact. A focus on wealth, however, can obscure how poverty also propels ecosystem destruction, particularly when combined – as in Singapore – with uncaring administrators, and the ruthless logic of imperialism. In this colony, poor Chinese, Malays, archipelagic South-east Asians, and Indians struggled to eke out a living by razing rainforest, because they possessed no better options. As these workers struggled to transform forests into farms, houses, and roads, they created an ecology of poverty that had catastrophic consequences for
humans and tigers alike. Finding ever less forest in which to hide from humans, the mighty cats instead began to regard some people as prey. Unable to flee, poor Chinese, Malays, archipelagic South-east Asians, and Indians sought to protect themselves by killing tigers. In the end, the humans vanquished the cats, but not without enduring hundreds of fatalities. Colonial Singapore’s environmental history reminds us that the people who carry out the work of eradicating nature often do so because they possess limited alternatives for survival. As a corollary, caring for and protecting the environment is inseparable from caring for and protecting people.

This paper contends that Aldo Leopold’s pursuit of unpeopled wilderness had a disturbing upshot – a disdain for human population growth that culminated with a critique of providing food and medical aid to developing nations. Although Leopold never fully shared these ideas with the public, he explored them in multiple unpublished manuscripts, and submitted a first draft of one of these essays to a press. Leopold also exchanged these findings with the most popular environmental Malthusian of his day, William Vogt, whose exposition of nearly identical arguments won him national fame. By revealing connections between wilderness thought and callous social policy, this paper identifies a new dimension of the “Trouble with Wilderness” that environmental historian William Cronon highlighted twenty years ago. This manuscript further calls into question whether the concept of wilderness is inherently exclusionary and misanthropic.

Through kinship claims, Heiltsuks and other coastal natives established a system
of marine space that facilitated effective fisheries management. After overriding
Aboriginal claims on the basis of open access, the Canadian Department
of Fisheries and Oceans conceded that efficacious regulation required exclusive
harvest zones. Nonetheless, courts continued to disregard Heiltsuk spatial
claims when assessing fishing rights.

Putting a provocative new slant on the history of U.S. conservation, Vanishing America reveals how wilderness preservation efforts became entangled with racial anxieties—specifically the fear that forces of modern civilization, unless checked, would sap white America’s vigor and stamina.

Nineteenth-century citizens of European descent widely believed that Native Americans would vanish from the continent. Indian society was thought to be tied to the wilderness, and the manifest destiny of U.S. westward expansion, coupled with industry’s ever-growing hunger for natural resources, presaged the eventual disappearance of Indian peoples. Yet, as the frontier drew to a close, some naturalists chronicling the loss of animal and plant populations began to worry that white Americans might soon share the Indians’ presumed fate.

Miles Powell explores how early conservationists such as George Perkins Marsh, William Temple Hornaday, and Aldo Leopold became convinced that the continued vitality of America’s “Nordic” and “Anglo-Saxon” races depended on preserving the wilderness. Fears over the destiny of white Americans drove some conservationists to embrace scientific racism, eugenics, and restrictive immigration laws. Although these activists laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement and its many successes, the consequences of their racial anxieties persist.