“Colonialism as an engineering project” Tiago Saraiva and Kathryn Denning and You • Our assignment: consider “colonialism and the sorts of environmental/ecological engineering projects that it has involved”… • What’s on Tiago’s mind? • What’s on your minds? • What the heck is engineering? What are its key characteristics? How have these characteristics changed over the centuries? {Engineer I know says: “systematic method of implementing ideas. It should be boring.”} Otherwise, some ideas we might think with: • Osborne’s “Acclimatizing the World” or Huxley’s Prolegomena to Evolution and Ethics • the original colonization of the New World and human ecological impact – John Beatty’s suggestion, and since I like megafauna... – different versions • the story of and his family… a different lens on the colonial project of ethnographic exhibits in the Jardin D’Acclimatation, Hagenbeck Tierpark, etc. How does this illuminate the colonial engineering project of acclimatization? Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science”, Osiris 2001 vol 15, 135. Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science”, Osiris 2001 vol 15, 137. “Acclimatization”… Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science”, Osiris 2001 vol 15, 139. Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science”, Osiris 2001 vol 15, 143 Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science”, Osiris 2001 vol 15, 144 Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science”, Osiris 2001 vol 15, 151

Conclusion…. T.H. Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics -- Prolegomena" (1894) "The process of colonization presents analogies to the formation of a garden which are highly instructive. Suppose a shipload of English colonists sent to form a settlement, in such a country as Tasmania was in the middle of the last century. On landing, they find themselves in the midst of a state of nature, widely different from that left behind them in everything but the most general physical conditions. The common plants, the common birds and quadrupeds, are as totally distinct as the men from anything to be seen on the side of the globe from which they come. The colonists proceed to put an end to this state of things over as large an area as they desire to occupy. They clear away the native vegetation, extirpate or drive out the animal population, so far as may be necessary, and take measures to defend themselves from the reimmigration of either. In their place, they introduce English grain and fruit trees; English dogs, sheep, cattle, horses; and English men; in fact, they set up a new Flora and Fauna and a new variety of mankind, within the old state of nature. Their farms and pastures represent a garden on a great scale, and themselves the gardeners who have to keep it up, in watchful antagonism to the old regime. Considered as a whole, the colony is a composite unit introduced into the old state of nature; and, thenceforward, a competitor in the struggle for existence, to conquer or be vanquished.

Under the conditions supposed, there is no doubt of the result, if the work of the colonists be carried out energetically and with intelligent combination of all their forces. On the other hand, if they are slothful, stupid, and careless; or if they waste their energies in contests with one another, the chances are that the old state of nature will have the best of it. The native savage will destroy the immigrant civilized man; of the English animals and plants some will be extirpated by their indigenous rivals, others will pass into the feral state and themselves become components of the state of nature. In a few decades, all other traces of the settlement will have vanished." Abraham, Ulrike, family and friends… or “Acclimatization failure” • The one extant account by an ethnographic show ‘exhibit’ – The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. 8 from were recruited by for Hagenbeck’s shows. Starting Sept 1880 they were exhibited at Tierpark , in Berlin, , … and then the Jardin d'Acclimatation in . Mock hunts, made crafts, paddled a kayak… “savages” in a “natural state”. • The Inuit all died, one by one, between 14 Dec 1880 and 16 Jan 1881 – the last five died in Paris after performing there for five days. Jacobsen had forgotten to vaccinate them against smallpox. • The translated text of Abraham’s diary was rediscovered in 1980 in archives. The original in has not been found. • Their skeletal remains ended up in the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle where they were finally relocated in about 2010. Repatriation discussions are underway. • Others in “ethnographic exhibits” died, but the Hagenbeck company persisted until 1932. • If “acclimatization” was essentially large-scale, multi-domain colonial engineering … and if some people were essentially classed as “nature”, “wild” and “specimens” (for zoos and museums) … then where does this case lead us in thinking about engineering of populations and life? • Thode-Arora 2002, doi: 10.1525/jsae.2002.2.2.2 , and The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab (Lutz, 2005), In the Footsteps of Abraham Ulrikab (Rivet, 2014), and documentary Trapped in a (2016).

The original human invasion of the New World… environmental / ecological impacts, and the stories we tell….

• What happened to the Pleistocene megafauna? [They’re gone, but why?] • Overkill? Climate change? [Hyperdisease? Asteroid impact?] The debate goes on… data resolution is a tough problem. • Implications? If overkill: humans are naturally awful at managing ecosystems. If climate change: ok, so the disappearance of the giant sloth wasn’t our fault, but…. • Expansion in analytical methods and strategies → some answers more within reach…. But … how sure can we be? • Why does the answer matter? What does it tell us about ourselves, and about what to do next? • Note about the way the archaeological past is frequently invoked as a source of wisdom for our future… but its utility is certainly variable. [Buy me a drink.] Surovell et al 2016:Test of Martin’s overkill hypothesis using radiocarbon dates on extinct megafauna https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1504020112

• “Coincident with the human colonization of the Western Hemisphere, dozens of genera of Pleistocene megafauna were lost to extinction. Following Martin, we argue that declines in the record of radiocarbon dates of extinct genera may be used as an independent means of detecting the first presence of humans in the New World. Our results, based on analyses of radiocarbon dates from Eastern Beringia, the contiguous United States, and , suggest north to south, time, and space transgressive declines in megafaunal populations as predicted by the overkill hypothesis. This finding is difficult to reconcile with other extinction hypotheses. However, it remains to be determined whether these findings will hold with larger samples of radiocarbon dates from all regions.” Megafauna and ecosystem function from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene Malhi et al , 2016. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1502540113

“Outside of these core hominid regions, the timing of megafaunal loss coincides closely with the global expansion of H. sapiens (2, 14, 16): Australia ∼45 kya (37), over 50– 7 kya, (∼30 kya), over 15–10 kya, South America over 13–7 kya (38), the Caribbean (∼6 kya), the Pacific islands (1–3 kya), Madagascar (∼2 kya), and New Zealand (∼700 y) (2). The overall global pattern has been rapid loss in regions experiencing sudden arrival of H. sapiens (14, 38), with no overall correlation with climatic variation. Approximately 1 billion individual large animals were lost from the Earth’s land surface (39). Although still much discussed, there is increasingly strong evidence for a causal link between megafaunal extinction and the arrival of H. sapiens (2, 14, 38, 40).” Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change. Sandom et al 2014. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.3254

“The late Quaternary megafauna extinction was a severe global-scale event. Two factors, climate change and modern humans, have received broad support as the primary drivers, but their absolute and relative importance remains controversial. To date, focus has been on the extinction chronology of individual or small groups of species, specific geographical regions or macroscale studies at very coarse geographical and taxonomic resolution, limiting the possibility of adequately testing the proposed hypotheses. We present, to our knowledge, the first global analysis of this extinction based on comprehensive country- level data on the geographical distribution of all large mammal species (more than or equal to 10 kg) that have gone globally or continentally extinct between the beginning of the Last Interglacial at 132 000 years BP and the late Holocene 1000 years BP, testing the relative roles played by glacial–interglacial climate change and humans. We show that the severity of extinction is strongly tied to hominin palaeobiogeography, with at most a weak, Eurasia-specific link to climate change. This first species-level macroscale analysis at relatively high geographical resolution provides strong support for modern humans as the primary driver of the worldwide megafauna losses during the late Quaternary.” Abrupt warming events drove Late Pleistocene Holarctic megafaunal turnover. Cooper et al 2015. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4315

“The mechanisms of Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions remain fiercely contested, with human impact or climate change cited as principal drivers. We compared ancient DNA and radiocarbon data from 31 detailed time series of regional megafaunal extinctions and replacements over the past 56,000 years with standard and new combined records of Northern Hemisphere climate in the Late Pleistocene. Unexpectedly, rapid climate changes associated with interstadial warming events are strongly associated with the regional replacement or extinction of major genetic clades or species of megafauna. The presence of many cryptic biotic transitions before the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary revealed by ancient DNA confirms the importance of climate change in megafaunal population extinctions and suggests that metapopulation structures necessary to survive such repeated and rapid climatic shifts were susceptible to human impacts.” Humans rather than climate the primary cause of Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in Australia. Van der Kaars et al, Nature Communications (2017) doi:10.1038/ncomms14142

“Environmental histories that span the last full glacial cycle and are representative of regional change in Australia are scarce, hampering assessment of environmental change preceding and concurrent with human dispersal on the continent ca. 47,000 years ago. Here we present a continuous 150,000-year record offshore south-western Australia and identify the timing of two critical late Pleistocene events: wide-scale ecosystem change and regional megafaunal population collapse. We establish that substantial changes in vegetation and fire regime occurred ∼70,000 years ago under a climate much drier than today. We record high levels of the dung fungus Sporormiella, a proxy for herbivore biomass, from 150,000 to 45,000 years ago, then a marked decline indicating megafaunal population collapse, from 45,000 to 43,100 years ago, placing the extinctions within 4,000 years of human dispersal across Australia. These findings rule out climate change, and implicate humans, as the primary extinction cause.” Ancient DNA reveals late survival of mammoth and horse in interior Alaska. Haile et al 2009 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0912510106

“Causes of late Quaternary extinctions of large mammals (“megafauna”) continue to be debated, especially for continental losses, because spatial and temporal patterns of extinction are poorly known. Accurate latest appearance dates (LADs) for such taxa are critical for interpreting the process of extinction. The extinction of woolly mammoth and horse in northwestern North America is currently placed at 15,000–13,000 calendar years before present (yr BP), based on LADs from dating surveys of macrofossils (bones and teeth). Advantages of using macrofossils to estimate when a species became extinct are offset, however, by the improbability of finding and dating the remains of the last-surviving members of populations that were restricted in numbers or confined to refugia. Here we report an alternative approach to detect ‘ghost ranges’ of dwindling populations, based on recovery of ancient DNA from perennially frozen and securely dated sediments (sedaDNA). In such contexts, sedaDNA can reveal the molecular presence of species that appear absent in the macrofossil record. We show that woolly mammoth and horse persisted in interior Alaska until at least 10,500 yr BP, several thousands of years later than indicated from macrofossil surveys. These results contradict claims that Holocene survival of mammoths in Beringia was restricted to ecologically isolated high-latitude islands. More importantly, our finding that mammoth and horse overlapped with humans for several millennia in the region where people initially entered the Americas challenges theories that megafaunal extinction occurred within centuries of human arrival or were due to an extraterrestrial impact in the late Pleistocene.” Test of Martin’s overkill hypothesis using radiocarbon dates on extinct megafauna Surovell et al 2016 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1504020112

“Finally, we would like to reassert the value of using paleoecological data to study the human past. The heavy ecological footprint of human societies throughout prehistory is becoming increasingly apparent through a variety of environmental proxies independent of the archaeological record. Past human societies have disrupted ecological communities in dramatic ways for many tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. In some ways, the record of ecological disruption marked by the arrival of a small founding human population may be more evident in the paleoecological record on a large scale than in the archaeological record itself. If archaeologists come to accept paleoecological proxies as also a record of human ecological disruption, rather than as solely a proxy for human boundary conditions, we believe that many new areas of research will emerge.” Megafauna and ecosystem function from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene Malhi et al , 2016. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1502540113

“In this paper, we review evidence for megafaunal impacts on ecosystem function, on timescales ranging from the Late Pleistocene to the present. Understanding the consequences of past extinctions is valuable for a number of reasons: in particular because the loss of megafauna may have an enduring but little-recognized legacy on the functioning of the contemporary biosphere. Much of our current understanding of ecosystem ecology and biogeochemistry has been developed in a world artificially depleted of giants. We explore what lessons can be learned from the impacts of past extinctions and declines for contemporary conservation and explore what role megafauna may have yet to play in maintaining and rebuilding viable and vibrant ecosystems.” The North American Pleistocene overkill hypothesis and the re‐wilding debate. Steve Wolverton 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2010.00686.x

“The conservation agenda to re‐wild North America may or may not be realistic in terms of political ecology. However, it represents a real conservation recommendation to re‐wild North America with the extant megafauna most closely related to those that became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. The recommendation is based on the presumption that society bears an ethical responsibility to re‐wild because humans caused the extinctions. However, the extent to which Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions were the result of overkill is hotly debated. As a result, the ethical imperative for North American re‐wilding should be questioned. It will not be questioned unless members of the conservation community read the extensive archaeological and geological literature concerning the North American Pleistocene extinctions. Overlooking the assumptions underlying this particular recommendation is costly to conservation science and to archaeology because it represents an over‐simplified, unwieldy and troubling fusion of the two.”