Invasive

Invasive species, in contrast to native species, do not belong to a particular ecology. They can cause significant disruption because they lack relationships to that ecology. So, for instance, when Eugene Scheiffelin decided he would bring all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to America and released 60 starlings in Central Park in 1890, he introduced an invasive species. Without any predator relationships, starling populations boomed, pushing out many native species and causing a great deal of ecological havoc to this day.

Early English Colonialism in the New World as an Invasive Culture

Calling an invasive species “bad” lacks perspective. Ecologies do not have any sense of “purity,” and invasive species have simply arrived recently. Over time, invasive species become native, as they develop relationships with the rest of the ecology, and the ecology adapts to integrate them.

However, just as cultures can try to become native more quickly, they can also actively resist the process. The early English colonial efforts in the New World, 1585 – 1650, did precisely this. Wilderness, in the English imagination, marked something dark and terrifying. The New World offered simultaneous hope and danger; for most Englishmen, it represented a wilderness they needed to eradicate, populated by wild people they needed to civilize. The threat of its seduction sometimes entered as a theme, as well; “going native,” or succumbing to the lure of joining the Indians, haunted European tales not as a promise, but as a threat. The endeavor took as its most important goal to conquer the New World, but never, under any circumstances, to become part of it.

Harriot’s narrative reveals how the English organized the report of the senses. First, he explicitly rejected the holistic naturalism of the Indians. ... Second, the English did not regard themselves as part of nature, or regard nature as simultaneously material and spiritual. Eyewitness testimony from English voyagers to America conclusively demonstrates that the English travelers and settlers were overwhelmed by the novelty of what they sensed. William Bradford, elected governor of the Plymouth colony in 1621, feared the novelty: “What could they see here but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men—and multitudes there might be of them they knew not … all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.” (Hoffer, p. 40)

A Wicomesse leader in 1633 told a group of Europeans, “Since you are here as strangers, you should rather confine yourselves to the customs of our country than impose yours upon us.” To the native mind, with its assumptions of traditions rooted in the land, that logic made perfect sense, but it violated the very reasons why Europeans came to the New World. They could never consider the possibility of adapting to the land; they came to adapt the land to suit them.

From xkcd

Perception

Even the European understanding of sound and speech mirrored their underlying dedication to remaining invasive. The desire to domesticate and conquer the New World received reinforcement from their fundamental terror, perhaps difficult to understand today, of the wilderness.

English perception needed boundaries, markers, and definite ends. What had no extent could not be calculated, and that without markers could not be categorized. Distance and impenetrability frightened the English because it prevented aural and visual communication. Too far off, too densely wooded, meant out of earshot. ... When the English found themselves unable to hear or see one another, they panicked. Novelty became unbearable. The screeching or howling sounds of the American forest and the Atlantic approaches terrified the travelers. Much of the forest land of England was gone by the late 1500s, and the remaining forests were home to witches and sprites. Lost in the woods, fearful of a dark bend in the river or a patch of fog-daubed forest, the English quivered with anxiety. Imagination filled in the pictures that strange sounds outlined. When two of the Plymouth Pilgrims got lost chasing a deer in 1620, “another thing did mightily terrify them; they heard, as they thought, two lions roaring exceedingly for a long time together, and a third, that they thought was very near them.” ...

The demands of English perception required that auditory and visual signals not blend into the landscape, as Indians’ signs did, but stand out from it in sharp relief. Thus, the trumpet blast identified the English to one another rather than the imitation of birdsong or animal call the Indians adopted. (Hoffer, pp.43-44)

See also

• Native

Further Reading

• Hoffer, Charles Peter. Sensory Worlds in Early America.