While those bound to larger chunks of earth may dream of escaping TO a beautiful island, the difficulties of escaping FROM an island have proved fatal for many species. These paradoxical qualities of islands are familiar to us island dwellers who love our habitats while also battling with their inconveniences. The encircling waters provide a bounded microcosm which both protects its inhabitants and makes them vulnerable. These same conflicting truths have pushed and pulled with the changing role of islands as symbols in Western consciousness over the past centuries and have also played a crucial role in developing modern Western environmentalism.

The Roots of Modern Western Environmentalism? Washed up from a tropical island?

Conventional histories of the development of modern western environmentalism saw it as arising in England, Europe and North America in response to the effects of urbanisation and industrialisation. However Richard Grove has a very different view. He argues that the this movement originated in the colonial experience in tropical lands and particularly - ISLANDS. His research is detailed in his book "Green Imperialism. Colonial Science and the Origins of Environmental Concern" (Cambridge Uni Press, 1995) and summarised in "Origins of Western Environmentalism", Scientific American, July, 1992 and "The Origins of Environmentalism", Nature, Vol 345, 3 May,1990. These articles may be here in full for you in the future but for now here are some highlights for islanders in a hurry.

Tropical Islands as Utopias for the Western Imagination

The image of an untouched tropical island has been associated with a Western vision of utopia for a long time - idealised by writers, artists and philosophers. Islands provided the landscape for an Edenic vision of harmony between humans and nature populated by the "noble savages" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's imagination (conjured up while he was stuck firmly in mainland France). However the full flowering of this Romantic thinking coincided with a growing awareness of the devastating impact of colonial capitalism on the ecology of islands leading to a new metaphoric role for islands.

Tropical Islands as Allegories for the Whole World - Vulnerable and Endangered Ecosystems

Romantic idealism, colonial enterprise causing large scale environmental change, and a rapidly developing body of scientific knowledge about local ecologies were on a collision course.

As early as the 1300's there were descriptions of the damaging effects of deforestation and European plantations on the Canary Islands and Madiera. From the 16th century on there was growing concern about the effects of colonial deforestation in the West Indies, St Helena and Mauritius.

The colonial trading companies and governments employed scientists ( mostly medical surgeons) to investigate the new flora, fauna and geologies. A whole network of scientific societies developed -

"Again, the first of these societies appeared in the island colonies, particularly on Mauritius. This was no accident. In many respects, the isolated oceanic islands stimulated a detached self-consciousness and a critical view of European origins and behaviour, of the kind dramatically prefigured by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe. Such islands became, in practical as well as mental terms, an allegory of a whole world, and observations of their ecological demise were easily converted into premonitions of environmental destruction on a wider scale.

So, alongside the emergence of professional natural science, the importance of the island as a mental symbol was an essential stimulant to the formulation of ideas about environmental protection, as well as of ethnological identity." (Grove, 1990,12)

European encounters with tropical islands appeared to bring about a similar change in world view to that experienced when we first saw the earth from outer space - as a small and very finite planet.

By the mid-17th century a conservationist ideology about the limits of the Earth's natural resources and the need to conserve them had developed - based on observations of environmental processes on islands.

The Possibility of Extinction - An Obvious Reality on Islands

On a continent one can believe that there's always more of a species over the mountains. On an island humans are not only much more able to bring about the extinction of a species, but also much more quickly aware of it. The extinction of the dodo and other birds in Mauritius in the latter parts of the 17th century, as well as the extinction of the auroch, a form of wild cattle in Poland, brought a new concept to Western thought - extinction.

In the 1840's scientists studied the fauna of Mauritius, New Zealand and the Chatham Islands off Chile and one suggested that the whole of New Zealand should become a nature reserve. Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859 - based of course upon his studies on the Galapagos Islands. Between 1860 and 1870 there were many pieces of protectionist legislation in Britain and the colonies. "Once again the galvanising force was an island colony: Tasmania" which brought in comprehensive protection for indigenous Tasmanian birds from 1860. Unfortunately this benevolence was too late to save the Tasmanian aborigines whose last full-blood member died in 1872. Casualties of both deliberate extermination and misdirected Christian kindness, this is the only known case of the extinction of an entire people.

Islands as Experiments in Land Management

Scientists actively promoted the need for conservation and colonial rulers were alarmed by the obvious impacts of deforestation such as soil erosion. They were also worried by the theory that deforestation led to a drop in rainfall and a change in the composition of the atmosphere - theories that have subsequently been confirmed.

Any ecological crisis clearly threatened the long-term security of the state and so colonial rulers would sometimes act to protect this security rather than the immediate interests of private capital. They were able to impose reforms in land management which would have been difficult in Europe.

Innovative measures to protect forests were introduced first by the French in Mauritius from 1768 on, and then by the English in the West Indies and the Carribean. These policies in turn became the models for the forest planting and protection systems that developed in India after 1847 which in turn became the models for colonial state conservation in South East Asia, Australasia, Africa and only much later in North America.

Obviously these reserves were grossly inadequate by our current ecological understandings, but their relevance to the present argument is that they were the first legislative actions of modern environmentalism and that they originated in the colonial experience on islands.

And so.....

For you islanders who have never before experienced the warm stirrings of jingoistic pride, let yourself go - uphold the powerful tradition of islands as symbols of both Utopia and vulnerability, as observation labs for ecological processes and as opportunities for innovative conservation practices!