Settler Ecology 3: Kyle Powys Whyte's Cultural Ecology

        Kyle Powys Whyte (2018) uses the term "settler ecology" in a somewhat different sense. By "settler ecology" he does not refer to the science of ecology. Rather, he means what geographers call human geography and anthropologists call cultural ecology, in reference to a people's attitudes toward nature as expressed in how they affect and live in the habitat of the place(s) where they reside. For Whyte, settler ecology is expressed in Euro-American colonialist and extractivist land settlement patterns in the New World, their means of obtaining food, clothing, and shelter; their relationships with other and former inhabitants of the places they occupy; and their material culture and built environment as can be seen historically and in traveling today throughout the North American agricultural and industrial landscape. Whyte is interested in the Euro-American settler colonialist human geography that dominated the natural world and transformed it while committing the violence that disrupted and altered the lives of Indigenous peoples who were living on that land when the Euro-Americans arrived in the New World. Invoking cultural ecology in this way, Whyte turns upside down the early 20th century anthropologists' concept of cultural ecology, with its residue of cultural evolutionism from so-called primitive to civilized as shown in adaptations from nomadic hunting, gathering, herding and horticulture to settled agriculture. Instead, Whyte employs cultural ecology to show how maladaptive “civilized” adaptations are to the natural environment and its inhabitants. Whyte's analysis goes further than an environmental history of settler empires (Griffiths and Robin 1997) in that he identifies certain features of a people's onto-epistemology that partially explain their resulting adaptations. To what extent is Whyte's "settler ecology" similar to and different from my usage of the same term, where I anchor the expression of this onto-epistemology in Euro-American ecological science's concept of "ecosystem services?"

References:

Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Kyle Powys Whyte, "Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Justice." Environment and Society: Advances in Research 9 (2018): 125-144.