Simon Pooley

This chapter in the book Histories of Bioinvasions in the Mediterranean (Springer, ed. Queiroz & Pooley) provides an environmental history of plant introductions and fire—and how their unintended consequences have been framed and managed—at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

The chapter explains why the plants which have proved invasive were introduced to the region, examines the effects of urbanisation on attitudes to introduced tree plantations, and describes the development of concern over the effects of fires and introduced plants on the indigenous fynbos vegetation.

The chapter recounts the complex history of environmental management on the Peninsula, discussing the advantages and limitations of the powerful narrative linking invasive introduced plant control with fires and water supplies, and recent controversies between invasion biologists and commercial forestry managers.

The chapter includes a 2,760-word text panel on the history and status of wildfire in the Mediterranean region.

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book Histories of Bioinvasions in the Mediterranean (Springer) edited by Ana Isabel Queiroz and myself, and states its aims and scope.

It defines and provides an overview of the study region, discussing the biophysical and historiographical dimensions of defining a ‘Mediterranean region’.

Key polemics arising in debates over how to think about bioinvasions are considered, and the editors’ positions clarified.

An overview of the book’s ten chapters follows.

The chapter concludes with recommendations for future directions for the interdisciplinary study of bioinvasions in the Mediterranean region.

Varied attitudes to crocodiles across Africa require location specific solutions to prevent attacks, writes Dr Simon Pooley

(this is a summary for a lay readership of my recent publications on the historical interrelations of humans and Nile crocodiles in Africa. Title and photo not of my choosing.)

Published in Birkbeck's Magazine 2016, 35: 28-29.

Croc attacks are not a major problem at national or provincial level in most countries, so funds and resources to mitigate them are scarce. However, for victims, attacks can be devastating. People may be killed or disabled, bringing grief, fear and - in rural areas - poverty, to victims, their families and communities. Crocodiles may be killed in retaliation. Wildlife conservation authorities and local people may have serious disagreements about how to respond to such attacks. This guide aims to help reduce these problems.

The guide includes information on the wider context of croc attacks in Africa, when and where attacks occur in the region, victim profiles, information on crocodiles involved in attacks, case studies, information on the biology and behaviour of Nile crocodiles, advice on how not to get bitten, what to do if you are bitten, how you can help prevent attacks, and an attack report form.

Printed, colour copies will be distributed free in the region, as will this pdf. Please contact me on croc.conservation@gmail.com with any queries or requests regarding use of this guide. I have made a pdf available here but it is large - 8mb at low res. I can send it to you in 2 parts of 5mb and 4mb on request.

Please cite as: Simon Pooley, How not to get eaten by a crocodile: in South Africa or Swaziland (London: Croc.Conservation, 2015).

This guide is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

This infographics in this guide were developed with funding from an ESRC / Imperial College London Impact Acceleration Grant to Dr Simon Pooley, based at ICCS, at Imperial College London. They can be viewed as interactive infographics on the CrocBITE website ( http://www.crocodile-attack.info/).

I am working with Dr Adam Britton (RIEL, Charles Darwin University) and Brandon Sideleau on a worldwide database on croc attacks.

Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain and the surrounding peninsula has been a crucible for attempts to integrate the social and ecological dimensions of wild fire. This environmental history of humans and wildfire outlines these interactions from the practices of Khoikhoi herders to the conflagrations of January 2000. The region’s unique, famously diverse fynbos vegetation has been transformed since European colonial settlement, through urbanisation and biological modifications, both intentional (forestry) and unintentional (biological invasions). In all the diverse visions people have formed for Table Mountain, aesthetic and utilitarian, fire has been regarded as a central problem. This book shows how scientific understandings of fire in fynbos developed slowly in the face of strong prejudices. Human impacts were intensified in the twentieth century, which provides the temporal focus for the book. The disjunctures between popular perception, expert knowledge, policy and management are explored, and the book supplements existing short-term scientific data with proxies on fire incidence trends recovered from historical records. This book provides a historically informed, social-ecological approach to thinking about our co-existence with fire.

See Review at http://envhis.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/4/766.full

"The film 'Invasion of the Crocodiles', first shown on BBC Natural World in 2007, took its title from the assertion that ‘Australia’s deadly saltwater crocs are making a dramatic comeback [and] are spreading in alarming numbers’. Publicity for the film stated that ‘hundreds of cattle are being killed, and most worrying of all, attacks on people are increasing every year, often in places where crocs were previously unknown’ (BBC 2007). These brief statements bring up a series of issues central to the idea of ecological invasions, including the distinction between desirable and undesirable animals, and the spatial and temporal dimensions of the concept of invasions. However, in this case the desirable animals are introduced, and the undesirable ones are ‘native’.

Crocodilians (crocodiles, alligators and the gharial), while they predate our species by millennia, are often represented as unwelcome intruders. In a sense, they could be regarded as such in this volume, not being ‘invasive aliens’ in any technical sense. In this essay I show that the scientific sub-discipline of invasion biology provides a useful arena for unpacking some of the cultural assumptions bundled up in assertions of ecological ‘invasions’. These attempts to define invasiveness, alienness and nativeness can be utilised to counter misleading popular usages of the term ‘invasions’."

This chapter first discusses some key definitions used by invasion ecologists. Temporal and spatial dimensions are central, as is the notion of harm. The discussion of the temporal dimension includes brief histories of crocodilians, and crocodilians and humans, in Australia. The discussion of spatial dimensions also touches on the notion of place, and Australian ideas about nativeness. The discussion of harm focuses on crocodiles as predators, and human–crocodile conflict.

"'Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination' assembles eleven substantive and original essays on the cultural and social dimensions of environmental history. They address a global cornucopia of social and ecological systems, from Africa to Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and their temporal range extends from the 1830s into the twenty-first century.

The imaginative (and actual) construction of landscapes and the appropriation of Nature – through image-fashioning, curating museum and zoo collections, making ‘friends’, ‘enemies’ and mythical symbols from animals – are recurring subjects. Among the volume’s thought-provoking essays are a group enmeshing nature and the visual culture of photography and film. Canonical environmental history themes, from colonialism to conservation, are re-inflected by discourses including gender studies, Romanticism, politics and technology.

The loci of the studies included here represent both the microcosmic – underwater laboratory, zoo, film studio; and broad canvases – the German forest, the Rocky Mountains, the islands of Haiti and Madagascar. Their casts too are richly varied – from Britain’s otters and Africa’s Nile crocodiles to Hollywood film-makers and South African cattle. The volume represents an excitingly diverse collection of studies of how humans, in imagination and deed, act on and are acted on by ‘wild things’.""

""In December 1957 in South Africa’s Natal Province, strident and widespread calls went up for the extermination of all crocodiles in Zululand. This followed the fatal attack on a white boy (a South African of European origin) at False Bay, on Lake St Lucia, attributed to a crocodile. David Raymond-Jones was swimming
unsupervised in the lake, and had ignored official warnings to stay out of the water. Furthermore, this was in a protected area for wildlife, known for its crocodiles, and crocodile attacks were not uncommon in the region – so the extent of the reaction is surprising and disproportionate to the incident.

This chapter begins with an examination of how crocodiles and their relations with humans had been represented to South Africans from the late nineteenth century to 1958. It then explores the social and ecological causes – and the sequence of events – which contributed to this explosive (and unprecedented) demand for the killing of all Nile crocodiles in Zululand. These events provide an instructive case study of how human environmental interventions and activities contributed to a ‘crocodile menace’. Prejudice and ignorance about a species were exploited by a variety of interests, ranging from commercial hunters to anglers, farmers and nationalist politicians.""

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, botanists in South Africa’s Western Cape felt hard pressed to popularise and protect the unique indigenous Fynbos flora of the region. They saw themselves ranged against the extensive transformations of the landscape being undertaken by farmers and foresters, the expansion of urban areas and infrastructure, and the depredations of flower pickers. The introduction of a suite of invasive alien plants into the region in the nineteenth century, notably a range of Australian species well suited to the poor nutrients and rainfall and fire regimes of the region, presented a physical but also a symbolic focus for their advocacy. In the early twentieth century this was played out in the context of political attempts to build unity among the English and Afrikaner populations after the South African War ended in 1902. The new science of ecology was consciously used as an integrative influence. However, the ecological theory imported with the experts arriving from Britain in the period of reconstruction, as influential a biological invasion as the earlier wave of alien plant imports, had unfortunate consequences for scientifically informed research and management of the local flora.

There has been much research on the impacts of European trade and the resulting spread of invasive plants, animals and diseases elsewhere on the planet. However, considerably less attention has been paid to the reverse flow. Europe’s Mediterranean region provides a particularly fascinating focus for studying the ecological consequences of biotic introductions resulting from internal (mainly maritime) linkages, and European exploration and world trade since the 1500s, extending into the hyperconnected world of the present. This article considers the concept of the Mediterranean and drawing on contributions to the book I co-edited with Ana Isabel Queiroz (Springer, 2018), asks whether this concept will survive the resulting transformations.

Crocodilians are responsible for more attacks on people than any other large predator, which has important implications for human safety and crocodilian conservation. Understanding the drivers of crocodilian attacks on people could help minimise future attacks and inform conflict management. Crocodilian attacks follow a seasonal pattern in many regions; however, there has been limited analysis of the relationship between fine-scale contemporaneous environmental conditions and attack occurrence. Here, we use methods from environmental niche modelling to explore the relationships between abiotic predictors and human attack occurrence at a daily temporal resolution for two species: the Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) in South Africa and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), and the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) in Florida, USA. Our results indicate that ambient daily temperature is the most important abiotic temporal predictor of attack occurrence for both species, with attack likelihood increasing sharply when daily average temperatures exceed 18°C and peaking at 28°C. It is likely that this relationship is explained partially by human propensity to spend time in and around water in warmer weather, but also by the effect of temperature on crocodilian hunting behaviour and physiology, especially the ability to digest food. We discuss the potential of our findings to contribute to the management of crocodilians, with benefits for human safety and conservation, as well as the application of environmental niche modelling to understanding human wildlife conflicts with both ectotherms and endotherms.

A very detailed 1,800-word book review of Jane Carruthers' new book.

The review begins as follows:
'In this 512-page monograph, Professor Carruthers sets out
to explain in scientific and political context the changing
philosophies and shifts in focus of the research agendas
shaping scientific research in South Africa’s national parks.'

The review concludes:
'Carruthers has collated an enormously valuable resource
for future historians and conservation scientists' and 'overturns oversimplified accounts of the country’s conservation history, provides rich resources for local and overseas scholars interested in the history of conservation science in the country, and encourages South African researchers and practitioners to see their history and efforts in international and historical context.'

The clear evidence of the accumulating impacts of anthropogenic actions on the Earth system is driving researchers to look to historical data as a resource for understanding the present and predicting the future. In the conservation science literature, using historical sources usually refers to data mining “the past” using the scientific methods of historical ecology. This article considers the often overlooked methodological challenges of sourcing and interpreting historical data. A schema is provided for conservation scientists, summarizing the kinds of questions and metadata required to work rigorously with historical data. This will improve the accuracy of the data we use to construct trends to inform our understanding of the conservation status of particular species and ecosystems. It will also deepen our understanding of the interplays of factors influencing policy and management in particular social-ecological contexts.

[Attached file is accepted, unformatted version. Formatted, final version is available as Early View on the Conservation Letters website - see link below]

Fire as a management practice in South Africa’s grasslands inflamed heated debate throughout the twentieth century. Imported ecological ideas meshed with homegrown sectoral land management traditions to reinforce a powerful antiburning narrative among experts. Farmers, however, developed their own theories on burning, and the history of fire research, policy, and management reveals a series of entanglements between ecological theory, management policies and recommendations, and practice that complicate narratives grounded in historiographical traditions focused on critiquing settler and colonial expertise. This article recommends three distinctions to make when thinking about the history of scientific expertise: first, between an individual’s abstract theorizing and his or her “thinking in the field”; second, between the influence of accepted scientific findings and the thinking guiding official policies of land management sectors; and third, between official policies and actual land management practices. This article provides overviews of long-term fire use in the country’s grasslands, the ecology of grasslands and fire in South Africa, of early debates over fire, and scientific fire research and management in the country.

Human-wildlife conflict is a growing problem worldwide wherever humans share landscapes with large predators, and negative encounters with eight species of the crocodilians is particularly widespread. Conservationists’ responses to these adverse encounters have focused on the ecological and behavioural aspects of predators, rather than on the social, political, and cultural contexts which have threatened their existence in the first place. Few studies have thusfar tried to understand the rich, varied, contradictory and complex relations that exist between particular humans and human societies, and particular predators and groups of predators. It is in the spirit of Brian Morris’s explorations of the interactional encounters and co-produced sociabilities that exist between humans and animals in specific places and regions that this paper offers a cultural herpetology (an account of human-crocodile interrelations) of the Nile crocodile (Crocodilus niloticus and C. suchus) in Africa. It draws on extensive historical documentation of the interactions of humans and crocodiles across Africa to examine how diverse and complex human responses to Nile crocodiles have been, and continue to be, and suggests some implications for improving human-crocodile relations.

The Cape Floristic Region in South Africa's Western Cape is home to the world's smallest floristic kingdom (there are six in total), which includes the unique Fynbos Biome, and supports nearly 9,000 species of plants, of which around 69% are endemic. 1 The Fynbos is partly protected in a series of eight UNESCO World Heritage Park sites, including the Table Mountain National Park which shares the Cape Peninsula with the city of Cape Town, its suburbs, shanty towns, industrial zones and other infrastructure. Today the region is plagued by intense, destructive fires that ravage nature reserves and cause significant damage to property. In January 2000, dramatic Fynbos wildfires torched 8,370 hectares of the Cape Peninsula, damaging 70 houses and 200 shacks in an informal settlement in the Cape Metropolitan area. 2 Despite intensive scientific research and fire management work, there is little agreement on the causes of such intense fires, their frequency, or whether they are unu...

The film Invasion of the Crocodiles, 2007, first shown on BBC Natural World in2007, took its title from the assertion that ‘Australia’s deadly saltwater crocs are making a dramatic comeback [and] are spreading in alarming numbers’. Publicity for the film stated that ‘hundreds of cattle are being killed, and most worrying ofall, attacks on people are increasing every year, often in places where crocs were previously unknown’ (BBC, 2007). These brief statements bring up a series of issuescentral to the idea of ecological invasions, including the distinction betweendesirable and undesirable animals, and the spatial and temporal dimensions of theconcept of invasions. However, in this case the desirable animals are introduced,and the undesirable ones are ‘native’.Crocodilians (crocodiles, alligators and the gharial), while they predate our species by millennia, are often represented as unwelcome intruders. In a sense, they could be regarded as such in this volume, not being ‘invasive ali...

1. Crocodilians are opportunistic predators and large crocodiles (>2.5m) like this Nile crocodile can and do attack large mammals including humans. They are found in over 90 countries worldwide, including many African countries (see map, right), where they live alongside rural people who must share waterways with them. 3. Generalisations are made about crocodile attacks in 'mainland Africa', for e.g. 62% of attacks are fatal. Typically, such claims are based on patchy, short-term data. There certainly are regions with high levels of human crocodile conflict, worldwide, and these require systematic investigation, to enable mitigation. 2. Across Africa, southeast Asia and parts of Indonesia, rural people depend on natural water bodies for drinking water, food, washing and bathing in, and must cross rivers and streams daily. It is unsurprising that many of these regions experience high levels of human crocodile conflict. 4. Crocodile attacks on humans cause media sensations,...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, botanists in South Africa’s Western Cape felt hard-pressed to popularize and protect the unique indigenous Fynbos flora of the region. They saw themselves ranged against the extensive transformations of the landscape being undertaken by farmers and foresters, the expansion of urban areas and infrastructure, and the depredations of flower pickers. The introduction of a suite of invasive alien plants into the region in the 19th century, notably a range of Australian species well suited to the poor nutrients and rainfall and fire regimes of the region, presented a physical but also a symbolic focus for their advocacy. In the early 20th century this was played out in the context of political attempts to build unity among the English and Afrikaner populations after the South African War ended in 1902. However, the ecological theory imported with the experts arriving from Britain in the period of reconstruction, as influential a biological invasi...

In the early twentieth century, botanists in South Africa's Western Cape sought urgently to popularise and protect the region's unique indigenous Fynbos flora. Plants imported from the 1840s, some of which proved invasive, became a physical and symbolic focus for their advocacy. The botanists' efforts resonated with political attempts to forge a common white South African national identity that drew on notions of landscape and the indigenous flora for symbolism and that consciously exploited the politically integrative potential of the new science of ecology. Introduced by overseas-trained experts, ecological theory was, however, inappropriate for the local flora, and had unfortunate consequences for the scientifically-informed research and management particularly of the fire-maintained Fynbos. While botanists and conservationists were united in defending the local flora against invasive introduced plants, they drew distinctions between what was 'indigenous' and what was 'natural' that further complicated their attitudes to the local flora. These historical debates illuminate agendas and policies on introduced ('alien') and indigenous flora in the region today.

SAUL DUBOW, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 296. ISBN 978-0-199-29663-7. £60.00 (hardback). doi:10.1017/S0007087409002143 Saul Dubow's study ...

The concept of “endangered species” is central to attempts to conserve biodiversity on our planet, but when we decide what is endangered, and prioritise conservation action, we should be reflexive about the limitations of our fixation on species, and the role of our values in shaping our choices. So many living beings remain unclassified and beyond both our scientific comprehension and our ethical consideration. This essay considers the technical issues and ethical challenges bound up with major conservation initiatives like the IUCN Red Lists and CITES.

As human populations grow and transform undeveloped lands and waterways, human–wildlife conflict inevitably increases. This is particularly problematic for large predators and the humans who live alongside them. Relatively little research has been conducted on alleviating adverse human encounters with one of the most significant predator species in Africa, the Nile crocodile Crocodylus niloticus. This short communication raises questions about some of the general statements made to explain the incidence of attacks by crocodiles. Some of the limitations of the data on such attacks are considered, with recommendations on what kinds of data are required. Data collection and analysis, and how they can inform more effective mitigation efforts, are discussed.

See the visualisations of my long-term crocodile attack data for S Africa and Swaziland I developed at:
http://www.crocodile-attack.info/data-viz

Until the early 1900s, for most Europeans African crocodiles existed essentially in the realm of myth and traveller’s tales. Until the 1930s, Nile crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus) were primarily regarded as vermin, a threat to human lives, and a problem for expeditions and settlements in that they attacked livestock. They were regarded as repulsive, frightening and useless. This contrasts strikingly with African attitudes, which varied widely from fear to veneration, and unlike Europeans, many Africans regarded crocodiles as a useful resource: medicinal, magical and dietary.
It is with the development of commercial fisheries from the 1920s that crocodiles are first regarded by colonial authorities as an economic issue and a matter for policy and official management, but for the most part as a threat. However, in coming to the notice of colonial governments, crocodiles were also considered for possible economically beneficial uses. Ecological research on fisheries raised doubts about their harmfulness to catches. Following the Second World War, crocodiles became commercially valuable for their skins and hunting and trapping became very widespread until the decimation of larger crocodiles led even commercial hunters to fear for their resource by the 1960s. Protective legislation became more widespread in the era of international conservation gaining traction in the late 1960s. After an initial period of protectionism, sustainable use of crocodilians became a central tenet of the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group’s conservation programme from the mid-1980s, and for African crocodiles by 1992.
This paper explores how changing and various European and African attitudes to crocodiles influenced human interactions with this apex predator of the continent’s waterways. It explores how crocodiles fit into larger narratives of hunting, conservation and sustainable utilisation of African wildlife, noting some significant divergences from these histories.

Cape Times opinion piece following the week-long fire on the Cape Peninsula: As we watch the peninsula burn and worry about our homes and natural heritage, let us also recall that there have been major fires here roughly every decade. The fynbos has been here for millennia, and it has been burning for just as long. The changes to the natural fire regime of the peninsula first changed significantly when Khoikhoi herders began to visit seasonally to graze their livestock around 1 600 years ago, setting the vegetation on fire when they left to ensure fresh grazing for the next season. When Europeans arrived in 1652, they tried to put a stop to this burning as it threatened their houses and other structures, and to protect their crops. However, the poor soil and windy conditions made it hard to grow cereal crops and many farmers turned to livestock farming. They inherited the practice of burning the veld from the Khoikhoi.

As the settlement grew, accidental fires became a feature of the dry, hot, windy summers in Cape Town. Ever since, humans have been the biggest cause of ignitions on the peninsula.

The piece briefly reviews management interventions and issues since concluding that we need fire, correctly managed, in the Table Mountain National Park today.

The consensus is that both ecological and social factors are essential dimensions of conservation research and practice.  However, much of the literature on multiple disciplinary collaboration focuses on the difficulties of undertaking it. This review of the challenges of conducting multiple disciplinary collaboration offers a framework for thinking about the diversity and complexity of this endeavour. We focused on conceptual challenges, of which five main categories emerged: methodological challenges, value judgements, theories of knowledge, disciplinary prejudices, and interdisciplinary communication.  The major problems identified in these areas have proved remarkably persistent in the literature surveyed (c.1960-2012). Reasons for these failures to learn from past experience include the pressure to produce positive outcomes and gloss over disagreements, the ephemeral nature of many such projects and resulting lack of institutional memory, and the apparent complexity and incoherence of the endeavour.  We suggest that multiple disciplinary collaboration requires conceptual integration among carefully selected multiple disciplinary team members united in investigating a shared problem or question. We outline a nine-point sequence of steps for setting up a successful multiple disciplinary project. This encompasses points on recruitment, involving stakeholders, developing research questions, negotiating power dynamics and hidden values and conceptual differences, explaining and choosing appropriate methods, developing a shared language, facilitating on-going communications, and discussing data integration and project outcomes.  While numerous solutions to the challenges of multiple disciplinary research have been proposed, lessons learned are often lost when projects end or experienced individuals move on. We urge multiple disciplinary teams to capture the challenges recognised, and solutions proposed by, their researchers while projects are in process. A database of well-documented case studies would showcase theories and methods from a variety of disciplines and their interactions, enable better comparative study and evaluation, and provide a useful resource for developing future projects and training multiple disciplinary researchers.

In South Africa, with its scarce and slow-growing natural forests, the most obvious and visible environmental effect of state forestry was the creation of plantations of introduced exotic species of timber trees. State foresters were variously accused of ruining landscapes aesthetically, drying up water supplies, and creating a fire hazard. However, in addition to establishing plantations, from the 1930s state foresters were also responsible for managing extensive ecologically sensitive mountain catchment areas. Initially focussed on water and soil conservation, their research on the indigenous vegetation of South Africa’s unique Fynbos Biome resulted in the creation of a dedicated programme of conservation research and management, and the department became far the most important agency for environmental management of fynbos. By the late 1970s their fynbos research programme would place South African forestry researchers in the first rank of international fire research on Mediterranean-type ecosystems. The department’s approach to wildfire in fynbos gradually shifted from fire suppression to prescribed block burning. A tightly coupled programme of research and management prevailed until the Apartheid state and with it state forestry began to collapse in the late 1980s. This paper recovers this little known story, and explores the consequences of the Department’s management interventions, and of its demise.

America’s Fires – a brief, straightforwardly organised, tersely argued book with a national focus – is perhaps Pyne’s most accessible demonstration of why fire histories matter, how to think about them, and how to go about writing them. This book and this subject are relevant to environmental historians of other parts of the globe because, despite Pyne’s herculean efforts, the fire histories of large areas of our planet – today experiencing major wildfires – remain to be written.

""In the early twentieth century, botanists in South Africa’s Western Cape sought urgently to popularise and protect the region’s unique indigenous Fynbos flora. Plants imported from the 1840s, some of which proved invasive, became a physical and symbolic focus for their advocacy. The botanists’ efforts resonated with political attempts to forge a common white South African national identity that drew on notions of landscape and the indigenous flora for symbolism and that consciously exploited the politically integrative potential of the new science of ecology. Introduced by overseas-trained experts, ecological theory was, however, inappropriate for the local flora, and had unfortunate consequences for the scientificallyinformed research and management particularly of the fire-maintained Fynbos. While botanists and conservationists were united in defending the local flora against invasive introduced plants, they drew distinctions between what was ‘indigenous’ and what was
‘natural’ that further complicated their attitudes to the local flora. These historical debates illuminate agendas and policies on introduced (‘alien’) and indigenous flora in the region today.""

The first decade of Dutch VOC occupation of South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope has been ill served by environmental historians. An examination of the daily journals covering the first decade of settlement proves fruitful for historians interested in the origins of European exploration, exploitation and conservation of natural resources at the Cape. This settlement is moreover a unique example of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers establishing a cornucopia of food plants in the absence of indigenous agriculturalists, experimenting with species imported from the VOC’s many bases. The difficulty of establishing what they may have learned from the indigenous peoples is addressed.

Saul Dubow’s A Commonwealth of Knowledge focuses primarily on the development of science and sensibility among English-speaking settlers in the Cape Colony from 1820, through union (of South Africa) in 1910, up to the victory of the Afrikaner nationalists in 1948 – examining how this shaped ideas about national identity among the country’s white (European) population. The latter part of the book brings the story up to 2000, a period that saw the decline of the liberal ‘South Africanism’ developed in the preceding period.
Dubow’s grasp of the historiography and his deft use of archival and secondary sources make this an invaluable book for intellectual historians. More broadly, he is illuminating on the ways in which science has been used by successive colonial and post-colonial elites to establish, assert or bolster their identities and authority, and as in his previous book Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (2005), shows there is much exciting work to be done on the history of science in the region.

A discussion of the history of fire on the Cape Peninsula, South Africa, in the context of recent fires on the Peninsula, and the publication of my book Burning Table Mountain: An environmental history of the Cape Peninsula (Palgrave 2014), which will be published by UCT Press in early 2015.

Perhaps we should rethink biological invasions in such a way as to escape the ideas that they involve the intrusion of exotic biota from foreign places, and are essentially human-driven. After all, the central problem is concern about harmful changes to local ecosystems when they come to be dominated by previously absent or apparently stable species. Such changes can just as well be caused by indigenous biota. Questions of scale and agency are key: how far must a crocodile swim before it is invading a new territory? What lengths of time are we using to decide what is native and natural? Has the invasive species been assisted (or not) by humans in some unsporting, 'unnatural' way?
I will use a case study, the alleged invasion of parts of Lake St Lucia in South Africa by crocodiles in the 1950s, to reflect on the kinds of questions we should ask when confronted by an apparent 'invasion'. We are told that defining a biological invasion should not be left to natural scientists, but in practice it seldom is. Statements about dispersal and concentration of invasive species are often matters of perception, or rhetoric, at least in the framing of 'the problem'. The underlying causes of the 'crocodile furore' in this case were complex, including prejudice and ignorance about crocodiles, disputes over land use, landscape engineering, high-profile incidents (attacks), local environmental conditions, crocodile hunters, and the agency of individual crocodiles.

On the morning of 18 November 1957, an 11-yr-old boy, David Raymond-Jones, was fishing on Lake St Lucia, in Zululand, South Africa. He swam out some 20yards from shore to cast his line deeper, where he was suddenly dragged underwater. He was, it was later decided, killed by a crocodile. The local European community immediately petitioned the provincial administrator of Natal to exterminate all crocodiles in Zululand, and the story became an instant media sensation. Considering that croc attacks were not uncommon in the wider region, and the boy had been swimming in crocodile-inhabited waters in a game reserve, why this sudden public call for the extermination of all crocodiles?

Our conference theme today is nature and the social imagination, and I want to show how deep-seated negative imaginings, or discourses, about Nile crocodiles directly impacted on the survival of an entire species. These prejudices contributed to ignorance about and misrepresentations of crocodile behaviour. They engendered a failure to properly investigate crocodile behaviour even among scientists and wildlife conservationists. This allowed politicians, commercial hunters, traders in traditional medicines, land-hungry farmers, and others to manipulate public ignorance and revulsion about crocodiles to further their own ends.

I will ground-truth these general statements in a case study, reconstructing the conjunction of social and environmental factors which contributed to the unprecedented outcry about the so-called crocodile menace that erupted in Natal, South Africa, in late 1957.