‘The intrusion therefore of cattle is by itself sufficient to produce the extirpation of the native race’

This contribution attempts to discuss unintended, neglectful, or willful manipulations of Social Ecological Systems (SESs) by commercial stock farmers as part of an attempt to drive Aboriginal people from their lands into the hinterland thereby accepting or condoning their annihilation or demographic reduction. By displaying the different ways in which commercial stock farmers have engineered changes in the ecological system I will show that traditional definitions of the term genocide fall short of applied techniques of decimation which consist of a combination of micro-practices and quotidian low-level violence. It is doubtful that given the complexity and the resilience of SES, however, a group of commercial stock farmers is able to operate the system (of which, after all, they are an element) in a controlled way. I argue nevertheless that the term ecocide should be applied to the way stock farmers changed the habitat of the Indigenous population, because the settlers had agency without understanding the totality of their actions. SES as coupled complex systems are dependent on the existence of bio-diversity, the intensity of grazing,11 Andrew J. Ash and John G. McIvor, ‘How Season of Grazing and Herbivore Selectivity Influence Monsoon Tall-Grass Communities of Northern Australia’, Journal of Vegetation Science 9, no. 1 (February 1, 1998): 123–32. defoliation, habitat fragmentation and changes of the soil as a consequence of densification.22 Kimberly A. With and Thomas O. Crist, ‘Critical Thresholds in Species’ Responses to Landscape Structure’, Ecology 76, no. 8 (December 1, 1995): 2446–59. Richard J. Hobbs, ‘Synergisms among Habitat Fragmentation, Livestock Grazing, and Biotic Invasions in Southwestern Australia’, Conservation Biology 15, no. 6 (December 1, 2001): 1522–8

Archaeology · Biology · Ecological systems theory · Environmental ethics · Geography · Indigenous · Political science · Population · Racism · Sociology · Unintended consequences · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation · Ecology

• Living (and dying) on dry bread

  Steven Farry•Food Culture & Society•2021

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