Migrant Ecologies

James Beattie, an award-winning environmental and world historian, is associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington. Ryan Tucker Jones is Ann Swindells Professor in History at the University of Oregon. Edward Dallam Melillo is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College.

Encompassing the expansive ocean, Migrant Ecologies finds coherence in Matt Masuda’s conception of the Pacific as a place of “multiple translocalisms,” marvelously varied culturally and ecologically, but tied together by movement. Here a splendid cast of characters-sooty shearwaters, chickens, dogs, rats, whales, tuna, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, and people-cross latitude, longitude, and coast lines, shaping lands and lives as they go, but all the while subject to the effects of human impacts, cultural mores, climatic circumstances, and other influences. So we see Maori hunting affecting the diet of Indigenous North Americans, traditional patterns of island land-holding working against the introduction of commercial farming, and tourists altering the nearshore ecology of Hawai‘i. In this intriguing environmental history, exceptionalism and cosmopolitanism go hand in hand to complicate the ramifications of development and extractivism." - Graeme Wynn. The University of British Columbia"From bird migration to nuclear radiation, Migrant Ecologies brilliantly demonstrates how migration and mobility underpinned environmental histories of the Pacific World from the deep past to the present. This illuminating book invigorates debates about indigenous histories and agency by showing how human and non-human migration have fundamentally shaped the Pacific in every historical period. Migrant Ecologies not only offers a new way to understand the Pacific but also provides a model for other environmental histories struggling to reconcile global and indigenous paradigms in a conceptual framework." - Brett Bennett, University of Johannesburg and Western Sydney University