ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Imperial Epistemology of Fraser Darling’s ‘Ecological Reconnaissance’

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 3 - (Post)-Imperial Ecologies

English Abstract

Having earned fame through his human ecological studies of northwest Scotland (West Highland Survey 1955), British popular ecologist and author, Frank Fraser Darling (1903–1979) was in demand from governments and conservation organisations as an expert advisor. In the 1950s, he received commissions to conduct a series of regional ecological surveys in colonised spaces: Alaska (1952), Northern Rhodesia (1956–7), Kenya (1958) and Sudan (1961). Fraser Darling described his investigations as “ecological reconnaissance, no more and no less”. This reconnaissance was broad in scope, including environmental, mental, historical and social factors in his studies of interactions between humans and wildlife. Critics found him unscientific, but he argued that the “narrow view” produced by academic ecologists would not produce the policies governments needed. Furthermore, his wide-ranging reconnaissance was equivocal, practised under both the auspices of the colonial system and the progressive ideas of mid-century human ecology. Focussing on his fieldwork diaries, this paper examines Fraser Darling’s epistemology of ‘reconnaissance’, and how he used this method to construct ecological insights and recommendations from the Alaskan tundra to the African savannah. In doing so, the potentially imperial nature of human ecology and environmentalism will be considered.

Author

• Lawrence Dritsas, University of Edinburgh