The settlers CHANGE THE LAND: Zach Wallis, Metabolic Explosion, Settler Colonialism, and the Ambivalence of Ecology in Pākehā New Zealand, 1868-1899, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The settlers CHANGE THE LAND: Zach Wallis, Metabolic Explosion, Settler Colonialism, and the Ambivalence of Ecology in Pākehā New Zealand, 1868-1899, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025

10Sep25

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, following the conclusion of the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, settler society in Aotearoa undertook a political economic project aimed at intensifying and consolidating the local settler colonial project. In doing so, the 1870s were marked by metabolic explosion: the systematic, temporally compressed, and politically driven transformation of environment, ecology, energy, landscape, political economy, and society in the archipelago. In their attempt to consolidate settler colonialism, Pākehā society thus became inheritors of the British fossil economy, and the varying political economic and environmental practices they adopted combined to form a metabolic feedback loop of dizzying complexity and simultaneity. This thesis examines how Pākehā society understood ecology, defined broadly as a set of discourses concerning collective human relations to nature and ideas about the relationship between species. Adopting a cultural materialist approach centered upon the relationship between metabolic explosion, settler colonialism, and discourse, this thesis delivers a critical assessment of the structure and politics of Pākehā ecological discourse in late nineteenth-century New Zealand. Using actors’ categories provided by William Pember Reeves’ 1898 history, The Long White Cloud, it finds that these discourses assumed a dialectical structure. The “thesis” valourized colonization by understanding the archipelago as “void space,” meant to be filled by foreign flora, fauna, and people. The “antithesis” bemoaned the ruinous and ecocidal character of Pākehā settlement, with the effect of influencing early and often unsuccessful attempts at forest preservation. The “synthesis,” emerging out of Darwinian natural history, was an ambivalent utilitarianism, overdetermined by metabolic explosion and the cultural logic of settler colonialism and which precluded any truly radical critique of Pākehā environmental and ecological transformation. Despite the supersession of this thinking by the early twentieth century, a similar utilitarian ambivalence has marked popular discourse about the environment and ecology in the Occident and beyond throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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