Washington by uprooting what they saw as the useless native crops and replacing them with what they valued. Yet the corn, tomatoes and wheat which they planted could not thrive in this alien environment. These new Washingtonians failed in their attempts to master nature, to transform wilderness into garden (Columbo 566). The haughtiness of their ill-favored intent "to get the land subdued and the wilde nature out of it" had failed them (Columbo 566). When any one large expanse is artificially restricted to a single plant, ecological disaster often strikes in the form of weeds. In Washington when these new-fangled crops failed, Canadian thistle, a hearty and irritating weed, ran rampant in the newly plowed fields and the land overrun by grazing. When the thistle substituted itself for the domesticated grasses, the land was no longer able to support livestock. Sheep died when they had nowhere to graze (Columbo 566). Desiring to domesticate the land the western settlers decimated it.
Gordon and Suzuki begin their essay "How Did We Come to This?" with reference to a strange biological phenomenon, "the boiled frog syndrome" (Columbo 581). A frog can continue to live in a water heating in a pot with the temperature gradually increased until it reaches boiling point, 1000 (Columbo 581). Gordon and Suzuki brilliantly suggest that this is the perfect metaphor for the modern decimation of the ecosphere. Pollution, erosion of the food chain, extinction, and toxic destruction of the earth have been ongoing for so long that their perpetual increase is not deemed as dangerous as it actually is. The greenhouse effect serves as environmentalists' equivalent of biology's boiled frog syndrome (Columbo 581). The greenhouse effect can be directly traced to the human refusal to submit to nature's laws rather than repeatedly trying to circumvent them.
In Australia the plague of the rabbit is not their only "natural" disaster. Practi...