ABSTRACT
As land across the world is occupied by expanding human populations and the plants and animals they deliberately introduce, mediation between the competing claims of wilderness ecosystems and animals and humans has become increasingly urgent. Literature can, within certain generic constraints, recreate the human-dominated world in ways which, while it cannot offer immediate practical compromise, does encourage reexamination of the ethics of human destruction and domination of animals and planetary habitats. Implicit in the categories of "feral" and "indigenous" are value ascriptions that have also changed radically and again inconsistently over time particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is axiomatic in ecological or environmental discourse to emphasize quite correctly the disproportionately destructive pressures brought to bear on the planet's shrinking resources by so-called first- and third-world societies. Capitalism and rampant consumerism are castigated for the major part they play, and have played in global environmental degradation.
