Abstract
If the world is composed of seamless flows of matter and energy, of messy bundles and movements, of unceasing change and expansive diversity, islands can help us to perceive how this flux is resolved in particular places. Since the revealing fieldwork of Charles Darwin (1859) and Alfred Wallace (1880), islands have allowed and encouraged the astute observer to conceive of and describe “biogeography”: how land, climate, weather, flora and fauna exist in concert and co-partake in the struggle for life, and how the human mind has envisaged, and the human hand has affected, these features through time (e.g. Grove 1995). In this light, islands are hardly insular and ought not be studied in isolation. Rather, they exist in the open, as iterations, and offer privileged glimpses of quintessentially fluid “entanglements of life” (Ingold 2008). They invite comparative study and offer lessons of particular experience and of natural and cultural history more generally (Baldacchino 2004).
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Niles, D., Baldacchino, G. (2011). Introduction: On Island Futures. In: Baldacchino, G., Niles, D. (eds) Island Futures. Global Environmental Studies. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-53989-6_1
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