Introduction: The Ecology of Fencing

Abstract

In the autumn of 2004.? a remarkable gathering of 102 scholars took place at St Antony's College, Oxford: they had come for an interdisciplinary symposium on 'Trees, rain, and politics in Africa: the dynamics and politics of climatic and environmental change'. Symposium papers were grouped into panels that focused on either particular resources (such as trees and water) or particular aspects of social relationships (such as politics and discourses). This format resulted in a series of dialogues between the natural science and social science paradigms, and this first half of the present issue o? Africa takes as its theme just one of those interdisciplinary conversations. Taken together, these authors demonstrate how the hybridization of natural science and social science can benefit understandings of the African past, interpretations of the African present and planning for the African future.1 All three articles focus on the unexpected social and ecological effects of physical boundaries in the semi-arid Karoo region of South Africa, but in different historical contexts. For both people and wildlife, life in the Karoo had long centred on mobility and flexibility as adaptations to the area's scarce and unpredictable rainfall. In the late nineteenth century, however, South African farmers increasingly inscribed social organization upon the landscape by enclosing land with fences (van Sittert 2002). This reorganization of space had, as this group of articles shows, severe long-term consequences because enclosure made relationships between society and ecology in the region increasingly inflexible. As the Karoo system 'hardened' through the physical means of fencing, the social means of institution building and the ideological means of apartheid policies, particularly fragile landscapes became less resilient. Current efforts to conserve the unique vegetation of the Karoo are building new physical, social and ideological structures atop a complex history of ecological disruption, social differentiation and ideological contestation. Each of the following articles on the region shows the complex local legacy of boundary making in the Karoo. Together, however, they show a regional process and point out