Despite occasional lamentations, and even while predicting severe consequences such as climate change, it is evident that Junghuhn suppressed his ethical uncertainties in order to execute his colonial duties in the name of science. But was this science in name only?⁴⁸ Would Junghuhn’s practice have differed if his research was articulated in a non-positivist scientific context? This is an extremely difficult question, tending as it does toward a severe anachronism; fundamentally, we cannot answer it directly. Yet, what we want to stress through this question is that Junghuhn’s doubt, his recurring uncertainty about the colonial project, and his intuitive concerns about climate change, were all subsumed under an image of positivist technoscience that connected a colonial political economy, field observation, and scientific measurement in an inescapable loop of socioenvironmental violence. Even while reveling in the freedom he was afforded by the many high summits of the Javanese mountains, he ultimately refused to see how his observations would condemn the human and nonhuman inhabitants living below to brutal forms of colonization. But, even if it is obvious that his tropical paradise could not be sustained through the colonial observations which almost immediately mandated its eradication, could such a paradise at least be collected?

Collecting Paradise

There was no seeing everything at once: no certainty.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (1972)


Between 1854 and 1862, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace explored the Malay Archipelago, ardently documenting the region’s geography and biodiversity while amassing a enormous collection of specimens for museums in Europe. His fieldwork, findings, and personal experiences are chronicled in the book The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise—A narrative of travel, with sketches of man and nature, published in 1869 following Wallace’s return to Europe. The complex relationship between the will to knowledge and the gathering of scientific data is illustrated in part by the unfathomable scale of Wallace’s collection of natural history specimens. As a young man in his early twenties, he had come across the controversial, anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which first ignited his fascination with the heretical idea that organisms might change their form over time; while the notion provoked in Wallace a plan for future research, the suggestion that species’ transmutationcould explain the natural efflorescence was rigorously opposed by Charles Lyell, Britain’s preeminent geologist.⁴⁹ Committed to understanding first-hand this complex problem of morphological development, together with his friend and fellow “beetle-hunter” Henry Bates, Wallace planned for a collecting expedition to the Amazon Basin, which would occupy him from 1848 to 1852. The South American tropics were fecund region for an extensive study of evolution; indeed, as Wallace noted in a pre-departure letter to Bates: “I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly––principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species.”⁵⁰ Yet, even after Wallace filled his notebooks with detailed reports, sketches of plants and animals, and maps—all of which produced a preliminary basis for understanding biogeographical distribution in the Amazon—his groundbreaking scientific revelation would have to be deferred. While he was returning to Europe aboard the Helen, after twenty-six days at sea, the brig’s cargo caught fire and the vessel was abandoned; Wallace lost nearly everything he had painstakingly collected and recorded.⁵¹

Two years later—still convinced that he would be able to solve the problems of natural selection, geographical distribution, and variations in plant and animal life only if he could gather an original collection that would be as varied and comprehensive as possible—Wallace would try again to solve the riddle of species transmutation, this time in Southeast Asia. During his eight years in the Malay Archipelago, he sent back to England an amazing 125,660 specimens of natural history, among them five thousand species hitherto unknown to science. While many of these were sold to private collections and museums, Wallace kept for himself approximately three thousand bird-skins (including roughly one thousand different species), as well as twenty thousand beetle and butterfly specimens.⁵² The sale of these specimens allowed Wallace to pay for his travels and, after his return to Europe, he was able to use his personal collection to continue thinking through various questions of evolutionary biology.⁵³ The following passage from an essay published one year after the expedition, “On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago,” explains Wallace’s rationale for pursuing a “perfect collection”:

[The naturalist] looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation inevitably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past. It is therefore, an important object,   which governments and scientific institutions should immediately take steps to secure, that in all tropical countries colonised by Europeans the most perfect collections possible in every branch of natural history should be made and deposited in national museums, where the may be available for study and interpretation.⁵⁴ As a “site” for scientific study, the awesome biodiversity of the archipelago is still evident in more contemporary estimations. According to Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita, “in almost all plant and animal taxa, Indonesia has levels of species diversity and endemism that rank within the highest in the world.” Absolute quantitative measures of the world’s biodiversity remain difficult to achieve, but it has been estimated that Wallace was exposed to “more than ten thousand species of trees, about a tenth of the world’s flowering plant species, about an eighth of all mammal species, nearly a sixth of all reptile and amphibian species, a sixth of all bird species, and about a third of all fish species.”⁵⁵

Until just a few decades ago, one could still encounter many of the lush forest landscapes in Southeast Asia that led to Wallace’s two most important publications. First, in 1855, he wrote “On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species,” which he published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September of the same year. The conclusions of what came to be known as “The Sarawak Law” are a key in the development of a theory of evolution by natural selection: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species.”species.”⁵⁶ The second publication, which has a more complicated reception, also indicates the significance of Indonesian biodiversity in the development of the theory of evolution. At the beginning of 1858, Wallace found himself in the Moluccas (the so-called Spice Islands), where he spent time on Halmahera, Gilolo, and Ternate. It was here that he was introduced to the Standardwing bird of paradise that would later be given his name: Semioptera wallacei. In early March, Wallace sent Darwin a letter asking him to pass his writing on to Charles Lyell “if he [Darwin] thought it sufficiently important to show it to Sir Lyell.”⁵⁷ In the essay which accompanied the letter, “On The Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” Wallace described the mechanism of evolution as the process of “natural selection.”⁵⁸ According to his biographical reflections, this understanding occurred to him as he lay suffering from a severefever.⁵⁹ On 1 July 1858, the so-called “Darwin-Wallace” paper was read at the Linnean Society in London. The paper was officially published by the Society on 20 August 1858; Darwin’s monograph On the Origin of Species followed on 24 November 1859. Many prominent authors have developed careful and considered reflections on Wallace’s contribution to the theory of evolution by natural selection; our ambition is to advance a reading of the will to knowledge as it is instantiated in Wallace’s estimation of the natural world (and the consequences of its degradation) through the development practices at the core of the colonial project.⁶⁰   

As a result of logging, forest fires, agricultural clearing, open-pit mining, road construction, and oil palm plantations, many of the areas which afforded Wallace the living evidentiary of evolution have all but disappeared. In fact, it is now estimated that within a decade, ninety-eight percent of the Indonesian rainforest will be destroyed completely if developments remain on a business-as-usual trajectory.⁶¹ When we asked evolutionary biologists whether or not they believed it would still be possible to develop the theory of evolution, or biogeographical distribution, based on a collection of specimens from the Malay Archipelago today, most answered in the negative. According to our interlocutors, animal and plant species have been radically displaced, and many are now present on islands where they would not have been found in Wallace’s time. Thus, as a result of various anthropogenic factors, the species’ scrambled and often precarious appearance in the devastated forests of the archipelago means that the story they tell today is of a very different “nature.” ⁶²

Still, Wallace was not immune to the realities of land-use transformation in the region, even if these changes were much less destructive in his time than they are among contemporary plantation developments. In one appraisal, Wallace remarked:

[F]uture ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve; and while professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown.⁶³

For Wallace, the blindness of the colonial project and its inevitable destruction of nature makes the entire scientific enterprise culpable because “we had it in our power to preserve” [authors’ emphasis] these so-called “records of Creation.” Such an ecclesiastical image of nature may seem odd, especially given that Wallace’s own writing helped to displace the belief that nature was the work of a divine creator. However, as anthropologist Anna Tsing has suggested in her book Friction, this idyllic image may still be of strategic importance: “The romance of nature gives grandeur and autonomy to the natural world; those who appreciate that grandeur are also able to feel the shock of nature’s desecration and destruction. Is it possible, I wondered, that, even in Indonesia, the romance of nature is one important route to an appreciation of nature’s fragility?”⁶⁴ What, then, of Wallace’s ambition for a perfect collection, which seems to express simultaneously a deep  appreciation of nature and a resignation that, through the very act of this collection, the scientist participates in a process that will end in destruction?

Nowhere is this vexing, schizoscopicperspective on colonial collecting more pronounced than in Wallace’s description of the birds of paradise.⁶⁵ While these remarkable birds were known in Europe at least since the Renaissance, they had arrived there in the form of lifeless skins; curiously, because these skins showed no osteological evidence of their hindlimbs, legend had it that they lived in the sky and never landed on earth except to die. Thus, Wallace was proud to proclaim himself the first Englishman to ever see birds of paradise alive in their terrestrial habitat. He even succeeded, against all odds, in transporting two living birds to London where he hoped the domestic aviaries of the Crystal Palace or Kew Gardens would allow them to survive in captivity. Paradoxically, it is the experience of beholding their natural beauty in the wild that inspired Wallace to deliver one of his most confounding statements on extinction, which he narrates near the end of The Malay Archipelago:

I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course—year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy.⁶⁶

What to make of such a troubling, hallucinatory adumbration today? Is this not the very melancholy that natural history collections and their attendant museological presentations are meant to neutralize?

Traditionally referred to as manuk dewata (“God’s birds”), it is their second Malay appellation, burung mati (“dead birds”), which expresses the cruel irony of their fate as symbols of an expulsion from paradise. There is now no doubt that human activities, including the fanatical consumption of fossil fuels, industrialized agriculture, bioengineering, resource extraction, global waste management, and pollution have violently disturbed Wallace’s “nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature.” Direct forms of consumption also played their part in this irreversible bioturbation; only a few decades after Wallace left Southeast Asia, the trade in exotic avifauna saw export numbers reach annual highs of up to 80,000 bird of paradise skins, most of which arrived in Europe to adorn luxury items such as women’s hats. Such activities caused a far-reaching conflict among residents and colonial authorities that lasted for nearly forty years and resulted in a 1931 prohibition against killing the birds; the debates over the preservation of habitats for birds of paradise are thus said to mark the start of environmental politics inIndonesia.⁶⁷

Wallace’s narrative in the Anthropocene, as with Junghuhn’s, trouble any simple inheritance of the colonial will to knowledge. If the acquisition of knowledge by way of colonial collecting was, according to Wallace, indelibly connected to an inevitable process of extinction, how might we reconcile such scientific ambitions with the demand for an ethical disposition that could contest such violent eventualities? On this point, we concur with the philosopher of science Michel Serres when he writes, “We are embarked on an irreversible economic, scientific, and technological adventure; one can regret the fact, and even do so with skill and profundity, but that’s how it is, and it depends less on us than on what we have inherited from ourhistory.”⁶⁸

Inheritance & Intrusion

The instant of nature forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life leaving behind just ghosts rustling like an old map.

— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (1998)


As Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares has presciently observed, “different regimes of power will produce different natures, for nature is not natural; it is the product of cultivation, and more frequently, of  conflict.”⁶⁹ So it was at the close of the nineteenth century when another German naturalist, Ernst Haeckel, arrived in Southeast Asia; his personal impressions of the expedition are documented inAus Insulinde: Malayische Reisebriefe (1901) and the three-volume Wanderbilder (1904), all of which contain descriptive texts, photographs, and numerous watercolors. The main objective of Haeckel’s trip was to continue his research into various radiolaria, medusae, and siphonophorae, not to seek out the so-called “Java Man,” the discovery of which he had predicted in the 1860s, following the publication of Darwin’sOrigin.⁷⁰ In his varied reflections on Java, Haeckel does indeed defend the idea of man and ape descending from a shared, extinct primate origin, and maintains that such a theory is already canonical. Although he is not in search of evidence for this “missing link,” he notes that the ability to study the remaining “anthropomorphs” is nevertheless extremely valuable, proceeding to then give an account of a walk he took with a baby orangutan in Singapore’s botanical garden. In this excruciating narrative of colonial racism, he also describes a friendship between the orangutan and a nine-year-old Malay boy, which, in his view, could be attributed to the fact that “the lower races” (i.e. Malayans) share a close evolutionary proximity to great apes. Later, he even suggests that Malays could best be understood as an “amphibian human race” because they enjoy fishing and living on boats.⁷¹

The consequences of such racist ethnographic research are well known after the genocides of the twentieth century; it is our concern to examine the less explicit yet violent inheritance of colonialnature.⁷² For such a review, a final story from Haeckel’s expedition will suffice. In the late fall of 1900, the naturalist visited Buitenzorg’s institute of botany, at the foot of Gunung Gedeh. Following his ascent, it is notable how the fertile plateau was still capable of stirring delight, as it once had done for Junghuhn sixty years before. But Haeckel’s encounter was no longer with wild, tropical nature; instead, the vegetation was supplanted by an image of neatly cultivated colonial plots. Haeckel found no trace of the once abundant rhinoceros, only emerald green, terraced rice fields. He noted, “It is especially through the numerously scattered villages (kampongsor dessas) surrounded by orchards and surmounted by the canopies of palm trees that the friendly impression obtains a highly painterly charm.”⁷³ The area was completely changed, which is to say, colonized. The imported fruit saplings from Europe that once traumatized Junghuhn—even if it was his own report that led to their planting—had now successfully taken root, giving the site a harmonious appearance of a cultivated, but no less abundant, tropical nature. How should we read this colonial inheritance? If Haeckel could so casually apprehend the colonization of the landscape as an objective fact of nature, or at least as an indication of the successful management of nature under the Dutch, how might we, in the Anthropocene, begin reassembling the various natures which are now entirely subsumed under a system of Integrated World Capitalism?⁷⁴

One approach would involve a reconsideration of the act of scientific observation itself. In a startling footnote meant to summarize the consequences of the German forestry industry on tropical nature, historian James Scott makes an exceptional comment about the results of reverse hallucinations. Referencing Werner Karl Heisenberg, the theoretical physicist best known for his treatment of the problem of uncertainty in scientific observation, Scott notes that the colonial will to knowledge produces a stultifying transformation.