Remaking the Land: The Acclimatization Movement and Anglo Ideas of Nature

An enthusiasm for introducing animals and birds that could be hunted or that re-minded settlers of home swept over the Anglo settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The movement was much stronger in Australia and New Zealand than in Canada or the United States, for both biological and social reasons. It represented a generation's ideas about nature and the relationship of human beings to nature—ideas deeply rooted in Western culture. We have inherited the landscapes that they shaped and their ideas as well, though today we express them in very different form.