Peripheral Visions: Californian-Australian Environmental Contacts, c. 1850s-1910

This article offers a comparative and transnational study of environmental contacts between California and Australia. It analyzes "peripheral visions" of the ideal society, shaped by isolation, distant markets, and climate similarities, using staple, world system, and cultural landscape theories. Key exchanges of plants, irrigation policy, and biological control emerged from acclimatization sentiment and ideas of a garden landscape of small-scale yeoman farmers centered on horticulture. The exchange was used to control environmental damage in a form of landscape "renovation," combining rational resource conservation and preservation. First fashioned in California, it spread to Australia and had reciprocal effects in the United States.