Wolfgang Schwerdt

The South Seas: untouched nature, birds of paradise, stunningly beautiful coral reefs, rainforests with wild animals—these are the images that tour operators use to lure us to the other side of the world. But the Europeans who discovered a new world for themselves on their voyages to the South Seas over the past 350 years, took possession of it, and adapted it to Western needs, brought deadly companions for the flora and fauna in their luggage. And they ushered in an era of unbridled exploitation and irrevocable destruction of ecosystems that had grown over millions of years. Animal migrants accompanied explorers, colonialists, and companies on their campaigns against indigenous cultures and animals and against self-introduced pests, so-called invasive species. Readers learn about the cultural history of animal species such as the kusu, cassowary, tuatara, and many more that are either already extinct or threatened with extinction due to human influence. It also becomes clear that migration has many different facets. The intrusion of non-native species is one, the roaming of sharks through the vastness of the world’s oceans is another, and the annual migrations of Australian emus, against whose threat Australians fought heroic battles in the first half of the 20th century, is a third. The South Seas: untouched nature—a marketing fairy tale with a dark past and present.

Marble cat, Sumatran tiger, leopard, clouded leopard, or black-footed cat. They all have one thing in common: they are threatened with extinction, at least in the wild. Since the dawn of civilization, they have been revered and persecuted, exterminated and idolized. But it is only with European expansion and globalization that their natural habitats around the world are being irretrievably destroyed at an ever-increasing rate. “Rotbart’s Wild Relatives” is a cultural-historical journey from early times through the 17th century, when the process of globalization was already in full swing, to modern times and the current challenges facing species and habitat conservation in the face of the so-called Sixth Extinction, the sixth mass extinction in the history of the Earth. Readers are immersed in a world of divine rulers, cultural heroes, man-eating big cats, unscrupulous profiteers, historical extermination campaigns, and trigger-happy naturalists. For the cultural history of anthropogenic species extinction is marked by greed and obsession with power, scientific passion, religious convictions, and a good dose of stupidity on the part of the animal species that, in its hubris, calls itself Homo sapiens, i.e., wise and rational.