Embodying the Anthropocene: Embattled crustaceans, extractivism, and eco-tourism on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean)

Abstract

Christmas Island, in the north-eastern Indian Ocean, remained uninhabited until 1888 when British entrepreneurs established a phosphate mining operation that has continued to the present. Over the last 132 years, the island has experienced a series of impacts that typify the effects of extractivism globally. Acquired by Australia in 1958, the island has also been the site of a major immigration detention centre, set up in 2006 to process and deter Asian asylum seekers. In recent decades, tourism has also been added to the economic mix in a form primarily orientated to the island’s distinct fauna, an enterprise that co-exists uneasily with established mining and internment operations. In these regards, the island has rapidly experienced a range of transnational pressures that have distorted and compromised its environment. As such, the island’s recent ‘biography’ exemplifies the impact and scale of integrated Anthropocene factors. Drawing on recent work on the nature of human ecodynamics, this article examines the character and role of the island’s eco-assets – and its crustaceans, in particular – in the emerging experience economy of eco-tourism, illustrating the tensions and instability underlying the latter and its awkward co-existence with mining and detention operations. In this manner, the article characterises the Anthropocene as the central determinant of the present and of possible futures for the island.