Australia’s rich talk about saving the environment; the poor bear the burden of doing it

Public housing tenants struggling with their bills will well understand NSW Community Services Minister Goward’s concern over the rising costs of nails and pots of paint. According to the minister, the carbon tax will push the price of household maintenance up; this is the reasoning behind an increase in public housing rents. But what’s fair about the state government passing its own carbon tax costs on to those least able to afford it

Cultural ecology: the problematic human and the terms of engagement

As an intellectual container ‘cultural ecology’ is fraught with the same conceptual and ontological problems – what Anderson (2005: 280) calls ‘the stale binaries’ - that attend human impacts, cultural landscapes, indeed human and physical geographies. Yet the rich, detailed and diverse empirical material in evidence at the moment contradicts this in the doing. So perhaps we should be confident that in the public conversations we shall be known best by our works. Our students will be most effective if they can both groundtruth the satellite image of coastal vegetation and explain why the tsunami was experienced very differently by subsistence fishers living on a different coastal edge. To ‘begin… by assuming a radical or pure break between humanity and animality’ (Anderson 2005: 271) is a rather different thing to demonstrating spatially and temporally variable differences in the ecological roles of specific peoples and groups of nonhumans. Or showing, using a battery of diverse methodologies, how culturally variable associations of humans and animals have influenced the patterning of plant communities. It is to this body of work I will return in more detail in future reports, while continuing to take issue with the terms of engagement

Nature, culture and time: contested landscapes among environmental managers in Skane, southern Sweden

Our increased understanding of \u27Man\u27s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth\u27 (Thomas 1956) is one of the key scientific achievements of the second half of the 20th century. Human activities now appropriate more than one third of the Earth\u27s terrestrial ecosystem production, and between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet has been transformed by human development (Vitousek et al. 1997). Humans are inextricably embedded in all earth surface processes, and often dominate them. These findings are increasingly being recognised in political and policy spheres, most notably in contemporary debates about climate change (IPCC 2007). Peter Kershaw\u27s work has been an influential component of this achievement, particularly in alerting us to a much longer potential timeframe of human entanglement through huntergatherer use of fire. He has forced us to think differently about cultural landscapes, and his research findings have persistently challenged the ideal of pristine wilderness

Geographical fire research in Australia: Review and prospects

\u27You live in the bush. You live by the rules of the bush, and that\u27s it.\u27 These were the reflective words of Mrs Dunlop upon seeing the blackened rubble of her home, which made headline news the morning after the first, and most destructive, fire front tore through the Blue Mountains in New South Wales on 17 October 2013 (Partridge and Levy, 2013). While seemingly a simple statement, it goes right to the heart of heated public and political debates - past and present - over who belongs where and why in the fire-prone landscapes that surround Australia\u27s cities. Bushfire is a constant and ongoing part of Australian history, ecology and culture. The love of a sunburnt country, the beauty and terror of fire, and the filmy veil of post-fire greenness described in the century-old poem \u27Core of My Heart\u27 (Mackellar, 1908) are still apt depictions of Australian identity today. Yet longer fire seasons and an increase in extreme fire weather days with climate change add both uncertainty and urgency to Australia\u27s ability to coexist with fire in the future (Head et al., 2013)

Diversifying ethnicity in Australia\u27s population and environment debates

Population–environment debates in Australia are at an impasse. While the ability of this continent to sustain more migrants has attracted persistent scrutiny, nuanced explorations of diverse migrant cultures and their engagements with Australian landscapes have scarcely begun. Yet as we face the challenges of a climate changing world we would undoubtedly benefit from the most varied knowledges we can muster. This paper brings together three arenas of environmental debate circulating in Australia—the immigration/carrying capacity debate, comparisons between Indigenous and Anglo-European modes of environmental interaction, and research on household sustainability dilemmas—to demonstrate the exclusionary tendencies of each. We then attempt to reorient them in productive ways, by attending to the complexity of environmental sustainability in a context of immense ethnic diversity. Attentiveness to ethnic diversity offers three important insights: (1) Anglo-European Australian understandings of nature and environmentalism are culturally specific, but other perspectives are possible; (2) tensions can arise when ethnic differences in environmental attitude or practice come into contact; and (3) cultural environmental research offers scope to identify ethnically diverse vernacular sustainability practices that should be supported. Each of these threads requires attention in a context where population–environment debates often overlook cultural complexity, and readily spiral into strident anti-immigration sentiments

Nativeness, invasiveness and nation in Australian plants

The conceptualization of alien invasive species conflates two axes of variability that have become unhelpfully blurred. The nativeness/alienness axis refers to the presumed belonging of a species in ecological or social space. Invasiveness refers to the behavior of the species in question, particularly in relation to other species. The overlay of nation introduces further variability. Teasing these axes apart is important for more effective environmental management. We examine these concepts using two influential forms of ecological knowledge: the biogeographical and ecological literature and the vernacular experiences of suburban backyarders. Three case studes, the invasive native Pittosporum undulatum and two invasive exotics, Lantana camara and Cinnamomum camphora, illustrate the complex and contingent nature of human interactions with such species and the potential for human interactions to increase and/or reduce the propagation of plant species

Becoming differently modern: Geographic contributions to a generative climate politics

Anthropogenic climate change is a quintessentially modern problem in its historical origins and discursive framing, but how well does modernist thinking provide us with the tools to solve the problems it created? On one hand even though anthropogenic climate change is argued to be a problem of human origins, solutions to which will require human actions and engagements, modernity separates people from climate change in a number of ways. On the other, while amodern or more-than-human concepts of multiple and relational agency are more consistent with the empirical evidence of humans being deeply embedded in earth surface processes, these approaches have not sufficiently accounted for human power in climate change, nor articulated generative pathways forward. We argue that recent research in human geography has much to offer because it routinely combines both deconstructive impulses and empirical compulsions (ethnographic, material, embodied, practice-based). It has a rather unique possibility to be both deconstructive and generative/ creative. We bring together more-than-human geographies and cross-scalar work on agency and governance to suggest how to reframe climate change and climate change response in two main ways: elaborating human and non-human continuities and differences, and identifying and harnessing vernacular capacities