Global Ideas in Local Places: The Humanities in Environmental Management

Land management has become a multi-faceted enterprise, with professionals, locals and others contributing variously to the outcomes, increasingly working in partnership arrangements all over the world. However, each local place has a different suite of 'experts' speaking for its future. This paper explores four key drivers of conservation initiatives: place, landscape, biodiversity and livelihood, and how these shape environmental management in the Desert Channels region of south-western Queensland and in the Quantock hills in Somerset, England. The aim is to show how the question of who is an authority on place contrasts in these two ecologically distinct places, and at different times in the period from 1945 to the present. The two cases demand very different scales of management, and build on different cultural traditions, but they share a surprising number of commonalities, particularly about who are the experts in managing the future of the natural world. The commonalities reflect global forces that are changing the environmental management of local places. The paper considers the value of art, history and the broader humanities in enriching and critiquing global scientific and management ideals and in empowering communities to engage in dialogue about managing their local places

Histories for Changing Times: Entering the Anthropocene?

In 2000, Paul Crutzen proposed that the Earth had entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where humanity is changing planetary systems. Since this time, the Anthropocene has figured prominently (and controversially) in global change science, an

Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia.

In 1968 Sir William McDonald, Victoria's Minister of Lands, announced a rural settlement scheme for the Little Desert in Victoria's far north-west. The conservation campaign that ensued was one of unprecedented vehemence and sophistication. It cost McDonald his parliamentary seat and consigned the Little Desert Settlement Scheme to oblivion. The Little Desert dispute was a watershed in Australian environmental politics. Suburban activists, scientists, amateur naturalists, economists, and bureaucrats banded together to oppose McDonald's ill-conceived scheme. It marked the beginning of a new consciousness of nature and the concept of "biological diversity" was voiced in the halls of parliament for the first time. In Defending the Little Desert, Libby Robin offers a sensitive account of the unlikely coalition of forces that assembled to save the Little Desert. This account of the campaign, perhaps the earliest expression of ecological consciousness in Australia, is relevant to all people interested in conservation and the environment, in participatory political processes, and in "public science." (Text adapted from Melbourne University Publishing.

Being first: Why the Americans needed it, and why Royal National Park didn't stand in their way

This is a history of beginnings, but it doesn't come from 1879. Rather it is about the politics of the World Centennial of National Parks in 1972. Not in 1964-100 years after the first national park in the world, Yosemite. Nor in 1979-100 years after Roy

Slamming the Anthropocene: Performing Climate Change in Museums

Today’s museums are generally expected to use their objects and collections in ways that extend beyond exhibitions. Theatrical events, for example, can provide important complementary activities. This particularly applies to public issues such as climate change and nature conservation, which are often framed in scientific and technical terms. An exhibition is expensive to mount and demands long lead times, but a public program is ‘light on its feet’; it can respond to a topical moment such as a sudden disaster, and it can incorporate new scientific findings where relevant. One way to make such debates inclusive and non-technical is to explore through performance the cultural and emotional dimensions of living with environmental change. Violent Ends: The Arts of Environmental Anxiety, staged at the National Museum of Australia in 2011,is an example of a one-day event that used art, film and performance to explore anxieties and public concerns about climate change. The event opened with the Chorus of Women, who sang a ‘Lament for Gaia’, and it concluded with ‘Reconciliation’, both works excerpted from The Gifts of the Furies (composed by Glenda Cloughly, 2009).[1] The performance presented issues that are often rendered as ‘dry science’ in a way that enabled emotional responses to be included in discussions about global warming. A legacy of this event is a ‘web exhibition’ that includes podcasts, recordings and some of the art, including that of a leading Australian environmental artist, Mandy Martin, whose more recent work we discuss further below.[2] The curators of the event, Carolyn Strange (Australian National University), Libby Robin (National Museum of Australia and Australian National University), William L Fox (Director of the Center for Art+Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno) and Tom Griffiths (Director of the Centre for Environmental History, Australian National University), are all scholars with active partnerships in the arts and the museum sector. Violent Ends explored climate change through a variety of environmental arts. Since 2011, we have seen many comparable programs, in Australia and beyond

Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future

This book documents a collaborative, environmental art project on Puritjarra, a rock shelter in the Cleland Hills in western central Australia. The project incorporates the perspectives of scholars of archaeology, ecology, environmental history and the history of science as well as those of contemporary artists drawing upon the heritage of Indigenous peoples and settlers. It explores diverse ways of representing and understanding a place where desert oaks may well have been a continuous feature of the landscape for the last 100,000 years, while plant and animal species introduced more recently have caused significant change within the span of a single human lifetime. Recurring themes include water, food, shelter and spiritual renewal. The aim of the project: “co-understanding… valuing the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.

Uncertain Seasons in the El Niño Continent: Local and Global Views

As global climate change shifts seasonal patterns, local and uncertain seasons of Australia have global relevance. Australia’s literature tracks extreme local weather events, exploring ‘slow catastrophes’ and ‘endurance.’ Humanists can change public policy in times when stress is a state of life, by reflecting on the psyches of individuals, rather than the patterns of the state. ‘Probable’ futures, generated by mathematical models that predict nature and economics, have little to say about living with extreme weather. Hope is not easily modelled. The frameworks that enable hopeful futures are qualitatively different. They can explore the unimaginable by offering an ‘interior apprehension.