Deborah Bird Rose

Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities

Welcome to the first volume of this new, international, open-access journal. Environmental Humanities aims to support and further a wide range of conversations on environmental issues in this time of growing awareness of the ecological and social challenges facing all life on earth. The field of environmental humanities is growing rapidly, both in research and teaching. In just the past few years, a number of research centres and undergraduate and postgraduate programs have emerged at universities all around the world: in the USA, the UK, Scandinavia, Taiwan and Australia, to name just a few places. In each area, this broad domain of scholarship is being taken up and developed in a distinct way. In general, however, the environmental humanities can be understood to be a wide ranging response to the environmental challenges of our time. Drawing on humanities and social science disciplines that have brought qualitative analysis to bear on environmental issues, the environmental humanities engages with fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility and purpose in a time of rapid, and escalating, change. The emergence of the environmental humanities is part of a growing willingness to engage with the environment from within the humanities and social sciences. While historically both fields have focused on ‘the human’ in a way that has often excluded or backgrounded the non-human world, since the 1960s, interest in environmental issues has gradually gained pace within disciplines, giving us, for example, strong research agendas in environmental history, environmental philosophy, environmental anthropology and sociology, political ecology, posthuman geographies and ecocriticism (among others). Indeed, in many of these fields, what have traditionally been termed ‘environmental issues’ have been shown to be inescapably entangled with human ways of being in the world, and broader questions of politics and social justice. But recent interest in the environmental humanities, as a field and a label, is a result of something more than the growth of work within a range of distinct disciplinary areas. Rather, the emergence of the environmental humanities indicates a renewed emphasis on bringing 1 Some of this diversity is showcased in the profiles of members of our editorial board, available at: http://environmentalhumanities.org/about/profiles

From the other side of the knowledge frontier: Indigenous knowledge, social–ecological relationships and new perspectives

A river is like a mirror: it reflects the care given by people whose lives depend upon it. A scald on red ground or the slow death of a river reveals more than troubled ecological relationships – they are signs of broken social relationships. How people take care of social relationships and how they take care of ecological relationships are the same question. In this paper we emphasise the importance that Aboriginal people place on social relationships for good ecological relationships. In the past few decades natural resource managers have sought Indigenous knowledge relevant to Western ideas of environment, and in doing so, created distinctions between ‘ecological’ and ‘social’ knowledge – this is an artificial ‘white-fella’ separation. Additionally, Indigenous knowledge has been treated as if it were a static archive that need only be extracted and applied to resource development and planning. Instead it is dynamic, adaptive and contextual. As a consequence of compartmentalisation and the assumption of timelessness, the importance of social relationships in ecological relationships has been overlooked. Some research has explored similarities between Indigenous knowledge and the Western concept of adaptive management, and raised the possibility of synergy between them. We agree there are possible connections and opportunities for exchange and further learning between Indigenous knowledge and ecological resilience and adaptive management. However, Indigenous knowledge and Western science belong to different world views. An important task is to explore ways of grappling with this ontological challenge. We suggest a conceptual turn around that we believe could assist in opening a dialogue as well as creating a set of foundational principles for robust ecological and social relationships.

On history, trees, and ethical proximity

Ashis Nandy urges us, in his essay ‘Historys Forgotten Doubles’, to consider alternative modes of engaging with the past. I take up his inspiring challenge in relation to my long-term research with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory of Australia. Through an examination of several short stories that connect past, present and future, I consider an Indigenous critique of colonising damage and destruction. Nandy suggests that ‘each ahistorical culture is so in its own unique style’. The effort to engage with an ahistorical culture on its own terms requires me to provide a certain amount of understanding of key cultural facts, and an understanding of story structure and intention. With that analysis in place, I then offer an account of a story in context. This story (within a story) moves me to a consideration of the prophetic voice and its capacity to expose ethical proximity through vulnerability. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and James Hatley, in particular, I argue for a historiography that is both other-wise and Earth-wise.Ashis Nandy urges us, in his essay ‘Historys Forgotten Doubles’, to consider alternative modes of engaging with the past. I take up his inspiring challenge in relation to my long-term research with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory of Australia. Through an examination of several short stories that connect past, present and future, I consider an Indigenous critique of colonising damage and destruction. Nandy suggests that ‘each ahistorical culture is so in its own unique style’. The effort to engage with an ahistorical culture on its own terms requires me to provide a certain amount of understanding of key cultural facts, and an understanding of story structure and intention. With that analysis in place, I then offer an account of a story in context. This story (within a story) moves me to a consideration of the prophetic voice and its capacity to expose ethical proximity through vulnerability. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and James Hatley, in particular, I argue for a historiography ...

Dialogue with Place: Toward an Ecological Body

Bakhtins study of Rabelais and the grotesque body is my starting point. The inspiration is to explore a part of the cultural past of the west in search of subversions that may also be affirmations of alternatives. This is a restorative project that seeks to elaborate a possible dialogue between different moments in the marginal realm inhabited by spectres of language, metaphor, and possibility. My search takes me into the analysis of ProtoIndo-European language and culture, and my purpose is in the present. The dialogical aim of my paper is set within a decolonising endeavor: to explore some of the implications of considering place as a partner in dialogue. I will be looking toward a concept of dialogical interpA©nA©tration between person and place. In considering place, I specifically intend to speak to settler societies, and to the urgent imperative for us settler-descended peoples of learning to make peace with place. I see this as part of the broader issue of developing an ethics of care toward place. How may settlers both acknowledge indigenous peoples prior and continuing rela

Fitting into Country: Ecology and Economics in Indigenous Australia

When Jessie Wirrpa went walkabout, she called out to her ancestors. ‘‘Give us fish,’’ she would call out, ‘‘the kids are hungry.’’ Jessie’s country included the dead as well as the living, the Dreaming ancestors as well as her own parents and grandparents. Everywhere she went she encountered signs of life. A discarded stone spear point, some charred sticks from a campfire, a Dreaming tree that got knocked by lightning when her oldest father died. No distinction between history and prehistory for Jessie: in her country, the present rolled into the past on waves of generations of living beings who had all worked to keep the place alive.

Women and Land Claims

In the Northern Territory the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 has had ambivalent effects. On the one hand, it has enabled more than 47% of the land and 85% of the coastline to be transferred to Aboriginal freehold title, and has thus enabled thousands of Aboriginal people to achieve a great measure of economic and political opportunity. On the other hand, the Act has created inequalities among Aboriginal people. Gender inequality has been pervasive throughout the history of claims to land, but has received far less public attention. Land claims until recently have involved a massive privileging of senior Aboriginal men vis-a-vis senior Aboriginal women. In this chapter, I consider some of the ways in which Aboriginal women have been disadvantaged by the privileging of men in a system that is predominantly controlled by men. My urgent intention is to alert claimants, anthropologists and lawyers who are preparing Native Title cases to some of the precedents in the Act. The marginalization and exclusion that Northern Territory women have experienced is in clear contradiction to the intention of the Act, and must not be repeated in other parts of Australia under the more recent Native Title legislation.

Keeping Faith with the Dead: Mourning and De-extinction

ABSTRACT This paper takes a critical perspective on the emerging prospect of ‘de-extinction’ as a response to the current period of massive biodiversity loss. Drawing on our own humanities and soci...

Gendered substances and objects in ritual: an australian aboriginal study

ABSTRACT The creative action of the foundational beings known as Dreamings lies at the heart of Aboriginal Australian ceremony. In ritual, gender is drawn into a nexus of generative action and interaction. I will make the case that gender characterizes country, ceremonies, many sacred sites and many objects and substances. People, country, sites and ceremonies are integral to the bringing forth of the life of the world, and draw on a root paradigm of birth. I will examine that paradigm from the perspective of gender in domains of blood, ritual, country, men and women, and objects. The analysis will show that while gender is most assuredly a difference that makes a difference, in Gregory Batesons famous words, it is the play of difference itself that is most productively worked with in ritual.

Introduction and Farewell

This issue of the Ecological Humanities is focussed on two of the greatest global phenomena that challenge contemporary social and cultural practice: the Anthropocene and climate change. In the first paper, Ben Dibley offers seven theses on the Anthropocene and ‘attachment’. He takes up questions of time, history, politics, and the human. Nick Mansfield presents an extended review essay that engages with the challenges of climate change. His essay starts with the prophetic words: ‘climate change will also bring with it problems to do with political time and historical time...’. In their contribution to this issue, Alice Robinson and Dan Tout bring their experience of drought into reflections on floods and belonging in the unique climate and culture of settler Australia. They explore what it means to call a place a ‘home’, and the need for settler societies to unsettle their own histories, ideas and relationships to produce more honest and sustainable possibilities for the future. These articles are all situated within an awareness of the far-more-than-human significance of events in this era of rapid change.