Steve Garlick

Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’

Simple Summary Wildlife cruelty is commonplace in society. We argue for a new engagement with wildlife through three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other; a geography of place and space, where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel, and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the ‘ecoversity’, as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach. Abstract Wildlife objectification and cruelty are everyday aspects of Australian society that eschew values of human kindness, empathy, and an understanding of the uniqueness and importance of non-human life in the natural world. Fostered by institutional failure, greed and selfishness, and the worst aspects of human disregard, the objectification of animals has its roots in longstanding Western anthropocentric philosophical perspectives, post colonialism, and a global uptake of neoliberal capitalism. Conservation, animal rights and welfare movements have been unable to stem the ever-growing abuse of wildlife, while ‘greenwash’ language such as ‘resource use’, ‘management’, ‘pests’, ‘over-abundance’, ‘conservation hunting’ and ‘ecology’ coat this violence with a respectable public veneer. We propose an engaged learning approach to address the burgeoning culture of wildlife cruelty and objectification that comprises three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other [1,2,3]; geography of place and space [4], where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, following [5], engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the ‘ecoversity’ [6], as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach to wildlife relationism. We believe it provides a mechanism to help bridge the gap between human and non-human animals, conservation and welfare, science and understanding, and between objectification and relationism as a means of addressing entrenched cruelty to wildlife.

Évaluation comparative de l'engagement des universités auprès de la communauté locale

Cet article propose un rappel des fondamentaux et une analyse des processus a l’œuvre dans l’elaboration d’une approche nationale visant a evaluer et a comparer la maniere dont les universites australiennes s’engagent aupres des communautes locales et regionales. Au sein des universites publiques australiennes, ce type d’engagement represente en effet une activite en croissance rapide et un critere de plus en plus souvent pris en compte dans le cadre de l’assurance qualite. Ce cadre d’evaluation comparative a ete developpe pendant pres de trois ans, a l’initiative de l’Alliance australienne pour l’engagement des universites aupres de la communaute locale (AUCEA), a l’issue d’une serie de consultations et d’essais de grande ampleur. Ce cadre comprend un questionnaire destine aux etablissements, un sondage d’opinion mene aupres des partenaires des etablissements d’enseignement superieur, ainsi qu’un modele de « bonnes pratiques ». Les instruments developpes ont ete experimentes dans le cadre d’un essai pilote portant sur 12 universites membres de l’AUCEA et seront mis en œuvre a la fin de l’annee 2008 au sein des 33 membres que compte l’AUCEA. Les resultats comparatifs seront disponibles debut 2009. Le cadre d’evaluation permettra aux universites et a leurs partenaires de la communaute d’ameliorer leur contribution a la societe et a l’environnement par le biais d’un echange de connaissances, d’un apprentissage et d’initiatives mutuels.