Introduction: current directions in Australian anthropologies of the environment

The biophysical environment is a central aspect of Australian artistic, intellectual, economic and political life. From the earliest depictions in colonists' journals and paintings to the contemporary literature and cinema of novel migrants, land, flora, fauna and climate have had a powerful vicinity In many ways, 'settler' relationships with this continent--portrayed simultaneously as harsh and threatening, beautiful and nurturing, resource-rich and diverse, free from moisture and barren--have come to be characterised by means of the environmental challenges encountered by means of pioneering agriculturalists and pastoralists, as they attempted to move round bushland into a productive rural landscape in the European image. These challenges were underscored by dint of the presence of Aboriginal clans who had their own athletic connection to land and their possess forms of resistance to the re-landscaping efforts of the invaders. The environment thus plays a significant character in representations of Australian national identity. Agricultural, mining and fishing industries remain central to the national imaginary and economy, while tourist pamphlets feature outdoor scenes that celebrate warm weather and diverse landscapes: oceans, beaches, forests, mountains, rivers and untilleds all populated with unique flora and fauna. on the contrary how do Australians, in all their diversity, actually perceive about, and understand, the land that ultimately sustains them?

Aboriginal relations with land have been extensively documented and analysed by the agency of a considerable number of anthropologists for more than a hundred However, the environmental beliefs, values and practices of non-Aboriginal Australians have received limited anthropological attention. (1) This can be partly explained by means of the discipline's traditional focus upon the lives of culturally different 'others', a determination which is increasingly subverted as more and more researchers make choice of to do ethnography 'at home' (Morton 1999) This lacuna in Australian anthropological research may also be to be paid to a perception that members of industrialised societies have relatively little knowledge of ecological processe (Ellen and Harris 2000: 6) in comparison to hunter-gatherer tribes who are often assumed to be more intimately engaged with the biophysical world, and to have down-reaching corporeal and spiritual connections to their lands. Lived experience, of course, is a great deal of more nuanced than this dichotomy of agricultures suggests. The seven papers neared here offer evidence of this and of an ongoing effort in Australian anthropology to fill the associated gap in research upon human-environment relations. In doing in the way that the authors look to an international material part of ethnography and cultural theory that has begun to coalesce beneath the heading of environmental anthropology.

The international context

Although the application of mind of human interactions with the environment has drawn out been acknowledged as a keystone of anthropology, the terminus 'environmental anthropology' seems only to have emerg in the last decade (eg Johnston 1995; Townsend 2000) It is loosely used as an umbrella category for an area of inquiry that encompasses cultural ecology (eg Steward 1988) ecological anthropology (eg Rappaport 1968) and what a certain number of refer to as 'the of recent origin ecological anthropology' (Kottak 1999), including political and historical ecologies (Biersack 1999) all of which have their possess distinctive theoretical and methodological approaches. Also included in this broad category is the field of ethno-ecology which focuses upon the emic understandings of human-environmental relationships. In addition, environmental anthropology incorporates studies of environmentalism and environmental motions (e.g. Milton 1993a, 1996; Brosius 1999) along with the more applied work upon 'natural resource anthropology' (Burton, Schoepfle and Miller 1986) and environmental justice (Johnston 1994) The notion that cultural identity and meaning, the pair collective and individual, are created [i]or[/i] part of to the other engagements with the biophysical world, and at the same time help to create that world (Strang 2005) step quicklys through much of the novel writing in this field. We consign to multiple 'anthropologies of the environment' as a means of acknowledging the diverse ways in which the researchers showed here seek to understand the combination of ideational, cultural, material and ecological factors that constitute the mingled 'natural' spaces humans encounter, manage and inhabit.

As Descola and Palsson (1996) point without the dual influences of nature and tillage on human societies have drawn out been of interest to anthropologists. Innumerable analytical approaches favouring the predominance of individual or the other in shaping human experience can be positioned along an interpretive continuum, framed at individual extreme by environmental determinism and at the other by dint of cultural constructionism. Ellen (1996: 2) argues that an over-emphasis upon culturalist interpretations of nature--the post-modernist idea that 'nature' is a cultural construction rather than an objective reality that exists outside of specific cultural frameworks--makes it real difficult for anthropologists to communicate effectively with biological and physical scientists (and with greatest in quantity other people encultured in 'Western' thinking) who assume that 'nature' has its be in possession of reality independent of culture. similar an approach also undermines our claims to a holistic perspective (see also Ingold 2000) At the other extremity of the spectrum theories that propose human behaviour is primarily driven by means of environmental factors have been criticised for being overly simplistic and failing to acknowledge the powerful influence of agriculture Consequently some leading environmental anthropologists, including Ingold and Milton, aid a re-worked concept of 'ecology' This has the potential to beat the nature-culture division by analysing human beliefs and practices as an integral part of the natural a whole thereby emphasising the mutual influence that environment and human societies have upon one another. (2)