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The disciplinary heritage of examining human–environment relationships continues to be vital but needs continual updating. In the Australian context, four threads of work can make key contributions in the next few decades: (1) recognising the depth of colonial heritage in 20th-century environmental thought, (2) supporting new Indigenous Geographies, (3) articulating environmental imaginaries beyond the settler-Indigenous binary and (4) responding to precarity and volatility with new ecologies. These threads each have distinct research trajectories – in terms of both their heritage in Geography and their development this century. They nevertheless have in common significant potential to help the discipline address the central shared challenge of contemporary life: facing climate change with commitments to justice. I consider wider implications, including three risks we need to be alert to. One risk is eco-fascism. Another is the re-naturalisation of environmental change as climate change impacts are exacerbated. The third is the amount of energy that needs to go into analysing and negotiating our volatile institutional contexts, potentially at the expense of what we have hitherto understood as core scholarly business.

Scholarship on the hydrosocial cycle has tended to overlook the atmospheric phase of the cycle. This paper identifies and conceptualises a politics of evaporation in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin. Evaporation is not a neutral hydrological concept to be understood, measured or acted on without an appreciation of the networks in which it originates, the geo-political circumstances that continue to shape its circulation, and its socio-spatial effects. The politics of evaporation is conceptualised here as a process of hydrosocial territorialisation in which atmospheric water came to be known as a force acting within a balanced hydrologic cycle, and ‘atmospheric territory’ was created. The scientific origins of evaporation show (i) how modernist hydrologic technologies and conventions that relied on containment and territorialisation to account for and control water led to the negative depiction of evaporation as a loss, and (ii) the historical depth of processes of abstraction and commensuration that are so influential in today’s regimes of water accounting and marketisation. The politics of evaporation is identified empirically in the controversy surrounding the management of the Menindee Lakes and the lower Darling River in New South Wales, where efforts to ‘save’ water according to the logic of efficiency have enrolled atmospheric water into a Basin-wide program to redistribute surface water. The lens of evaporation theorises a neglected aspect of the materiality of water that is particularly important to the dry, hot parts of the world. It challenges us to rethink the ‘cycle’ as well as the ‘hydro’, while providing further evidence of the value of thinking about territory in a material register as volumetric and not areal.

We place the state of Australian university Geography in brief historical context and assess the key contemporary challenges. We draw on recent strategic reviews and overviews, and perspectives from the heads of programmes. Geography’s presence and visibility in both STEM and HASS domains is a key source of its attractiveness to students and its cross-disciplinary strength. Unfortunately, this same STEM/HASS crossover is precisely what makes it chronically vulnerable to institutional restructuring.

Migration from the Global South to Global North is a major feature of contemporary population movements, and provides a lived experiment of the implications of moving from less resource-intensive modes of living towards more resource-intensive ones. Pre-migration practices come together in complex ways post-migration with established norms and infrastructures in destination countries. Here we examine the barriers to and enablers of sustainable practices, synthesising in-depth research from nine different studies in south-eastern Australia in relation to household water use, food growing and transport. The total sample includes 323 migrants from 33 countries. The main barriers include infrastructure and broader patterns of work and society. The main enablers are cultural norms of frugality and preferences for public transport. Barriers and enablers interact in diverse ways. We show that migrants are important contributors to inadvertent sustainabilities, but their contributions may be weakened by infrastructural, structural and cultural barriers. Addressing the diverse capacities of migrants would enhance system change for everyone.

This commentary has been written during the maelstrom of COVID-19 response, at a time when both Norway and Australia are ‘flattening the curve’ by implementing strong social distancing measures, wi...

In the summer of 2018/19, a series of fish kills on the Darling River attracted international attention. We analyse the disaster as a crisis of modern water within the hydrosocial cycle framework formulated by Linton and Budds. Using archival analysis we identify four phases in the emergence and transformation of modern water in the Murray-Darling Basin generally and the lower Darling specifically; navigation flows (1850–1900s), entitlement flows (1880–1940s), exchange water (1950–1990s) and saved water (2000s-present). The phases are driven by conceptual abstraction and commensuration, leading in turn to the material abstraction of water from the lower Darling, rendering the river and its communities vulnerable. We reveal three previously unidentified social processes contributing to the current crisis. First, the development of a model of hydrological productivity that rationalised the Basin scale as a unit of governance and deemed some places ‘effective’ and others, like the Darling, ‘ineffective’. Second, an early form of offsetting in ‘exchange water’ that disembedded water at least three decades before market environmentalism took hold. Third, accounting technologies that enrol evaporative water into basin water governance and politics. A crisis like the fish kills reveals the ways in which the hydrological cycle overflows with social content, internalising scientific expertise and dominant modes of water governance that include settler colonialism. However, hydrosocial framings need to better capture the diversity and complexity of co-existing Indigenous ontologies, and their different expressions of the social and experiences of the material. These ontologies both intersect with and exceed modern water.

Although a number of researchers have responded to calls to better understand human experiences of weather in the context of a changing climate, there remain few studies that analyse the role of weather in everyday urban life, where mediating technologies such as air-conditioners and tumble dryers are widespread. To address that gap, this paper advances a concept of ‘weather-ways’, in which cultural understandings of weather are conceived as dynamic, unfolding and interactive. Empirically, we examine how weather is part of the daily practices of 20 Melbourne (Australia) participants using interviews conducted across four seasons in 2010–11. Findings show a particular distinction between work and home weather-ways. Office work practices provided a highly structured weekly temporal framework around which other practices were organised. Regardless of the weather, work practices continued undisrupted, particularly in air-conditioned buildings. Away from work, where participants had more freedom to engage with and respond to the weather, they demonstrated a willingness to remain weather-connected, despite having access to technologies. Participants modified their practices in accordance with weather and its variations, through both simple adjustments, such as modifying clothing layers, and broader responses including the temporal and spatial adjustments of leisure and laundering activities that took advantage of ‘good’ weather or avoided less favourable conditions. Vernacular adjustment strategies that may assist in adjusting to future climate changes are in tension with the structural and collective frameworks of most indoor workplaces.

Successful management of invasive plants (IPs) requires the active participation of diverse communities across land tenures. This can be challenging because communities do not always share the views of scientists and managers. They may directly disagree, have alternative views, or be unwilling to manage IPs. Reviews of IP social science identify opportunities to better understand the role of cultural processes and everyday practices to address these challenges. To scale up and leverage the insights of existing qualitative social science IP research, we used meta-ethnography to unlock accounts and interpretations of lay perspectives. Meta-ethnography is a form of qualitative research synthesis increasingly used beyond its origins in health and education to produce interpretive syntheses of an area of research. In the 7 phases of meta-ethnography, we systematically identified and synthesized 19 qualitative articles pertinent to lay experience and knowledge of IPs in diverse settings. Action and meaning regarding IPs were influenced by 6 meta-themes in personal and social life: dissonance, priorities, difference, agency, responsibility, and future orientations. Through descriptions and examples of each meta-theme, we demonstrated how the meta-themes are higher level structuring concepts across the qualitative research that we analyzed and we retained grounding in the in-depth qualitative research. We characterized the meta-themes as leverage points and tensions by which we reframed lay people in terms of capacity for reflective IP management rather than as obstacles. The meta-ethnography synthesis shows how leverage points and tensions emerge from everyday life and can frame alternative and meaningful starting points for both research and public engagement and deliberation regarding IP management. These insights are not a panacea, but open up new space for reflective and mutual consideration of how to effectively navigate often complex IP problems and address conservation and social and livelihood issues in dynamic social and physical environments.El manejo exitoso de las plantas invasoras requiere de la participación de las diferentes comunidades participantes en la tenencia de tierras. Esto puede ser un reto porque las comunidades no siempre comparten las opiniones de los científicos y los gestores. Puede que las comunidades estén en desacuerdo directo con estas opiniones, tengan opiniones alternativas o no estén dispuestas a manejar las plantas invasoras. Las revisiones a las ciencias sociales de las plantas invasoras identifican oportunidades para entender de mejor manera el papel de los procesos culturales y las prácticas diarias para abordar estos retos. Usamos la meta-etnografía para revelar explicaciones e interpretaciones de las perspectivas comunes para aumentar y potenciar el conocimiento cualitativo de las investigaciones en ciencias sociales de las plantas invasoras. La meta-etnografía es una forma de síntesis de la investigación cualitativa que se usa cada vez más fuera de sus orígenes en la salud y educación para producir síntesis interpretativas de un área de investigación. En las siete fases de la meta-etnografía identificamos y sintetizamos sistemáticamente 19 artículos cualitativos correspondientes a la experiencia y el conocimiento no profesional de las plantas invasoras en diferentes escenarios. Las acciones y significados con respecto a las plantas invasoras estuvieron influenciadas por seis meta-temas en la vida personal y social: disonancia, prioridades, diferencia, agencia, responsabilidad y orientaciones a futuro. Por medio de descripciones y ejemplos de cada meta-tema, demostramos cómo estos son conceptos estructuradores de nivel más alto a lo largo de la investigación cualitativa que analizamos y mantuvimos basados en la investigación cualitativa a profundidad. Caracterizamos los meta-temas como puntos de potenciación y tensiones por la cual replanteamos a la gente común en términos de capacidad de reflexión en el manejo de plantas invasoras en lugar de considerarlas obstáculos. La síntesis de la meta-etnografía muestra cómo los puntos de potenciación y las tensiones emergen de la vida cotidiana y pueden plantear puntos de partida alternativos y significativos para la investigación, la participación pública y la deliberación en el manejo de plantas invasoras. Esta información no es la panacea, pero puede abrir un espacio nuevo para la consideración mutua y reflexiva de cómo navegar efectivamente los problemas complejos de las plantas invasoras y cómo abordar los temas de conservación social y de sustento en los ambientes dinámicos sociales y físicos.入侵植物的成功管理需要不同土地制度的社区的积极参与。这可能是一个挑战, 因为社区居民并不总是认同科学家和管理者的观点。他们可能会直接反对、持不同观点, 或不愿意管理入侵植物。对入侵植物的社会科学综述有助于更好地了解文化过程和日常实践的作用, 以应对这些挑战。我们使用元民族志来展示非专业人士观点的描述和理解。元民族志是一种定性研究综述的形式, 起源于卫生和教育领域, 已被越来越多地被用于对一个研究领域进行诠释性的综述。在元民族志的 7 个阶段中, 我们系统地确定并概括了 19 篇与不同环境中非专业人士对入侵植物的经验和知识有关的定性文章。我们发现, 关于入侵植物的行动和意义受到个人和社会生活中 6 个元主题的影响: 不协调性、优先性、差异、机构、责任和未来方向。通过对每个元主题的描述和举例, 我们展示了元主题如何在我们分析的定性研究中形成更高层次的结构性概念, 并且我们在深入的定性研究中保留了基础。我们将元主题描述为杠杆点和张力, 在此基础上, 我们将非专业人士重新定义为思考入侵植物管理的能力, 而非障碍。元民族志的整合显示了杠杆点和张力如何出现在日常生活中, 且可以为有关入侵植物管理的研究和公众参与及讨论提供有意义的替代性起点。这些见解不能解决所有问题, 但可以为反思和交互性考虑如何有效管理复杂的入侵植物问题, 以及在动态的社会和物理环境中解决保护和社会及生计问题开辟了新的空间。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】.

Indigenous public artworks in Australian urban spaces have challenged assumptions of Indigenous absence from the city. This paper examines the construction of Birrarung Wilam, in central Melbourne,...

Migrant farmworkers dominate the horticultural workforce in many parts of the Minority (developed) World. The ‘manual’ work that they do—picking and packing fruits and vegetables, and pruning vines and trees—is widely designated unskilled. In policy, media, academic, activist and everyday discourses, hired farm work is framed as something anybody can do. We interrogate this notion with empirical evidence from the Sunraysia horticultural region of Australia. The region’s grape and almond farms depend heavily on migrant workers. By-and-large, the farmers and farmworkers we spoke to pushed back against the unskilled tag. They asserted that farmworkers acquire knowledge and skills over time and that experienced farmworkers are valuable—their value being brought into sharp relief against accounts of inexperienced farmworkers’ errors. Our interviewees provided rich insights into farmworkers’ engagements with crops and the intricacies of picking and pruning well. Far from being bereft of knowledge and skills, they recognised that experienced farmworkers bring benefits. They improve productivity, product quality and ultimately profits. This is especially so when open communication channels exist across the farm hierarchy, when experienced farmworkers’ insights are taken seriously by their employers. Our research is informed by organisational studies literature and scholarship on craft/making. Like factory floor workers and artisans, experienced farmworkers bring accumulated knowledge and skills to their work, gained through repeat performance. They reflect on and adjust their activities in dialogue with their materials and the environment. Experienced farmworkers demonstrate care, dexterity and judgement. They are not unskilled, and they are more than labouring bodies.

Despite decades of challenge to the Enlightenment dualisms of Western environmental thought, they remain deeply embedded with respect to agriculture because of the ways in which cultivation is implicated in humanity’s move out of nature and into culture. In contrast, in non-Western contexts, scholars have more commonly discussed cultivation as a close engagement between humans and the more-than-human world. Emergent research examines how environmental engagements change in the encounters of migration from Majority to Minority Worlds, providing new ideas and practices for sustainable futures. We contribute to these debates with a study in the Sunraysia region of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, an area facing significant climate change impacts. We examine environmental engagements of ethnic minority migrants (Burundian, Hazara, Tongan, Vietnamese, and Italian) alongside Anglo-Australian residents. Findings identify both differences and connections between these groups and show complex interweavings of environmental engagement, ethnic background, migration history, and generational change. Groups perceive and respond to the local environment differently and in the context of their premigration experience, challenging dominant (Minority World) perceptions of environment as a freestanding and separate entity. The strongest cross-cutting theme is valuing environment for its food provision, associated with positive emotions and an ethic of care. Participants relate to food gardens rather than farms as places of pleasure and close engagement. Australian farms are understood as places where different rules apply and harmful chemicals must be used. Food gardens are an important site of cross-cultural encounter and experiment that can move environmental scholarship forward in the search for alternative futures. Key Words: agriculture, cultivation, migration, settler colonialism.

This article explores knowledge transfers in international migration and development through insights from Pacific Island seasonal workers participating in Australia's Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP). We discuss actual and potential horticultural knowledge transfers that are enabled when circular migrants are engaged in agriculture in their place of migration origin and destination. Transfers identified by seasonal workers themselves include: technologies to improve horticultural production, exposure to different crop types, and techniques to improve crop yields. We argue that SWP migrants should be reframed as knowledge holders (not ‘unskilled’ or ‘low-skilled’ labourers), and reflect on how knowledge transfers can be better supported to enable benefits for communities of origin and destination.

Western environmentalism and conservation are deeply entangled with histories of colonialism. This entanglement has marginalised Indigenous and migrant perspectives on the environment to protect settler norms and interests. This paper approaches those two types of othering together in the context of environmental debate, using the lens of a mainstream conservation magazine. We analyse representations of indigeneity and migration in a shifting settler-colonial discourse on the environment, throughout the 45 volumes of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s magazine Habitat (1973–2016). The Australian Conservation Foundation was Australia’s first nation-wide conservation organization. Its magazine exemplifies a settler-colonial discourse that initially aimed to conserve pristine nature but that over time has responded to increasing awareness that environmental crises have transnational causes and consequences, and require intercultural and international cooperation. We found that, while contributors to the magazine increasingly represent Australian conservation issues as connected to international processes and closely collaborate with remote Indigenous communities, they continue to assume the settler as norm and prioritise the protection of wealth and lifestyles. These goals are achieved through the conditional inclusion of others and through the treatment of environments as having zero-sum limits. The colonial imaginaries of ‘wilderness’ and carrying capacity are repurposed to frame migration as being at odds with Australian people’s wealth and wellbeing. The reiteration of settler-colonial environmentalism as a dominant way of protecting the environment stands in the way of the greater pluralism of environmental relationships that will be needed for coping with environmental change.

Amidst calls for paradigm shifts in environmental scholarship, we track an emergent literature on how environmental values, knowledge and behaviour (EVKB) change (or not) with the migration process. We focus on the role of Majority World migrants to the Minority World. Large-scale survey research into EVKB is beginning to consider both ethnicity and migration history as important variables, but tends to leave the concepts of environment and environmental behaviour unexamined. Western EVKB indicators thus tend to be universalized rather than understood as themselves culturally specific. An emergent literature attempts to improve both quantitative and qualitative research on EVKB by broadening the conceptualization of environmental behaviour to include the practices of Majority World migrants. Those studies throw new light on the process of acculturation as having disruptive or solidifying potential for sustainable practices. We summarize four implications for future research. There is a need to go beyond western logics in research design and method. Straightforward assumptions about the ‘pro’ in pro-environmental behaviour need to be challenged. Cases of EVKB’s persistence post-migration and positive influence on the broader population should be sought out and examined. The migration process provides real-time experiments in enacting alternative worlds.

Irrigated agriculture faces significant challenges under climate change, and may not be feasible in parts of the Murray–Darling Basin beyond 2050. Recent research into the cultural politics of water has paid limited attention to the water cultures and relations of irrigators in Minority World countries. We analyse the water relations of grape farm irrigators in the Sunraysia region of Victoria, using interviews and farm tours undertaken between 2014 and 2016. Findings are summarised under five themes: (1) the sociality of irrigation water, (2) temporal and spatial relations, (3) the risk of rain, (4) the micro-scale of water knowledge, and (5) environment as actor. These themes shed light on the diverse relations that constitute both environmental and irrigation water. Irrigators are embedded in these relations at multiple scales, local and distant, mediated by technology and infrastructure. The scale of our focus makes visible water and other environmental knowledge that often goes unnoticed in broader debates over irrigation. The concept of “the environment”, understood as an embodied actor in policy discourse and by irrigators, is an emergent trend that warrants ongoing research attention.

This paper contributes to increased understanding of emotions and climate change through a study of the emotional management strategies employed by a sample of Australian climate scientists. We bring three broad areas of literature into conversation in order to think more productively about climate change and emotion: recent applications of the concept of emotional labour, studies of the role of emotion in science, and feminist perspectives on the performative role of emotions. In response to contextual drivers that include the social norms of science, a strong climate denialist influence and the preservation of self and family, these scientists mobilize a range of behaviours and strategies to manage their emotions around climate change and the future. These include emphasizing dispassion, suppressing painful emotions, using humour and switching off from work. Emotional denial or suppression of the consequences of climate change worked to enable the scientists to persevere in their work. This study suggests that painful emotions (anxiety, fear, loss) around climate change need to be acknowledged and discussed.

The broad question around which I frame my dialogue with Briassoulis’s paper is, why stop at response? I consider this question with three connected subquestions. Why is it only the response part of the subject matter that needs assemblage thinking? Can other conceptualizations – environmental degradation, socioecological systems – remain intact within an assemblage approach? And does the concept of response itself imply a linear kind of causality arguably incompatible with assemblages?

Catastrophic fires have generated intensified public responses in favour of transformative climate change action. Realizing the potential of this moment requires us to understand and puncture the cultural and emotional politics of our collective denial.

Cultural change is critical to climate change responses, but the in-depth qualitative research that investigates culture is necessarily conducted at scales difficult to integrate with policy. A focus of climate change mitigation and adaptation is affluent developed world households. Adapting methods used elsewhere in social science, we report and assess a meta-ethnography of household sustainability research, scaling up findings from 12 studies encompassing 276 Australian households. Seven themes are dominant: family concerns are central to household practice; adaptiveness is contingent but more pervasive than often assumed; households make sense of climate change not through abstract arguments, but through physical resources and materials; boundaries of the home space are dynamic and subjective; daily time is an important currency; paradoxes abound among everyday practice; and privacy and a sense of autonomy are prioritised. Insights from the method include new light on familiar themes when seen ...

The reality of anthropogenic climate change has rendered adaptive responses at all scales an imperative. Households are an increasing focus of attention, but more in the developing world than the developed world, because of the presumed lesser vulnerabilities and stronger adaptive capacities of the latter. Critiques of such presumptions, and the quantitative, macro-scale focus of much adaptation research are emergent. How relatively affluent households, as complex social assemblages, may adapt to climate change impacts encountered in their day-to-day functioning remains unclear. There is, however, a sizeable body of research on household environmental sustainability in the developed world. That research has significant implications for climate change adaptation. This paper brings household environmental sustainability research into productive conversation with the climate change adaptation literature. The former shows that sustainability issues are refracted through social relations within households, and the demands of everyday life. This has three implications for how adaptation needs to be re-framed. First, climate change will not be experienced only via climatic stimuli and extreme weather events. It will be entwined in the complexity of everyday life. Second, knowledge of climate change is not a prerequisite for household adaptive capacity. Third, household-scale analyses show that assumed capacities and vulnerabilities may end up being quite different to those imagined or measured at a macro-scale. These insights invite consideration of how householders’ adaptive capacities can be better supported.

Predicted nonlinear changes in the Anthropocene will challenge the extent to which environmental issues are governable. Climate change projections highlight positive feedbacks between invasive species spread and increased bushfire risk. We use empirical evidence of current practices of invasive plant management, and the case of Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), to illustrate what it means to live with invasive plants. Gamba is a significant threat to tropical savanna biodiversity through its influence on fire regimes across northern Australia. We analyse the practices of Gamba governance via policy analysis, interviews with over 50 managers and participant observation. Our results show the multiple ways in which Gamba exceeds and escapes governance, exposing the impossibility and risks of absolute control as a management framing. By attending to practice in this way, we show how an alternative framing, in which living with weeds is a more explicit part of the governance framework, can work. Our framing contributes to more effective management because political choices are made more transparent, valorises pragmatic knowledge about the messy reality of living with weeds, and mobilises a broader range of resources including land managers now resistant to the state. The Gamba-fire assemblage has mobilised political action by invoking fire policy rather than weed policy, but not necessarily in a way consistent with best practice weed management. Attention to these practices of vernacular governance not only shows the ideal of present control to be illusory, but will also provide important cultural resources in the form of networks and capacity, as the challenges of invasive species shift and intensify.

This article explores the entanglement of two kinds of invasive lives in northern Australia: invasive plants, and the enduring life of the unfinished colonial project, which continues to have impli...

Invasive plants pose a major environmental management issue. Research into the social dimensions of this issue has flourished over the past decade, as part of the critical examination of relations between human and nonhuman worlds. The social sciences and humanities have made substantial contributions to conceptualizing invasiveness and nativeness; understanding the perceptions, attitudes and values of diverse stakeholders; and analysing the politics and practices of invasive plant management. Cultural analysis allows areas of conflict and commonality to be identified. Social complexity must be added to ecological complexity to understand the causal relationships underlying invasions; and linear understandings of science-policy relationships are too simplistic. Productive connections have been established between recent social and natural science approaches in the context of rapid environmental change and unpredictable futures. Nonetheless, the prevalence of human exceptionalism in the ecological sciences constitutes a major point of divergence between social and natural science perspectives.

Households within affluent countries are increasingly prominent in climate change adaptation research; meanwhile, social and cultural research has sought to render more complex the dynamics of dome...

Cultural geography has a long and proud tradition of research into human–plant relations. However, until recently, that tradition has been somewhat disconnected from conceptual advances in the social sciences, even those to which cultural geographers have made significant contributions. With a number of important exceptions, plant studies have been less explicitly part of more-than-human geographies than have animal studies. This special issue aims to redress this gap, recognising plants and their multiple engagements with and beyond humans. Plants are not only fundamental to human survival, they play a key role in many of the most important environmental political issues of the century, including biofuels, carbon economies and food security. In this introduction, we explore themes of belonging, practices and places, as discussed in the contributing papers. Together, the papers suggest new kinds of ‘vegetal politics’, documenting both collaborative and conflictual relations between humans, plants and others. They open up new spaces of political action and subjectivity, challenging political frames that are confined to humans. The papers also raise methodological questions and challenges for future research. This special issue grew out of sessions we organised at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in New York in 2012.

The emerging Anthropocene concept contains two conceptual challenges: its developing narrative tends to present a teleological view of history as linear and deterministic, which is at odds with evidence of evolutionary and historical contingency; and the species category at its core sits uneasily with both the causal details of historical changes and the complexity of conceptualizing human–nature relations. We can learn from the ways similar challenges have been dealt with in the long debate over the origins of agriculture. A body of critical and empirical scholarship now conceptualizes agriculture in more dynamic, contingent terms, but has dealt less well with the second, more difficult, challenge. To realize the Anthropocene’s potential to suggest restorative and less fatalistic approaches to the future, we need to work as hard on the concepts as on their constitutive empirical evidence.

You live in the bush. You live by the rules of the bush, and that's it.' 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's 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 'Core of My Heart' (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's ability to coexist with fire in the future (Head et al., 2013).

Tim Neale examines environmentalism and indigeneity in northern Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, mainly through the lens of Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act (2005), brought in by the Labor Governments ...

This paper explores the proposition that gifting is a little recognised yet important practice bound up in the quest for sustainable consumption, which has largely been studied with reference to market rather than gift economies. It draws on gift theories in economic anthropology which explain gifts as engendering social relations of reciprocity and beyond, and shaping social life differently to commodities. Understanding how and why commodities become gifts (and vice versa), we contend, provides a new way of understanding some of the complex ways in which social relations are implicated in sustainable consumption. We use a study of Christmas gifting practices within a group of environmentally engaged households to begin to empirically explore if and how environmental considerations are expressed in the gift economy. We conclude that the fashioning of a particular social identity, namely, the ‘green consumer’ can operate very differently in the context of gift-exchange than in the context of non-gifting consumption.