People and Places of Nature and Culture

This book highlights the importance of developing a better relationship between humans and earth, people and place, culture and nature, in order to achieve environmental stability in the age of climate change. It examines the current concept of environment, which implies separation between a subject and its environs and suggests that humans have a relationship of mastery over the earth. It also explores how discourses of nature, such as natural history, ecology and political economy, re-enforce this idea of mastery. Through looking at how nature is viewed in Australian Aboriginal Country, this book offers a new way of looking at nature that will change the relationship between human and earth.

Rod Giblett is Associate Professor in the School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. He is also a local conservationist of the internationally important wetland near where he lives. He has published an oral and natural history of the area and has recently completed a book of environmental philosophy and nature writing about it.