BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 15-Jun-04 | ISBN: 1844710092 | Trim Size: 228 x 152 mm | Extent: 324pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

This book is about the relationship between humans and the earth, people and place, culture and nature. It argues that the concepts and categories of natural history, scientific ecology, landscape aesthetics and their associated practices in conservation landscapes and industrial land use work-over (if not overwork) nature (land, living beings, air and water). By contrast, conservation counter-aesthetics, Australian Aboriginal Country and symbiotic livelihood in a bioregion work (with) the earth as living being.

Beginning with a historical account of the cultural construction of nature, it ends with a contemporary discussion of land symbiotic. It moves from the discourse of nature as dead machine to the practices of living with the earth as living being. On the way it critiques nature conservationism in national parks and wilderness for its will to mastery over nature. It goes on to undertake an ecological psychoanalysis of the oral and anal sadism of industrial land use in mining and pastoralism. The drive here is to promote eco-mental health.

Arguing for an extension of an ethics and practice of landcare beyond the conservation of special places, the book maintains that earthcare should embrace the whole earth, indeed the entire ecosphere. It traces and calls for a paradigm shift from the sanctuarism of national parks and wilderness to the sacrality of Aboriginal Country and the living earth. Ecological sustainability rather than ecologically sustainable development is the crucial touchstone. To this end a postmodern, political ecology is developed, applied to and illustrated by reference to a wide range of British, American and Australian examples.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface; Acknowledgments ; I Cultural Nature; chapter one; The Nature of Natures and the Culture of Natures; chapter two; Is the Public Sphere to the Biosphere as Culture is to Nature (as Male is to Female)?; II Landscape Aesthetics; chapter three; Natures’s Fairest Forms: Aesthetics of Nature; chapter four; Pleasing Prospects Revista’d: The Gentleman’s Park Estate; III Colonial Country; chapter five; Home in the Wilds: Wild(er)ness as a Culural Category ; chapter six; Riding Roughshod Over It: Mateship Against the Bush; IV National Parklands; chapter seven; Nature Sanctuarized: ‘Our’ National Parks as Modern Cathedrals; chapter eight; Sites and Rights of Enjoyment: Nature and Native Title in National Parks; V Industrial Landuse; chapter nine; Eating Earth: Mining and Gluttony; chapter ten; Kings in Kimberley Watercourses and Wetlands: Sadism and Pastoralism; VI Land Symbiotics; chapter eleven ; ‘We are the Land Ourselves’2: Aboriginal Country is a Cultural Category; chapter twelve; Home is Here: Livelihood, Bioregion and Symbiosis; Notes; Bibliography; Index

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“Rod Giblett’s book Living Earth will be appreciated by readers with wide literary and historical backgrounds, and those interested in the Australian environment. ” —Andrew Thompson The Greener Times

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Rod Giblett is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communications and Multimedia, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. He has previously published books on wetlands. Recently he completed a critical, cultural history of communications technology. Currently he is writing a book about the body. He is also a local conservationist of the internationally important wetland near where he lives in Forrestdale. He is planning to write an oral and natural history of the area.