The Lancet Commission on pollution and health

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder

Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge

This article provides an overview of the current and projected climate change risks and impacts to mental health and provides recommendations for priority actions to address the mental health consequences of climate change. The authors argue the following three points: firstly, while attribution of mental health outcomes to specific climate change risks remains challenging, there are a number of opportunities available to advance the field of mental health and climate change with more empirical research in this domain; secondly, the risks and impacts of climate change on mental health are already rapidly accelerating, resulting in a number of direct, indirect, and overarching effects that disproportionally affect those who are most marginalized; and, thirdly, interventions to address climate change and mental health need to be coordinated and rooted in active hope in order to tackle the problem in a holistic manner. This discussion paper concludes with recommendations for priority actions to address the mental health consequences of climate change.

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Climate change and mental health: Risks, impacts and priority actions

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Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations

A river is like a mirror: it reflects the care given by people whose lives depend upon it. A scald on red ground or the slow death of a river reveals more than troubled ecological relationships – they are signs of broken social relationships. How people take care of social relationships and how they take care of ecological relationships are the same question. In this paper we emphasise the importance that Aboriginal people place on social relationships for good ecological relationships. In the past few decades natural resource managers have sought Indigenous knowledge relevant to Western ideas of environment, and in doing so, created distinctions between ‘ecological’ and ‘social’ knowledge – this is an artificial ‘white-fella’ separation. Additionally, Indigenous knowledge has been treated as if it were a static archive that need only be extracted and applied to resource development and planning. Instead it is dynamic, adaptive and contextual. As a consequence of compartmentalisation and the assumption of timelessness, the importance of social relationships in ecological relationships has been overlooked. Some research has explored similarities between Indigenous knowledge and the Western concept of adaptive management, and raised the possibility of synergy between them. We agree there are possible connections and opportunities for exchange and further learning between Indigenous knowledge and ecological resilience and adaptive management. However, Indigenous knowledge and Western science belong to different world views. An important task is to explore ways of grappling with this ontological challenge. We suggest a conceptual turn around that we believe could assist in opening a dialogue as well as creating a set of foundational principles for robust ecological and social relationships.

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From the other side of the knowledge frontier: Indigenous knowledge, social-ecological relationships and new perspectives

Introduction Foreword by Iain McCalman and Libby Robin 1. Hooves 2. Bores 3. Scrub 4. Wheat 5. Dust 6. Reeds 7. Cotton Conclusion

The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History

Garden plants have become a target in conservation science discourse, particularly the notion that they ‘jump the garden fence’ to become weeds. This paper synthesises findings of a suite of projects exploring the ‘culture of weeds’ through different disciplinary lenses. Together they agree that while home gardens sometimes contain plants known to be environmental weeds, gardens may not always be the vector for their spread into nearby bushland. Many plants attributed to gardens, in fact, originate in agriculture. The metaphor ‘jumping the garden fence’ obscures the complex pathways that underpin the spread of weeds. Weeding is an important part of both gardening and caring for bushland. Historically, we have been weeding the bush for a long time, and it is an important human activity. If it is industrialised, as it has been in agriculture, through broad-scale chemical and mechanical processes, it may be less valuable to both the bush and the people who care for it. A closer scrutiny of the milita...

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Led up the garden path? Weeds, conservation rhetoric, and environmental management

In this paper, we review some recent international museum and events-based ideas emerging around the concept of the Anthropocene, the proposition that the Earth has now left the Holocene and entered a new epoch: The Anthropocene (or Age of Humans). The Anthropocene is defined by changes in natural systems that have occurred because of the activities of humans. It is an idea that emerges from earth sciences, but it is also cultural: indeed the geological epoch of the Holocene (the last 11,700 years) marks the period in which most of the world’s major civilisations and cultures have emerged; it includes both the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions. To assert that the planet has moved ‘beyond the Holocene’ is to assert that humanity (indeed all life) has entered a new cultural and physical space that has not been previously experienced. Questions of how humans live in a planet with changed atmosphere, oceans, land systems, cities and climates are moral as well as physical. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described climate change as the greatest human rights issue of our times. (Excerpt from the article)

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Cameron Muir

Papers

Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations

From the other side of the knowledge frontier: Indigenous knowledge, social-ecological relationships and new perspectives

The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History

Led up the garden path? Weeds, conservation rhetoric, and environmental management

Slamming the anthropocene: Performing climate change in museums