Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Australian Journal of Environmental Education
Volume
39
Issue
3
First Page
375
Last Page
389
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
School
Centre for People, Place and Planet / Kurongkurl Katitjin/
RAS ID
60380
Abstract
In a Kimberley place-based cultural story, Dangaba is a woman whose Country holds poison gas. Her story shows the importance of cultural ways of understanding and caring for Country, especially hazardous places. The authors contrast this with a corporate story of fossil fuel, illustrating the divergent discourses and approaches to place. Indigenous and local peoples and their knowledge, cultures, laws, philosophies and practices are vitally important to Indigenous lifeways and livelihoods, and critically significant to the long-term health and well-being of people and place in our locality, region and world. We call for storying and narratives from the pluriverse of sociocultural voices to be a meaningful part of environmental education and to be implemented in multiple places of learning. To know how to hear, understand and apply the learnings from place-based story is to know how to move beyond a normalised worldview of separation, alienation, individualism, infinite growth, consumption, extraction, commodification and craving. To know how to see, feel, describe and reflect upon experience, concepts and practice is to find ways to move towards radical generosity, mutuality of becoming, embodied kinship, wisdom, humility and respect.
DOI
10.1017/aee.2023.30
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
Poelina, A., Paradies, Y., Wooltorton, S., Mulligan, E. L., Guimond, L., Jackson-Barrett, L., & Blaise, M. (2023). Learning to care for Dangaba. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 39(3), 375-389. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2023.30