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• W2419663033 abstract "This paper sets the ‘coastcare movement’ in the context of shifting attitudes toward and experience of nature in Australian cit ies. It is argued that growing interest in urban nature, such as reflected in coastcare, is intensifying contests over the status of different ideas about the nature of nature. Drawing upon both the personal involvement of the authors in urban coastcare groups and upon interviews with members of such groups in Perth, Melbourne and Hobart, the paper explores some of the ways scientific, personal and cultural interests get bound together in coastcare movements. In particular, the paper explores the emotional commitment to ‘return’ coastal environments to the ‘way they were’. This commitment sheds some light on the conflict between purely scientific and community-based approaches to environmental management. At the heart of social movements such as coastcare is an emerging politics of belonging, one grounded in ideas of nativeness and biodiversity that extend well beyond strictly ‘objective’ interpretations. While drawing upon science, the work of such groups needs to be understood and represented as inherently political as well, being a response to social processes such as globalisation as much as to changes in ‘the environment’. It is argued that to advance their social aspirations, coastcare groups need not just to advocate ecological diversity, but to incorporate a self-reflexive interest in a diversity of social values. PROLOGUE: JULIET’S DISQUIET From 1966 to 1973 as a child and adolescent I rambled around the coastal Hobart suburb of Taroona with my friends. We were stamping our mark on the beach, bush, streets and creeks. We weathered the ‘67 bushfires, and the floods that some years later that washed away the path to the beach. We ate fruit found hanging over fences, growing in gullies and on spare blocks, We dropped trails of pips and seeds, had berry and cherry plum wars and squashed passionfruit beneath our feet as we fought our way through the tangle of vines. Some families used sheoaks as Christmas trees and others radiata pines, all cut from local bushland. Somewhere along the line cotoneasters became everyone’s favourite plant and boneseed became the dominant understorey of foreshore and hillsides. Around 1991 I started my first Landcare group at Taroona primary school, which my children were then attending. The’ big bush’ next to the school had just been cleared to make way for housing for the elderly. The children were upset. I had just finished my Master of Environmental Studies and was full of facts and figures about the demise of the planet. I was fuelled by a good dose of righteous indignation and was firmly on the high moral ground. I knew there wasn’t much time to right the wrongs that were being done. And I was a purist – only native vegetation grown from local provenance seed. Now 15 years later, after years of working with Tasmanian communities on environmental projects in urban and rural environments, I am no longer sure what I am doing. I have just started another Coastcare group at Blackmans Bay and my approach is very different. Like Taroona, Blackmans Bay is a suburb located near the mouth of the Derwent River estuary. It has a well used sandy beach, cliffs and rocky foreshore, and is a popular spot for snorkelling and diving. The local Council has recently upgraded services at the beach, which has meant concrete neatness, roads and parking. The area has also been landscaped with a mixture of plants local to the area and other coastal plants from who knows where. I preferred it how it was, but know I am in the minority. The cliffs and beach are lined with houses most of which have been there for the past 20 years, some for 50 years or more. The reserved coastal zone contains a mixture of native plants, interspersed with environmental weeds such as cotoneaster, boneseed, canary broom, African boxthorn, banana passionfruit, sweet pittosporum. Many of these plants are evident in gardens around the neighbourhood, including my own. In this highly modified landscape, what is the role of an environmental care group? There are a few simple answers to this question such as, clean up litter, raise awareness about responsible pet ownership and beach use (so that penguins and other seabirds are given space to nest), keep stormwater and sewage pollution in front of the nose of Councillors and object to inappropriate development on the coast. In such landscapes, there are also good reasons for conserving and replanting native vegetation and encouraging native animals to remain and, in some cases, to return. But there is something missing in the now familiar story of native vs exotic species that has been niggling at me for a long time. That is an acknowledgement that we can’t retrieve what is lost and go back to an original, native condition. We have to reinvent how we relate to the nature we have helped create. We can continue to spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours of volunteer labour trying to recreate a state of environment we have lost or we can pause and look at what’s happening now, more than 200 years into colonial occupation of this country, a time in which every aspect of the nature of Australia has been in some way changed. As soon as the first Europeans arrived, and the lives of Aboriginal Australians were disrupted, the landscapes (and seascapes) established over tens of thousands of years by people, plants and animals was on the way to being lost. So too, new forms of landscape were on the way to being made. Many of the relationships colonial Australians have unwittingly created in this land benefit plants and animals that struggled to survive in the old ‘natural’ Australia. Some species we have brought in are thriving, sometimes at the expense of native species, sometimes not. Native is not necessarily good and exotic bad. We have to examine the language we use as environmental carers so that we can truly begin to see the relationships that are developing in this new landscape. This won’t stop us managing the landscape. Like most animals and insects we are gardeners of the world. We promote what we want and seek to keep other elements of the world in check. We are constantly in relationship with every other living thing around us. Holding on to a fiction that we live in a ‘human space’, we are often not conscious of these relationships. Once this fiction is challenged, however, we may learn that the environments we have helped make are not necessarily as unnatural or as in need of redemption to a state of innocence as we often assume. They remain, nonetheless, desperately in need of our care." @default.
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• W2419663033 title "The way it was: Coastcare groups and the nature of nature in Australian cities" @default.
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