Abstract
In this chapter, I want to consider the history of the overlapping revolutions in science and society in Australia that have come together in the partnerships for ‘sustainability’. Although this is a global phenomenon, its local manifestations are subject to the strong biophysical constraints of the Australian continent. Australian environmental conditions, I argue, make for distinctive nuances in the way the science of conservation biology has evolved there. My chapter is in a sense a ‘worked example’ of William M. Adams’s argument that ‘[c]onservation is… geographically diverse, historically changing and contested’.1 It is as Adams says, ‘fundamentally a social phenomenon or social practice’. R.A. Kenchington, an Australian coastal zone scientific manager, put it succinctly: ‘We do not manage the environment’, only the human behaviours that affect its structure and processes.2 It is not just the human behaviours, it is also the nature of the ecological crisis itself. Crisis demands more than ‘just science’, as Michael Soule, a doyen of conservation biology, commented:
Conservation biology differs from most other biological sciences … it is often a crisis discipline … In crisis disciplines, one must act before knowing all the facts; crisis disciplines are thus a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information.3
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© 2009 Libby Robin
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Robin, L. (2009). New Science for Sustainability in an Ancient Land. In: Sörlin, S., Warde, P. (eds) Nature’s End. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245099_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245099_9
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