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Why 'green-black' alliances are less simple than they seem

The Conversation - Fri, 2017-03-10 05:22
Certain traditional owners and conservation groups allied to stand against a planned gas hub in Western Australia's Kimberley region. AAP Image/Tim Gentles

In Australia and across the world, Indigenous people are resisting developments that threaten their lands. Wangan and Jagalingou people stand in opposition to the planned Carmichael coalmine in Queensland, while the Sioux people are holding firm in their struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock.

As these contests intensify, they reveal that Indigenous peoples often have limited say over what happens on their country. When pitted against powerful state and corporate actors, Indigenous people may seek assistance from others, such as environmentalists, to protect their interests and further their aspirations.

In Australia, these arrangements have sometimes been called “green-black alliances”. However, as we argue in our new book Unstable Relations, it is misleading to contend that Indigenous people and environmentalists necessarily share (or don’t share) the same ends and motives.

They are neither natural allies nor enemies. Instead, we suggest, close attention to the past and present of “green-black” meetings in Australia reveals that their relationships are surprisingly unstable, and are shaped by shifting legal and social contexts.

To understand how and why these collaborations occur, and how and why they can fall apart, we need a better comprehension of the particular processes and people involved, rather than treating them all as uniform.

Understanding land rights today

Since 1966, governments in Australia have progressively recognised different forms of Indigenous land rights. Perhaps the most well known is “native title”, which was first recognised in the High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision.

Native title applies only to Crown lands and pastoral leases, only authorises limited land use rights, and is proven through condescending tests of cultural “continuity”. Because of the history of colonial dispossession, some groups fail to meet these tests; others refuse to do so. These problems notwithstanding, multiple forms of Indigenous land rights together cover more than a third of the continent, much of it in remote Australia.

As we have recently seen, mining companies and others often greet changes to land rights regimes with dire warnings about economic impacts. The “Mabo madness” of the 1990s proved overblown. By and large, Australia’s various land rights regimes have been highly accommodating to miners and mineral extraction.

In violation of United Nations principles, Australia’s native title laws do not recognise Indigenous peoples’ rights to consent over what happens on their country. Rather, they simply allow a right to be consulted for six months. This gives rise to contractual agreements, such as Indigenous Land Use Agreements, which effectively grant mining companies and others a “social licence to operate” in exchange for a mixture of cash and in-kind benefits.

Indigenous academic Marcia Langton and others have argued that this era of “agreement-making” has the potential to lift Indigenous people in remote areas out of poverty. According to this argument, environmental groups that raise concerns about industrial activity do so at Indigenous peoples’ expense.

A simplified version of this story is often found in the mainstream media, casting environmentalists as out-of-touch urbanites and portraying Indigenous groups who work with them as dupes or somehow illegitimate.

Meanwhile, many Australians seem to accept that extractive developments are both inevitable and beneficial, despite complex evidence to the contrary.

The alternative view is the one depicted in this painting by Garawa artist Jacky Green, in which a road train covered with dollar signs represents “the wealth being taken away from us, from our country”.

Unstable relations

The anthropological and historical research presented in our book highlights that, far from being manipulated, Indigenous people who are opposed to a particular development often seek to enter into strategic partnerships with environmentalists. Crucially, these are not inevitable alliances but negotiated collaborations, which can run into problems if circumstances change.

The controversy that erupted in recent years over Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act was shaped by collaborative relationships established between the Australian Conservation Foundation, The Wilderness Society, and Cape York Land Council and its former chairman Noel Pearson decades earlier. Whereas these groups had formalised an alliance in the mid-1990s, which successfully lobbied for land rights and the return of country to traditional owners in Cape York, they split in the late 2000s over how to regulate planning on that country.

Nonetheless, while a public controversy raged, together these groups continued to privately negotiate further outcomes over jointly managed national parks.

Another quite different example is the campaign against a major liquid-gas processing plant and port at Walmadany (James Price Point) in Western Australia. The ethnographer Stephen Muecke has characterised the relationship between those Goolarabooloo people who sought to halt the project and their green supporters as the most successful such collaboration in Australia’s history.

This was based on long-term personal relationships between some of those involved and, crucially, the media and scientific resources that environmentalists were able to bring to the campaign. “Citizen scientists” took their cue from Goolarabooloo people’s firsthand knowledge of local environs, conducting highly successful surveys of turtle nests and bilbies.

In our book, we and other contributors point to many other productive but nonetheless unstable relationships in South Australia, the Northern Territory, Victoria and elsewhere.

The ‘green-black’ future

Environmentalists often seem oblivious to the contractual landscape in which they are acting. They mistake their relationships with particular Indigenous groups as a natural alliance, based on received ideas of Indigenous connection to country.

But as Yorta Yorta activist Monica Morgan has pointed out, Indigenous people have a holistic relationship with their country, which doesn’t always fit with the specific goals of environmentalists. When green groups assume that Indigenous peoples’ “traditional culture” is necessarily conservationist, this can lead them to denigrate Indigenous people who pursue economic opportunities.

Relationships between Indigenous people and environmental interests continue to change. Both are now landholders of significant conservation areas in remote Australia, while Indigenous people are increasingly employed as rangers through state-funded conservation projects.

Again, specific case studies show how these arrangements are far from simple. At the former pastoral property of Pungalina in Queensland’s Gulf Country, Garawa people return to “Emu Dreaming” places now managed by non-Indigenous conservationists. There they negotiate an ambiguous field of responses to their presence, ranging from interest and respect to anxiety.

In Arnhem Land, Kuninjku people express ambivalence about the problem of the environmentally destructive buffalo in an Indigenous Protected Area. The buffalo are simultaneously recognised as companions, an environmental problem, and a crucial source of meat in hungry times.

As long as Indigenous people have limited capacity to decide what happens on their country, and as long as environmentalists continue to oppose destructive developments, their interests will sometimes intersect. However, as these situations arise and alliances form, we should be careful to avoid essentialising or conflating those involved. “Green-black” alliances will certainly be productive at times, but they will always be unstable.

The Conversation

Timothy Neale receives funding from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre.

Eve Vincent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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EPA head Scott Pruitt denies that carbon dioxide causes global warming

The Guardian - Fri, 2017-03-10 05:12

Trump adviser shocks scientists and environmental advocates with statement that negates EPA policy and ‘overwhelmingly clear’ evidence on climate change

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming.

Pruitt said on Thursday that he did not believe that the release of CO2, a heat-trapping gas, was pushing global temperatures upwards.

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Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching worsens as scientists fear heatwave's impact

The Guardian - Fri, 2017-03-10 05:00

Images released by Greenpeace show newly bleached coral at reef between Port Douglas and Cairns

More evidence of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef has emerged ahead of surveys that will confirm whether an underwater heatwave has caused widespread damage for an unprecedented second year in a row.

Photos and footage taken by marine biologist Brett Monroe Garner at a reef between Port Douglas and Cairns – south of the hardest-hit northern section of the reef last year – indicate severe bleaching of corals he said were “full of colour and life” just months ago.

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Robber fly: Hunting secrets of a tiny predator

BBC - Fri, 2017-03-10 04:15
The mid-air hunting strategy of a tiny fly the size of a grain of rice has been revealed by an international team of scientists.
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Baby chimp thriving after rescue from traffickers

BBC - Fri, 2017-03-10 04:08
We revisit Nemley Junior who was freed from wildlife traffickers in Ivory Coast after a BBC News investigation.
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Robber fly: Hunting secrets of a tiny predator revealed

BBC - Fri, 2017-03-10 03:32
A tiny robber fly the size of a grain of rice has an advanced hunting strategy, researchers discover.
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Here comes the pollution pram

BBC - Fri, 2017-03-10 01:47
The scheme hoping to help parents steer their little ones away from exhaust fumes.
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Oldest crocodile eggs discovered in dinosaur nest

BBC - Fri, 2017-03-10 00:58
The oldest crocodile eggs known to science have been discovered in the cliffs of western Portugal.
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Use buggy covers to combat air pollution danger, parents warned

The Guardian - Fri, 2017-03-10 00:28

Parents should protect their infants by using covers on prams during the school run, particularly in the morning, according to experts

Parents should use covers on their prams during the school run to protect their infants from air pollution, experts have warned.

Scientists tested the pollution levels inside prams to assess the exposure of infants taken on the school run with older siblings. The researchers found that the fine particle pollution from vehicle exhausts, which is particularly harmful, was higher during the morning journey.

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Watching the scratching bear is good for you

BBC - Fri, 2017-03-10 00:00
Research from the University of California has found that watching nature programmes, such as Planet Earth II, is good for you.
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Consuming our future

ABC Environment - Thu, 2017-03-09 19:05
Only lowering our living standards will achieve sustainable growth. That’s the message from Satyajit Das.
Categories: Around The Web

Consuming our future

ABC Environment - Thu, 2017-03-09 19:05
Only lowering our living standards will achieve sustainable growth. That’s the message from Satyajit Das.
Categories: Around The Web

Too close for comfort: campaign aims to give cyclists safe space

The Guardian - Thu, 2017-03-09 18:30

Cycling UK is raising funds to replicate nationwide a West Midlands police initiative that teaches drivers how to overtake cyclists safely

More than 2 million Britons cycle every day, and about 6.6 million ride at least once a month. For most of these people, the cycling infrastructure will be poor and they will be on the road mixing with traffic in all its forms where close passes will sadly be the norm.

According to findings from Dr Rachel Aldred’s Near Miss project, drivers overtaking cyclists too closely account for a third of threatening encounters that cyclists have with motor vehicles.

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Fukushima clean-up 'beyond comprehension'

ABC Environment - Thu, 2017-03-09 17:43
Six years on, significant challenges remain in cleaning up the Fukushima plant.
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DNA provides window into early Aboriginal history

BBC - Thu, 2017-03-09 15:43
Scientists use hair to locate where distinct groups lived in Australia up to 50,000 years ago.
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Drone fly stirs for the first feed of spring

The Guardian - Thu, 2017-03-09 15:30

The insect’s abdomen pulsed – with a sudden flexing of its armour-like plates it was readying itself to fly, feed and pollinate

Winter winds had worked their way into the sills and splits in a wooden gate. Silver birch seeds and seed cases had been blown and wedged into every gap. Many more had been whisked through the bars into the lee of the west wind only to snag in spiders’ webs, and there they hung, in the grubby threads that had become necklaces of detritus.

Related: When is a wasp not a wasp? When it's a hoverfly

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What our backyards can tell us about the world

The Conversation - Thu, 2017-03-09 14:16
Citizen science projects are a way to contribute to science from your own backyard. Shutterstock

Our backyards are home to many scuttling, slithering and scampering creatures, which are often the subject of fascination. But they can also play a key role in tracking the changes in the world around us – for science.

Science is a vital tool to monitor the world, but scientists can’t do it all alone. Ordinary citizens can help by getting involved in a citizen science project.

People are spending weekends with their friends and families learning more about their backyards and gathering data that would otherwise be inaccessible to scientists.

They’re helping to manage invasive species, tree death, diseases and animal health. And it’s a way to take responsibility for the environment, urban areas, farmland and the creatures that visit our gardens.

Here are just a few ways you can get involved too.

Birds in backyards

Bird feeders and water dispensers are a great way to monitor human interactions with wildlife. If you have them, you can see the effect they have on your garden. You may even get a visit from a threatened species.

This project, created by researchers at Deakin and Griffith universities, aims to find out how people influence bird numbers and species diversity, and to measure the impact of food and water provisions. The organisers are looking for volunteers.

Additionally, BirdLife Australia’s Birds in Backyards is a project that collects reports of backyard bird sightings for analysis through the data-collection site Birdata. The site also contains resources on bird-friendly gardening, a bird finder tool (for identifying that pesky bird), forums and events.

Aggressive birds?

You may have heard the story of the bell miner (Manorina melanophrys), its feeding habits, aggressive behaviour and its association with a plant sickness known as eucalypt dieback.

A bell miner hangs from the trees. David Cook/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The Bell Miner Colony Project, which I run, looks at the bell miners’ habitat choice and movements, and investigates whether they really cause dieback. The project, developed two years ago, looks to answer questions about bell miner distribution across the east coast of Australia, and helps with managing forests and gardens.

Most people either love or hate bell miners. I personally love them, so I want to find out what they are really doing on a species scale.

One colony lives in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens and another in the Melbourne Zoo, so they are easy to see and visit. They make a distinctive “tink” call throughout the day, which can be used to monitor density. If you have seen any, please report them.

Tracking ferals

If your area seems to be riddled with pests, Feral Scan is a website for surveying and identifying them. The data is compiled and plotted on a map to create a scanner for previous sightings.

Another website for reporting biodiversity sightings is the Atlas of Living Australia. Any species seen in your backyard or during your travels can be added to the searchable database of sightings from across the nation.

Helping wombats

WomSAT maps and record wombats and wombat burrow locations. So if you’ve seen wombats running around, let them know.

A wombat infected with mange. Upsticksngo/Flickr, CC BY

There is also a call for volunteers in the ACT to help treat wombats with mange infections. Mange is a skin disease caused by mites, which leaves wombats itching until they scab. Volunteers help by applying treatments outside wombat burrows and monitoring the burrows with cameras.

Weed spotting

For those of you who are not into animals, there is a project for detecting new and emerging weeds in Queensland.

Queensland Herbarium teaches weed identification and mapping skills so that you can send your weed specimens and accompanying data to them.

This helps scientists determine where weeds are, how they spread and the best process for large-scale management.

The Conversation

Kathryn Teare Ada Lambert founded The Bell-Miner-Colony Project and is always on the lookout for interesting citizen science projects to get involved in.

Categories: Around The Web

SA rooftop solar installs surge after statewide blackout

RenewEconomy - Thu, 2017-03-09 13:32
New data suggests SA's September blackout rekindled the state's love affair with rooftop solar, spurring a more than 17% uptick in installations from October to December 2016.
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Solar-powered everything

RenewEconomy - Thu, 2017-03-09 13:07
One company’s mission to make every surface soak up the sun - rom car parks, to food cars, jackets and army tents.
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California just generated enough solar power to meet half its energy needs

RenewEconomy - Thu, 2017-03-09 13:04
Want to see energy progress? Head west to California.
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