Abstract
Australia, in common with nations globally, faces an immediate and future environmental and economic challenge as an outcome of climate change. Indigenous communities in Australia, some who live a precarious economic and social existence, are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Impacts are already being experienced through dramatic weather events such as floods and bushfires. Other, more gradual changes, such as rising sea levels in the north of Australia, will have long-term negative consequences on communities, including the possibility of forced relocation. Climate change is also a historical phenomenon, and Indigenous communities hold a depth of knowledge of climate change and its impact on local ecologies of benefit to the wider community when policies to deal with an increasingly warmer world are considered. Non-Indigenous society must respect this knowledge and facilitate alliances with Indigenous communities based on a greater recognition of traditional knowledge systems.
Highlights
Australia, in common with nations globally, faces an immediate and future environmental and economic challenge as an outcome of climate change
Development in Australia has come at the expense of Indigenous wellbeing to the advantage of a society born out of colonial exploitation: Wealth creation for most Australians has been predicated on expropriation of Aboriginal lands, initially for agriculture and for mining from
Greater recognition of the knowledge maintained within Indigenous communities relative to localized ecologies and the affects of climate change would go some way to addressing injustice by configuring Indigenous people globally as valuable arbiters of change rather than the helpless victims of the First World: When considering climkleinate change, indigenous peoples and marginalized populations warrant particular attention
Summary
In Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (2004), Deborah Bird Rose writes that ‘Settler societies are built on a dual war: a war against Nature and a war against the natives.’ From the early years of European occupation of Indigenous Country in Australia, both land and the environment have been degraded by a multitude of forces underpinning colonization, including key aspects of agricultural practice (Muir, 2014), and mining (Altman & Martin, 2009). While the new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnball, is regarded as being somewhat ‘friendlier’ to the environment, far he has not shifted government policy on climate change He recently approved the controversial ‘mega’ Carmichael coal mine in Queensland (Taylor, 2015b), even though multinational mining companies, including BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto are “quietly exiting coal” (Grigg, 2015) and its value to the Australian community, in both an economic and environmental sense is heavily contested (Cleary, 2015). It is widely accepted by scientists that an increase in temperature of around two degrees Celsius will cause widespread death as a direct result of illnesses and diseases attributed to climate change, but severe mental illness and deep psychological scaring (Christoff, 2014; Hamilton, 2013; Kolbert, 2014) Indigenous people, those living outside major urban centers, will face the consequence of sickness to country itself. If community-owned country becomes “sick” through environmental degradation, climate impacts, or inability of traditional owners to fulfil cultural obligations, through the ongoing management and habitation of their land, the people of that land will fell this “sickness” themselves. (Green et al, 2009, p. 1)
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