Aboriginals, Environment and Waste: a Post-colonial Perspective

Introduction -

    ...contemporary Aboriginal culture can only be understood as a complex product of the Australian colonial process acting on earlier forms of life and culture. Conversely, the dominant society will remain incomprehensible to itself as long as it ignores or disregards Aboriginal culture, Aboriginal perspectives and Aboriginal understandings of Australian society (Hodge & Mishra 1990, 71).

The Nature of Humans and Nature in Western Mythology

Introduction -

    Research in environmental studies is concerned with questions of how humans should best act (with) in their environments. This research is also informed by how people understand themselves, their environments, and the relationship between them. However, hierarchies of knowledge and power lend weight to some interpretations and approaches, while other possibilities are denigrated or ignored: complexity is generally avoided. For example, much environmental research is heavily weighted towards environmental management and sustainable development approaches which assume that people are highly intelligent, rational and reasonable beings who can understand, manage and control natural processes through their mental powers and actions. 'Nature' is understood to be bland, malleable and controllable.

Holism, Reductionism and Communitarian Visions

Introduction -

    In contrast to the popular bumper sticker which calls us to 'Think Globally and Act Locally', we all need to
'think and act, globally and locally' to assure environmental sustainability at all levels. Our need for community and a sense of place, a connection between culture and nature, is often jeopardised by traditional emphases on individualism and reductionism in intellectual and political circles. These positions have tended to dominate over holism and communitarianism, and their effects arguably contribute to much of the despair we feel today about environmental issues.

Preservationism and the Place of People in the Environment Movement

Introduction -

    The environment is more than the natural world (Birch and Cobb 1980). It is also the social world of people, where poverty, inequality and environmental degradation are indeed closely linked. The works of scholars and activists who insist on examining these links challenge us to examine how they might operate and with what implications.

Putting the 'social' back into 'science': a policy approach to endangered species conservation

Introduction -

   While an increase in public environmental awareness over the last three decades can be construed as encouraging, it would be fatuous to conclude that a homogeneous environmental movement is moving steadily towards resolving society's environmental ills. A more informed interpretation that accounts for the distribution and operation of power - central concerns of current social theory - would account for the diversity of interests embodied in modern environmental concern.

Politics plays a part: the case of Shoalwater Bay and Graham Richardson

Introduction -

    Within the environment movement, social theory has often been ignored or considered insignificant in comparison with the pressing need for 'action', 'management' and the rapid formulation of 'policy'. Street activists, who are 'at the coalface' of environmental disputation, often regard theory as the ramblings of philosopher academics in 'ivory towers' who have little or no connection with their own day-to-day activism. Faced with pressures for expediency and bargaining which characterise government, environmental bureaucrats, too, have or make little serious time to consider philosophical questions about environment that are raised by social theorists.

Landscapes of green domesticity

Introduction -

    The play of seeking, choosing, discarding words and stories that suggest, approximate, but never recapture the past is... an interpretation of life that invests the past and the "self' with coherence and meaning that may not have been evident before the act of writing itself The very language she uses to name herself is simultaneously empowering and vitiating since words cannot capture the full sense of being and narratives explode in multiple directions on their own Precisely because self-representation is discursively complex and ambiguous, a "radical disappropriation" of the actual life by the artifice of literature takes place at the scene of writing. The "1", something apparently familiar, becomes something other, foreign; and the drift of the disappropriation, the shape, that is, that the autobiographer's narrative and dramatic strategies take, reveal more about the autobiographer's present experience of "self' than about her past, although, of course, it tells us something about that as well (Sidonie Smith 1987, 45-47).

Sociological Explanations of Why doctors Shun Qualitative Social Research

Introduction -

    This essay discusses the complete non-participation of doctors in a project aimed at examining the effect of doctor-patient interaction on patient satisfaction. I present sociological explanations of why no one in the
sample participated in the project. I argue that doctors attempt to maintain a margin of indeterminacy and control areas of uncertainty and thus are apprehensive of social research. I also contend that the present medical crisis, the rise of alternative therapies, the small size of the city from which the sample was drawn, and cultural factors contributed to the non-participation of doctors. I end the paper by arguing that despite its failure, the research project has really been a success!

Breaking the Impasse in Northern Ireland

Introduction -

    The Northern Ireland peace talks, which resume on September 15 with the inclusion of Sinn Fein, need new approaches to help break the long deadlock. A solution has been elusive because both sides have strong arguments: the Protestant Unionists/Loyalists who favor continued union with London are in the majority; the Catholic Nationalists! Republicans who favor an end to that union have a claim to deep historical rights. And both claim God on their side.

Education, National Strategic Reserves and Australia's Budget Deficit

Introduction -

    Education is the most vital sector to Australia as the nation moves into the third millennium. Education is the national strategic reserve of the information age and, rather than cutting its funding, it would be prudent that the government invest in the future of tertiary education. 

A Race Election: Context and Implications for Australia

Introduction -

    Wth the exception of the 1967 Referendum to alter s. 51 (xxvi) of the Australian Constitution, the Australian people have never been sent to the polls with a specific race agenda. In that May referendum, 90.8 % of Australians approved of granting the Commonwealth power to legislate over Aborigines. It was, by any measure, a major step toward reconciliation and national unity.