Product Description: In 2005, researchers from four Australian universities and CSIRO joined forces with environmental managers from three state agencies and six regional catchment management authorities to answer the question: Can we detect the influence of public environmental programs on the condition of our natural resources?This was prompted by a series of national audits of Australia’s environmental programs that could find no evidence of improvement in the condition of waterways, soils and native vegetation despite major public programs which had invested more than $4...read more

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Product Description: A collection of stories about the relationship people have with the land. The voices that speak to us belong to ordinary Australians living in rural and remote areas. They are pastoralists and graziers, opal miners, environmentalists, former city people, and Aboriginal men and women...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

- What makes people care about the environment?- Why and how do different cultural groups value land in different ways?With increasing international concern about green issues, and the apparent failure of mechanistic solutions to complex problems, Uncommon Ground provides a timely understanding of the cultural values that underpin human-environmental relations. Through a comparison of two very different groups, the Aboriginal people and the white cattle farmers in Far North Queensland, Uncommon Ground explores how the human-environmental relationship is culturally constructed.This highly topical study also examines the long-term conflicts over land in Australia, which have brought to the surface each group's environmental values. The author considers how these values are acquired, and the universal and cultural factors that lead to their development. Major emphasis is put on the cultural forms that create and express environmental values for the Aborigines and the white pastoralists, such as:- historical background- land use and economic modes- socio-spatial organization- language, knowledge and methods of socialization- oral and visual representation- cosmological beliefs and systems of law

Product Description: "Imagined Country" attempts to describe the relationship between society and the physical world through representation. The myths and symbols of spaces reveal how society regards its environment. As cultural perception shifts, altered by location and time, so its representations of the physical environment change...read more