Title: ‘Making a difference in environmental research: placethinking and placespeaking in the Anthropocene’
Proposal for Earth Ethics Conference
Robyn Bartel, Geography & Planning, University of New England, Armidale NSW
Conference Focus Area Relevant to this Proposal: __Earth-centred ethics and philosophy__
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Type of Participation Proposed:_____Academic paper – oral presentation______
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ABSTRACT
The challenges posed by human impacts across the globe, and the degree of environmental harms currently being experienced, present deep questions for academics engaged in researching areas related to policy reform and behavioural change. How can we respond adequately and appropriately to the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene, defined as it is, and somewhat paradoxically, by both human co-creation of the Earth, and Anthropogenic degradation of Earth systems? This paper will explore this question by examining established research practices and how methodologies adopting multiple ontologies and grounded in place may offer advantages both intellectual and practical, drawing on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, place agency and radical approaches in legal pluralism. Place is often invisibilised and abstracted by mainstream institutions and processes, including in research, and this has obscured its role in co-producing these very same mechanisms. Such place-work is particularly important for environmental law, for which place is or should be central. Rachel Carson’s work demonstrates remarkable prescience in heralding relational ontologies, the relevance of materiality, including foregrounding of place and non-human agency, as well as the value of collaborative governance, particularly validation of place-based knowledges. There is a challenge here for researchers to recognize and embrace the many voices of place at multiple scales and to more fully appreciate place agency, and deploy this recognition to address the environmental, regulatory and institutional problems of our time, including those that define the Anthropocene. To transform its vision and impact mainstream scholarship must interrogate its frequently-held but often overlooked assumptions ofuniversalism, essentialism, anthropocentrism and utlitiarianism. Such a transformation involves a finer-grained attendance to geographical conditions, including not only spatial diversity but also temporal dynamism, change and emergence, as well as the incorporation of non-human perspectives and a de-centring of the human. Such lessons of contextualization and deep democratization have relevance for Earth ethics more generally.
biography
Name: Robyn Bartel
Affiliation: Geography & Planning, University of New England, Armidale NSW.
Associate Professor Robyn Bartel is a multi-award winning scholar with wide-ranging expertise in geography, law and education. Known internationally for her contribution to legal geography, her research encompasses regulation, regulatory agencies and the regulated, as well as the social, institutional and natural landscape in which all are situated. Her work has been influential in environmental policy development, heavily cited in the scholarly literature, and handpicked for prestigious international collections and seminal texts in environmental law. Robyn is a founding member of AELERT, the Australasian Environmental Law Enforcement and Regulators network, as well as UNE’s Environmental Humanities Research Network.