Episode 25, The Environmental Volunteer Group
Show notes
The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below.
REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
Climate adaptation and the rethinking of conservation
- Conservation biology and restoration ecology have been internally
debating the baseline question for at least two decades. The conventional
baseline-restoration model targets the ecosystem as it was at a specific
past date, often pre-industrial or pre-European-contact. The
climate-adaptation model accepts that ecosystems are moving and asks how
to support function and biodiversity through the transition. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II Sixth
Assessment Report (2022) treats ecosystem-based adaptation as a primary
category of climate response, alongside hard-infrastructure and
social-systems adaptation.
- Coastal foreshore systems in southern Australia are showing measurable
effects of sea level rise, salt intrusion, increased storm-surge
frequency, and shifting species ranges. The CSIRO and Bureau of
Meteorology’s State of the Climate 2024 report documents these changes
for Australian coastlines.
Ecofeminism and environmental philosophy
- The Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood, who taught at the University of
Tasmania and later at the Australian National University, published
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature in 1993. The book is a foundational
text in ecofeminist political philosophy and a sustained critique of
Western dualistic thought. Plumwood died in 2008. Her unfinished work
was published posthumously as The Eye of the Crocodile in 2012.
- The Chinese-American anthropologist Anna Tsing, at the University of
California Santa Cruz, published The Mushroom at the End of the World:
On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins in 2015. The book follows
the matsutake mushroom commodity chain across the United States, China,
Japan, and Finland, and argues for a multispecies, collaborative
conception of life in damaged ecosystems.
Community-based mangrove restoration in the Global South
- The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest in the world,
approximately ten thousand square kilometres straddling the
Bangladesh-India border. Around four and a half million people live in
the Bangladesh portion. The forest is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and
the country’s primary natural defence against sea level rise and tropical
cyclones.
- Community-based ecological mangrove restoration in Bangladesh has been
documented by the Bangladesh Forest Department in partnership with NGOs
including the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies. Women’s groups,
fishing cooperatives, and youth networks participate in adaptive
co-management arrangements.
- Mekong Delta mangrove restoration in Vietnam responds to a layered
ecological damage history: chemical defoliants used by United States
forces in the Second Indochina War from 1961 to 1971; intensive shrimp
aquaculture expansion from the mid-1980s; and contemporary sea level
rise and salt intrusion. Community-led restoration networks coordinate
with the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
- A broader international community-based adaptation movement, supported
by networks including the Global Environment Facility Small Grants
Programme and the International Institute for Environment and
Development, has documented community-led ecosystem adaptation across
the Global South since the early 2000s.
The Australian volunteer environmental movement
- The federal National Landcare Program was established in 1989 by the
Hawke government, partly in response to advocacy from the National
Farmers’ Federation and the Australian Conservation Foundation. It
formalised and partially funded local volunteer groups doing on-ground
restoration work. There are now more than five thousand Landcare and
friends-of groups operating across Australia, supported by state and
territory Landcare networks and federal funding cycles.
- The campaign against the construction of the Franklin Dam on the lower
Gordon River in southwest Tasmania, from 1982 through to the High
Court’s decision in Commonwealth v Tasmania (Tasmanian Dam Case) on 1
July 1983, was a defining moment in the modern Australian environmental
movement. The campaign produced the political formation that became the
Australian Greens, founded as a national political party in 1992.
- Tasmanian environmental politics has continued to be central to
national debate, including through ongoing forestry, native forest
logging, and World Heritage area campaigns.
The political economy of environmental volunteer labour
- The Australian Bureau of Statistics General Social Survey and related
data sources estimate that approximately one hundred and fifty thousand
Australians are active environmental volunteers in any given year. The
cohort skews female, older than the median Australian adult, and more
economically secure than the general population.
- The foundational feminist critique of women’s unpaid labour being
systematically erased from economic measurement was articulated by the
New Zealand economist and former politician Marilyn Waring in her 1988
book Counting for Nothing, also published as If Women Counted. The
argument has been extended to environmental and ecological labour by
scholars including Joan Tronto on care ethics and Nancy Folbre on the
political economy of care.
- The contribution of unpaid environmental volunteer labour to Australian
biodiversity outcomes, climate adaptation, and natural-asset maintenance
is not captured in standard national accounts. Estimates of its
notional economic value have been produced by various Landcare reviews
but are not integrated into the System of National Accounts.
REFERENCES
[1] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2022:
Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Working Group II Contribution to
the Sixth Assessment Report (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022),
particularly Chapter 2 on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.
[2] Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge,
1993); Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile, edited by Lorraine Shannon
(Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012).
[3] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the
Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015).
[4] Bangladesh Forest Department and Bangladesh Centre for Advanced
Studies, Community-Based Mangrove Restoration in the Sundarbans (Dhaka:
Bangladesh Forest Department); Md Khalequzzaman and Reazul Ahsan,
published research on Sundarbans community co-management.
[5] Vu Quyet Thang and contributors, published research on Mekong Delta
mangrove restoration; UNDP Vietnam, Community-Based Mangrove Management
in the Mekong Delta (Hanoi: UNDP Vietnam).
[6] International Institute for Environment and Development, Community-
Based Adaptation: Lessons from the Field (London: IIED, 2018); Global
Environment Facility Small Grants Programme, Community Action for Climate
Adaptation reports.
[7] Australian Government, National Landcare Program documentation
(Canberra: Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry); Landcare
Australia, State of Landcare Report (Sydney: Landcare Australia, 2023).
[8] Commonwealth v Tasmania (Tasmanian Dam Case) (1983) 158 CLR 1; James
McQueen, The Franklin: Not Just a River (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books,
1983); Bob Brown, Memo for a Saner World (Camberwell, Vic: Penguin Books,
2004).
[9] Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women
Are Worth, second edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999;
first published as If Women Counted, 1988); Joan Tronto, Moral
Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York:
Routledge, 1993); Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and
Family Values (New York: The New Press, 2001).
[10] Australian Bureau of Statistics, General Social Survey: Summary
Results, Australia (Canberra: ABS); Landcare Australia, State of
Landcare Report 2023 estimates of volunteer numbers and contributions.
FURTHER READING
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). A companion to Tsing’s thinking on
multispecies survival in damaged ecosystems, with extended reflections on
collaborative ecological practice.
Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2011). An Australian environmental
anthropologist’s work on extinction, mourning, and the ethics of living in
breaking ecosystems.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press,
1949). The foundational American conservation philosophy text, against
which much subsequent ecological thought has been written.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific
Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980). Foundational ecofeminist
historical work on the parallel domination of women and nature in early
modern European thought.
Bron Taylor, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London: Continuum,
2005). Useful reference on the wider intellectual traditions of human
relationship to environment, including non-Western and Indigenous frames.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific
Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions,
2013). A Potawatomi ecologist’s argument for braiding Indigenous and
scientific knowledge in ecological practice.
Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian
Lands and Peoples (Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1994). Foundational Australian
ecological history with sustained attention to the Tasmanian context.
All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended.
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