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A Beautiful Soaking Rain: Environmental Value And Water Beyond Eurocentrism, Leah Maree Gibbs Jan 2010

A Beautiful Soaking Rain: Environmental Value And Water Beyond Eurocentrism, Leah Maree Gibbs

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Current approaches to valuing nature within environmental and natural resource management are based on and limited by Eurocentric knowledge and experience of northern temperate nature. Methods based on separation and domination marginalise other ways of knowing nature and thinking about value. The aims of this paper are to unsettle current ways of thinking about water values; to decentre Eurocentric thinking about water management; and to present a different way of thinking about values associated with water, based on an empirical study of the Lake Eyre Basin in central Australia. The paper takes a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on multiple knowledges of …


Just Add Water: Colonisation, Water Governance, And The Australian Inland, Leah Maree Gibbs Jan 2009

Just Add Water: Colonisation, Water Governance, And The Australian Inland, Leah Maree Gibbs

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Water has played a key role in the development of the Australian inland and the nation. For European colonists, the dry and variable landscape challenged ideas about nature imported from northern temperate regions. I argue first, that colonists brought with them ideas for ordering nature and tools for transforming landscapes that led to inappropriate and destructive water management and the silencing of local voices and knowledge systems. Secondly, colonial patterns of ordering and transforming landscapes are ongoing, but new ways of governing water, which challenge colonialism, are emerging. In the first section of the paper I discuss colonial relationships with …