Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 10 of 10

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Ancestral Landscapes Of The Pueblo World, Lesley M. Head Aug 2011

Ancestral Landscapes Of The Pueblo World, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

No abstract provided.


Is It Easy Being Green? On The Dilemmas Of Material Cultures Of Household Sustainability, Chris Gibson, Gordon R. Waitt, Lesley M. Head, Nicholas J. Gill Aug 2011

Is It Easy Being Green? On The Dilemmas Of Material Cultures Of Household Sustainability, Chris Gibson, Gordon R. Waitt, Lesley M. Head, Nicholas J. Gill

Lesley Head

In the 1970s ‘greens’ were normally thought of as radicals because of their uncompromising political views about sustainability, non-violence, social justice and grassroots democracy. Sometimes greens were marginalised as ‘tree-huggers’ because of their affinity with the non-human world. Today, in popular discourse, ‘green’ provides the centre of sustainability gravity (Barr 2003). Green has become a definitive reflection of what individuals are to become as both consumers and citizens. It is easy, it is said, to be green. This is evident from product branding to categories used in government survey results to describe the ‘most acceptable’ household practices. But as green …


Changing Cultures Of Water In Eastern Australian Backyard Gardens, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir Aug 2011

Changing Cultures Of Water In Eastern Australian Backyard Gardens, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir

Lesley Head

Research into diverse cultural understandings of water provides important contributions to the pressing global issue of sustainable supply, particularly when combined with analysis of relationships between everyday household practice and larger sociotechnical networks of storage and distribution. Here we analyse semi-structured interviews with 298 people about their 241 backyards in the Australian east coast cities of Sydney and Wollongong, undertaken during the 2002-03 drought. Water emerged as an important issue in both consciousness and practice. In contrast to a number of other environmental issues which stimulate more polarised responses, a commitment to reducing water consumption was shared across the study …


Australian Backyard Gardens And The Journey Of Migration, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir, E. Hampel Aug 2011

Australian Backyard Gardens And The Journey Of Migration, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir, E. Hampel

Lesley Head

Gardens have been an important site of environmental engagement in Australia since the British colonization. They are places where immigrant people and plants carry on traditions from their homelands, and work out an accommodation with new social and biophysical environments. We examine the backyard gardens of three contemporary migrant groups in suburban Australia, Macedonian, Vietnamese and British-born, and a fourth group of first generation Australians with both parents born overseas. There is strong emphasis on the production of vegetables in Macedonian backyards, and herbs and fruit in Vietnamese backyards. British backyards were more diverse, some focusing on non-native ornamental flowers …


Living With Trees – Perspectives From The Suburbs, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir Aug 2011

Living With Trees – Perspectives From The Suburbs, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir

Lesley Head

A study of suburban backyards and backyarders in Sydney and Wollongong revealed evidence of attitudes and behaviours in relation to trees. Attitudes are characterised under themes that indicate conditions of tolerance and belonging. They include attachment/risk, order/freedom and nativeness/alienness. While love is common, high levels of suspicion and intolerance towards trees in the suburban context are more common. Our findings confirm and throw further light on previous work indicating that many Australians have very partitioned views of the world in relationto where humans and nonhuman lifeforms belong. This partitioning must be understood in conceptual as well as spatial terms.


Cultural Ecology: The Problematic Human And The Terms Of Engagement, Lesley M. Head Aug 2011

Cultural Ecology: The Problematic Human And The Terms Of Engagement, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

As an intellectual container ‘cultural ecology’ is fraught with the same conceptual and ontological problems – what Anderson (2005: 280) calls ‘the stale binaries’ - that attend human impacts, cultural landscapes, indeed human and physical geographies. Yet the rich, detailed and diverse empirical material in evidence at the moment contradicts this in the doing. So perhaps we should be confident that in the public conversations we shall be known best by our works. Our students will be most effective if they can both groundtruth the satellite image of coastal vegetation and explain why the tsunami was experienced very differently by …


Local Engagements With Urban Bushland: Moving Beyond Bounded Practice For Urban Biodiversity Management, Nicholas J. Gill, Gordon R. Waitt, Lesley M. Head Aug 2011

Local Engagements With Urban Bushland: Moving Beyond Bounded Practice For Urban Biodiversity Management, Nicholas J. Gill, Gordon R. Waitt, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

Management of ecologically significant urban green space is likely to be increasingly governed by biodiversity policy frameworks. These frameworks tend to reproduce bounded thinking and strategies that separate green space from its context and characterise people as a disturbance. Like many green spaces these ecologically significant areas are highly valued by visitors and nearby residents. Green space is important for engagement with nature, social interaction, and for respite from daily life: it is strongly connected to surrounding areas and to the lives of people who live there. The dissonance between bounded management thinking and the role of green space in …


Retrofitting The Suburban Garden: Morphologies And Some Elements Of Sustainability Potential Of Two Australian Residential Suburbs Compared, Sumita Ghosh, Lesley M. Head Aug 2011

Retrofitting The Suburban Garden: Morphologies And Some Elements Of Sustainability Potential Of Two Australian Residential Suburbs Compared, Sumita Ghosh, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

No abstract provided.


Suburban Life And The Boundaries Of Nature: Resilience And Rupture In Australian Backyard Gardens, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir Aug 2011

Suburban Life And The Boundaries Of Nature: Resilience And Rupture In Australian Backyard Gardens, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir

Lesley Head

Despite an academic shift from dualistic to hybrid frameworks of culture/nature relations, separationist paradigms of environmental management have great resilience and vernacular appeal. The conditions under which they are reinforced, maintained or ruptured need more detailed attention because of the urgent environmental challenges of a humanly transformed earth. We draw on research in 265 Australian backyard gardens, focusing on two themes where conceptual and material bounding practices intertwine; spatial boundary-making and native plants. We trace the resilience of separationist approaches in the Australian context to the overlay of indigeneity/ non-indigeneity atop other dualisms, and their rupture to situations of close …


The (Aboriginal) Face Of The (Australian) Earth, Lesley M. Head Aug 2011

The (Aboriginal) Face Of The (Australian) Earth, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

No abstract provided.