ABSTRACT
When the Australian Working Group for the Ecological Humanities rst convened at the start of the new millennium at the Australian National University’s Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, it was as a small group of scholars from different disciplines, each of whom had developed their own angle on the contribution of the humanities and social sciences to diagnosing and redressing the socio-cultural dimensions of the environmental problems that weighed upon us. The shared vision that emerged from these early discussions was encapsulated in a manifesto that framed the Ecological Humanities as an interdisciplinary and intercultural endeavour, dedicated to ‘rethreading the fabric of knowledge’ by ‘building bridges’ between ‘the sciences and the humanities, and between western and other ways of knowing,’ with a view to ‘developing moral action in relation to the “natural” world’. This undertaking, we afrmed, was motivated by curiosity, uncertainty, concern, and a desire to collaborate with ‘scholars and other experts from a diversity of cultures and traditions,’ along with a commitment to ‘cultural, biological, and academic diversity’ (Rose and Robin ‘Manifesto’). While it was not made explicit here, the scare quotes around ‘natural’ signalled our keen awareness of both the cultural construction of concepts of ‘nature’ and of the interrelationship of ‘social and ecological justice’ (Rose and Robin ‘Ecological Humanities in Action’).
