ABSTRACT
VAL PLUMWOOD Land of Paradox There are many good reasons to conclude that a rich, deep connection with land and place is a key part of a healthy human culture, a source of human wisdom and sustainable living, of caring for the land and ensuring a healthy future.1 Australian schoolchildren recite verse from a national literature that lays a strong claim to love of the land: ‘Core of my heart, my country, a wilful, lavish land, all you who have not loved her, you will not understand’ writes Dorothea McKellar. A major task for Australian environmental philosophy and history is then to explain why people from a settler culture who make such claims to love their land have been engaged in destroying so much of it. What is it that has given non-indigenous Australia some of the worst vegetation clearance, land degradation and biodiversity extinction rates in the world? Does the very size of the continent give us a frontier sense of inexhaustibility? Has the colonial heritage of Australians, which positions us on both sides of the colonial relationship as both colonised (in relation to the British) and coloniser (in relation to Aboriginal people) perhaps distorted, stripped and impoverished our relationship to our transplanted home?
