ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some insights from qualitative research with rural-amenity migrants in the hinterland regions of Melbourne, Australia, to contribute to contemporary discussions about how we might progress reflexive environmental management in the Anthropocene. Environmental management research has become increasingly concerned with how interactions between rural-amenity migrants and the biophysical landscapes they come to occupy are shaping future ecological trajectories. In the process of repositioning environmental management for the Anthropocene, it is vital that we interrogate how ecological futures are already being interpreted and co-produced at a fine-grained scale. An examination of environmental management that is conscious of temporal human-environment interactions may reveal useful insights into the challenges for environmental management practice and policy in rural-amenity landscapes. Perceptions of what constitutes appropriate environmental management and ecological function are bound up in the bodily experience of plants, soil and other nonhuman elements that are themselves products of past performative relationships.
