ABSTRACT
Like Michael Leunig’s characters (Figure 10.1), many of us don’t quite know what to make of the past or future, but sense that it is important at least to look in their respective directions. We are more comfortable in the present, which in the end is all we have anyway, finding physical and psychological sustenance in our connec-
tions to something we call the natural world. Leunig refashions past and future into ‘pasture’ – a physical place, but also something else again. Our present world carries both an inheritance from the past, and the seeds of the future. Similarly, but somewhat less playfully, contemporary environmental management
dilemmas require us to deal with a nature that is being refashioned both physically and conceptually. The first challenge for our thinking is to accommodate both change and stability over a range of temporal scales. As examples through the book have shown, this is an important issue whatever the field of inquiry, and whether or not humans are included in the frame of reference.
