1 January

Here’s a way to maybe bridge the gap between how we think about landscape and how aborigines do. Our agriculture sees soil, water, plants and animals as means to an end. To provide us with food. However plants, animals, water and soil have ends of their own, independently of us. Aboriginal landscape management works with everything as an end in itself, rather than as a means. They do everything to meet the needs of the plants, animals, water and soil, because in turn they know that they will help to meet our needs too. It’s not some New Age love of the land, it’s seeing the landscape as a whole collection of agencies that need to work together, for mutual benefit. It all comes back to how much we’re willing to grant agency to other things. Humans are very reluctant to do that, it challenges their sense of self to admit other things have agency. Try telling somebody soil, water, plants and even animals have intelligence, for example. Our ideas about agency are incredibly narrow.