May Monthly Meeting – Speaker: Libby Robin “Restoring Ecological and Social Connections”

We are increasingly aware that the world is changing all around us. By the end of this century, there will be many more of the disasters we already know – fires, floods, heat waves. All these will be worse the coming decades, even if we stop adding to the problems today. What sort of a world will our grandchildren inherit? How do we live with ourselves now if we feel we can do nothing about the future? We can’t spend our immediate futures overwhelmed by anxiety and feeling helpless in the face of relentless environmental destruction.

In this talk I explore emerging real-life restoration partnerships that already reconnect ecological and social futures. Local people need to feel they have agency in their futures. At the time of the first World Congress on National Parks in Seattle in 1962, conservation was all about wild places and so-called pristine landscapes. ‘Wilderness’ was ‘America’s Greatest Idea’. But in this Anthropocene world, where humans are terraforming the planet, we need ways to work with damaged lands and seas, in cities and towns and farms where we grow food, and to find futures here and now that don’t damage other forms of life.

Gondwana Link is one hopeful story: it is building ecological connectivities over 1,000 kms long across Western Australia, including land held by Traditional Owners, private land, national parks, state reserves, new philanthropic conservation reserves and marine reserves. It draws on humanities leadership in music, dance, museum exhibitions, films and centres the important work of Traditional Owners. Together ecological repair and celebration serve to restore torn social fabric and landscapes ruined by extractive practices. Caring for southwestern Australia is important because it protects so many rare and spectacular species that only live in that corner of the world, and which in 1972, justified the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Reserve located in the Fitzgerald River National Park in Western Australia, a globally significant natural area. It is not officially classified as a full UNESCO World Heritage Site, at least partly because locals have developed creative new partnerships in the region, including the Fitzgerald Biosphere Group (FBG), which is a member led “Grower Group” with a strong record of achievement in resilient farming and natural resource management. FBG and others are working towards sustainable livelihoods in this special place.

Gondwana Link seeks to marry the aspirations of the local and the global, the bushland and the livelihoods, the people who live there and the global groups, philanthropic and diplomatic (like UNESCO). Big national and international conservation organisations kicked off Gondwana Link, ‘but it is the small local groups that keep it going’, Keith Bradby, CEO of Gondwana Link declares, as his team pioneers new ways to dwell in local places more kindly and more creatively. Local and global together are crucial to engage people from all walks of life in the present and are essential to both human and planetary health in the future.

Professor Libby Robin is an eminent historian of science and environmental ideas who is currently Emeritus Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. She is a creative writer, trained in the history of science and environment, who worked for two decades with ecologists at the Fenner School and one of its predecessors, CRES (the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies), from 1999-2018. Her work includes researching the role of museums in exploring global change, and she has also been a curator at the National Museum of Australia. Libby has published many books including Building a Forest Conscience, Defending the Little Desert, The Flight of the Emu, Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future, How a Continent Created a Nation and The Environment: A History of the Idea. Her latest book is What Birdo is That? A Field Guide to Bird People (2023, Melbourne University Publishing). Libby is now working on a book about restoration ecology in Anthropocene times, and the future of conservation. She is bringing some of that ‘work in progress’ to discuss with the Canberra Field Naturalists in this presentation.

Refreshments available from 7pm. Mugs or keep-cups encouraged. Non-members welcomed.

Meeting starts at 7:30pm.