Environmental (re)education and local environmental knowledge: statutory ground-based monitoring and pastoral culture in central Australia

Abstract

Ground-based monitoring of rangeland condition is common in Australian pastoral administration systems. In the Northern Territory (NT), such monitoring is officially seen as a key plank of sustainable pastoral land use. In the NT and elsewhere, these monitoring schemes have sought to increase participation by pastoralists. Involvement of pastoralists in monitoring is theoretically an educative process that will cause pastoralists to more critically examine their management practices. Critical perspectives on the relationship between rangelands science/extension and pastoralist knowledge systems and concerns, however, suggest that pastoralists' reception of such monitoring schemes will be influenced by a range of social contexts, including the character of pastoralist environmental knowledge. Fieldwork with pastoralists in Central Australia shows that the process by which pastoral environmental knowledge develops has rich experiential, historical and social dimensions. These contexts play a role in framing pastoral environmental knowledge and in shaping pastoralists' interpretations of environmental events and information from other parties. Pastoralists will assess information from monitoring in light of these contexts. The nature of the ground-based monitoring scheme is such that the very environmental knowledge that it seeks to reform may in fact be confirmed or otherwise interact with pastoral knowledge in unanticipated ways. Lack of systematic evaluation of the scheme and of pastoral environmental knowledge, however, precludes definitive judgements at this stage. The apparently central role of monitoring in NT pastoral land administration, however, suggests that the assumptions underlying the scheme and its implementation be reassessed.

Stewardship among lifestyle oriented rural landowners

“…Those NRLs who undertake activities such as raising cattle, not only see this as a productive use of land with normative value but its monetary outcomes help them to occupy their land and sustain their rural lifestyle. Sustainability for many NRLs, as for many farmers, may be more about their ability to stay on the land, to weather its financial and workload impositions, and to realise their vision of the land, than about than environmental processes and issues per se (Gill, 2003, Vanclay, 2004 The research also indicates that trajectories of land management by NRLs are variable and complex. There are many types of NRLs as the typologies proposed elsewhere show.…”

Making country good: stewardship and environmental change in central Australian pastoral culture

“…The key ‘moments’ and the selected data that I present in this paper emerged from this analytical process. In this paper each ‘moment’ is necessarily concise; further or parallel details for themes such as pastoral experiential knowledge and the operations of the CLMA can be seen in Gill ().…”

“…Such impacts can scarcely be argued with. These same impacts, however, can also be attributed to cattle, although on this matter there is a relative silence in CLMA discourse (Gill ). More significantly, as rabbits are singled out as agents of ecological villainy, they become key to modernising the binary opposites of order and chaos in pastoral culture.…”

Adaptation and change in Queensland’s rangelands: Cell grazing as an emerging ideology of pastoral-ecology

“…Dr Stan Parsons first introduced cell grazing to Australia in an address to the Northern Territory's Cattleman's Association in 1989. Early reports suggest that cell grazing was initially perceived as controversial, and it appears that this view still persists today (Gill, 2003;McCosker, 2000).…”