Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future.

Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

Chapter 4 Connections in Nyungar Boodja: An Essay and a Story Pierre Horwitz Consortium for Health and Ecology, Edith Cowan University 1. Nyungar Boodja and the Continental Corner I have learned that I am a Wadjela man in Nyungar boodja1, and from my Nyungar friends I understand that I should be proud of that. Nyungar boodja is country in the south-western corner of a vast land mass, an idiosyncratic corner of a continent. In this essay I explore the degree to which south-western Australian inhabitants now engage, or connect, explicitly or implicitly, with particularly south-western Australian phenomena. Westernised life in Nyungar boodja for inhabitants might mean walking to the beach and while their feet nestle into the beach sands, looking out across the ocean and watching a sunset. Some might connect with a remarkably expansive blue sky or the early sea breezes in spring, or the Darling Range, running remarkably north-south, crossed by easterly winds that are cool in fine weather during winter but are hot in summer. The ocean is where the sun sets, always. For some, probably fewer inhabitants, it might mean engaging with a scratchy often charred forest, or pushing their way through reeds into one of the many wetlands, each swamp with a frog chorus that changes through the year. Perhaps even fewer see a Milky Way and fully starry sky over an ancient flat land, or acknowledge that smell of the first line of sand dunes before they get to the beach. For some people these things make them feel instinctively home, almost without being conscious of it. Breaking leaves off the grass tree, the balga, and absentmindedly snapping them in their fingers while they talk or walk. The remarkably idiosyncratic flora, now the reason why this part of the continent is called a biodiversity hotspot, but to some inhabitants, they know the spring, and where the orchids flower, and what to do when the Hibbertia comes out, everywhere, and where the patches of Leschanaultia are. And the seasonal water, some people cant live here without knowing a seasonality, where evaporation doubles rainfall annually, where sandy soils flip from moist in winter to water repellent in summer. The seasons profoundly influence life in south-western Australia, and the Nyungar peoples recognise six seasons according to the land, the climate, and their movement, burning and hunting patterns. 2. Sense of Place George Seddons book Sense of Place (1972), subtitled A response to the environment, the Swan Coastal Plain of Western Australia, emphasised this locatedness, encouraging people (planners in particular) to be aware of where you are, and to plan appropriately and relevantly for place. His table of contents reads like a traditional geography but laced with something new for its time: the land and landforms (the dune systems, the lakes, estuaries and wetlands); the climate (34 years on this needs to be revised of course); the geological setting (the sedimentary
1

The Nyungar peoples are indigenous to the south-western corner of the Australian continent. The Nyungar word for white person is Wadjela. 24

Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

basin, the faults and the outcrops); the Quaternary geology, and the soils (wind blown, river washed, lateritic or swamp soils). There is a major section on evolutionary history, the general character of the Plain, the trees of the plain (so characteristic the eucalypts, tuart, jarrah and marri, the wattles, the banksias, melaleucas or paperbarks, the Agonis flexuosa or peppermints, casuarinas, and of course the parasitic Christmas tree Nuytsia), and changes in plant cover. One chapter then describes the way the Swan River was in 1827and in another section, the peoples, the Aboriginal and European peoples, and their response to the Coastal landscape, the Offshore Islands, and the wetlands. His book finishes with a quite remarkable short chapter called A sense of place where he said that locale should be cherished. Seddon drew on facts of places, asked questions about carrying capacity, and whether wildflowers were worth more to the world than wheat, encouraged us to relearn the virtue of frugality, and introduced notions of inequality warning against growth at the expense of the poor. His work emphasised vulnerability1. His notion of sense of place is without precedent in the Western world. Since then, academia, from the disciplines of psychology to architecture and beyond, have developed a sense of place theme, dissected it, reconstructed it to be meaningful wherever you are on this planet, but more particularly to characterise that intuitive feel that locates and contextualises, that conveys both identity and attachment, something that is definitively yours. His book was quite remarkable for its time, attempting a synthesis of what it meant to be an inhabitant on the Swan Coastal Plain. Seddon makes a pertinent point: Our language is poor in words of place. Parochial and provincial are both derogatory, although there is nothing wrong with parochialism if your parish is a good one. These words express the expansionist faith that has driven Europeans for the last 300 years. We have the word timely but there is no equivalent placely. Topical literally means pertaining to place but this use today persists only on labels of ointments for topical application. By extension from the topics of the day, topical has come to mean timely. The drive of much of our technology is to obliterate distinctions of place (Seddon, 1972: 262)2. 3. Technology and Place This drive of technology results in roads that are constructed to alienate one part of the landscape from the other, and probably even more essentially, to allow us to travel through it at vast speed, without seeing whats locally special.

My interpretation of this vulnerability is that our isolation in this continental corner, surrounded by desert and ocean, perhaps for millions of years, is both our greatest asset yet our greatest vulnerability. The isolation has allowed periods of time much greater than almost anywhere on earth, for no mixing, and the development of heightened endemism, but that lack of mixing meant lack of immunity and flexibility to invasion. 2 Nyungar language does not appear to have this obvious gap. Arguably place is a particularly diverse part of the Nyungar language through place names, they end in up, a diversity that reflects the diverse, heterogeneous landscape. 25

Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

Our technology has allowed us to plan and construct the drain and the ditch to change the hydrology locally, and influence it regionally. Our societal obsession with controlling excess water when its around actually removes us from a process of knowing how to deal with it its a self-defeating form of control. Our taps provide aseasonal water, day by day, year in year out, giving us a false appreciation of quality, and a false appreciation of quantity. In short were separated from the hydrological cycle. Our separation from food production has been the subject of tomes, more eloquently put by other authors. Much of our food is packaged and processed and loaded with flavours and sugars, not to mention preservatives so that our capacity to learn about subtle tastes and microbial decomposition is diminished. Our supermarkets, prefabricated, off-the-shelf building structures whose rental arrangements subsidise the large corporate stores, give nothing away about location; once inside them we might as well be in another part of the world. We can now consume, through removal of trade barriers, and effective trade, and a given income, almost anything from anywhere at anytime. Air-conditioning is no longer a luxury item. Its no longer acceptable to experience a sequence of hot nights, or even one hot night. Does that mean that collectively we are not learning how to deal with climate induced irritability? Instead of designing houses, or knowing when to draw blinds, shut doors and windows or when to open them according to the shifts in the breeze, the way our grandparents coped, we flick a switch, and consume energy and water in the process. Replacing the detail of local understandings is a variety of media that package ideas and experiences, thats ok, but they are not local. In fact the experiences are rarely timely or placely. Our scales of time and place have changed.1 In all of this we seem no different to other apparently civilised and developed parts of the world. My own children, now young adults, are far more proficient than I ever will be with electronic gadgetry, but as dearly as I love them, I cannot help noticing their greatly reduced acquaintance with the sands, trees, fruits and water of our neighbourhood. If I asked them to go out the front door into the neighbourhood to find me a handful of figs in February or a lemon in August, or some mulberries in September they might struggle, and may be end up going to a supermarket, but I knew my neighbourhood fruit trees intimately. Some of you might be thinking that Ive failed as a parent. 4. A Hypothesis Alienation from the Local The point Im making here, is that the life skills of our children of today, what they acquire through parental engagement, schooling and tertiary education, centre on an impressive ability to deal with technology for sure, and probably more generally to deal with the abstract, but that these skills have come at the expense of an erosion of
1

Of course Im generalising, and I need to be much more precise about who we are, and who the general public is Perhaps Im talking of middle Australia, perhaps it is more widespread than that; perhaps as an individual once you have the capacity to consume, and be subsumed under a public service whose objectives become saturated by security, safety and comfort, then the general public is the subject to whom they attend. 26

Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

local knowledge, an understanding of the idiosyncrasies of their place. They are less familiar with what is local than has ever been at a time in the past. I sense that things are getting more like this. We are increasingly alienating ourselves from the intricacies of place at a local scale, and we may even be obliterating some of the intricacies themselves. If this hypothesis has merit, what does it mean for sense of place? Can you lose sense of place? No, of course not, it just changes to something else. Our sense of place will increasingly reflect the scale of timeliness and placeliness to which we are becoming adapted. We will however continue to lose the appropriateness and relevance of the local scale. Think of place identity and place attachment a modern western child will identify with television characters, the African savannah where wildebeests are attacked by lions, and have attachment to a lounge room. Im exaggerating but you get my point.1 Miller (2005) in his paper Biodiversity and the extinction of experience (published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution) described the estrangement of people from nature as being a product of increasing urbanisation: Urbanisation has a homogenising effect on biodiversity as native habitats are much reduced and relatively few species, often non-native, that thrive in human-dominated landscapes tend to predominate To make matters worse, the native species that remain in cities worldwide tend to be segregated from the neighbourhoods where most human residents live Thus, a corollary of the exodus to urban areas is that most people encounter biological uniformity in their day-to-day lives. Miller (2005: 431). These two effects, one of estrangement and homogenisation, and one of a changing sense of place, have the same net effect. They diminish, and shift, our experiences from what is local. They diminish our ability to read, interpret and understand the system of which we are a part. The signs seem to suggest to me that this shift is gathering momentum towards a diminishing ecological literacy. From his book published in 1972 The closing circle: Confronting the environmental crisis (London: Cape), Barry Commoner gave five laws of ecology: -Everything is connected to everything else -There is no such thing as a free lunch -Nature knows best -Everything must go somewhere -If you dont put something in the ecology, its not there. All of these laws are relevant here, but the last one, perhaps the most obscure of all of them, is the one that strikes accord. Its one of nestedness: there is nothing that exists outside of [its] ecology. To Commoner, ecology then is a way of seeing the whole, and everything has an ecology. You can see how dualisms and misinterpretations of ecology as nature and the environment contravene this law
1

So far I have avoided the words nature and environment, mainly because they each set up an artificial dichotomy. Nature is used to separate humans, the man and nature dualism. Environment is also misused since it assumes there is an other. Like the ecofeminist critique (see for example Merchant, 1989), these dualisms create inappropriate value judgements and serve to perpetuate the alienation; rather than humans as part of a system, we become humans and the environment (which needs to be managed). The use is nevertheless common, and in this context too. 27

Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

because they set up the pretence that humans are separate to their ecology. Ecological literacy is reading, interpreting and understanding that of which we are a part. 5. Education, Health and Ecological Literacy Sensing this inexorable shift, and almost like last calls from the wild, we urge our education system to introduce ecological literacy into a curriculum obsessed with a written and numerical tradition, and struggle to persuade the emergency and hospital-focused health sector to see the importance of contact with nature as the ultimate preventative cure. Does it really matter? Wheres the evidence that we need ecological literacy and contact with nature? A number of treatments of these topics have been published (see for instance Kellert, 2002; Jackson, 2003; Maller et al., 2006), and from these it is possible to categorise evidence (Table 1; but please note these categories are overlapping and nonexclusive). Table 1: Health benefits associated with contact with nature 1. The direct individual health benefits, in terms of physical fitness of: - physical activity per se - diet per se - interactive lifestyles mediated by urban design - immunity 2. Indirect consequential health benefits - tending to ones garden (caring) - rehabilitative and restorative properties of contact with nature - regaining control (reversing alienation) - communing (spiritual well-being) 3. Ability to respond to systemic effects - as individuals - as communities While the first two classes of evidence are relatively well treated in the literature, the third, our ability to respond to systemic effects, is less well treated, and of direct relevance to environmental education as a profession1. How we respond to the system is of course a learned thing, and an experiential thing. This might be best shown with a story of latter day Nyungar boodja. Earth Fire and Water We have been lucky enough to be engaged in an 11 year study of the Gnangara Mound region north of Perth (McKay and Horwitz, 2006). The Gnangara Mound is the largest of the unconfined groundwater systems on the Swan Coastal Plain (SCP), that part of Western Australia between the Darling Scarp and the ocean. It is a huge sand plain, where (running north/south) the deep sands act like a giant sponge
1

I should also note in passing that specialist disciplines are problematic because they restrict and constrain so that we dont see the connections to other evidentiary areas. Perhaps these relational connections, that cut across established disciplinary views, are more important than specialist approaches. 28

Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

(wetlands). The city of Perth is on the SCP, as are Bunbury, Busselton and Mandurah further south, and where urban development proceeds at an extraordinary rate Mandurah is said to be the fastest developing area in Australia. North of Perth the pace is furious too, and this is where the Gnangara Mound is important. It has, at different times, provided Perth with up to 70% of its domestic water, and these extractions, plus declining rainfall have resulted in the groundwater levels dropping dramatically. In fact, the water table has dropped up to 5 metres in places, to the extent that most of the iconic wetlands are drying more than they have for thousands of years. This drying exposes wetland soils that have developed under saturated conditions. We have noticed two significant trends in wetlands on the Gnangara Mound. The first is that they are becoming acidic (more about this below). The second is that the organic sediments in the wetlands are drying, and are increasingly vulnerable: they are no longer able to resist fire because they are not wet. We have urged authorities, starting with our own yearly reports and latterly through particular lobby groups, to address issues of licensing all public and private extractors/irrigators, and to allow wetlands to fill seasonally, to keep sediments saturated all year round. But in five years the amount of water extracted by unlicensed operators has probably not decreased, and the groundwater levels continue to decline. Also, the urban development continues to expand in the environs of these wetland systems. Iconic wetlands1, some would argue the jewels of the SCP wetland system, are found within the Yanchep National Park, a national park increasingly surrounded by new suburban settings.2 In late December 2004, during a hot dry spell around Christmas, a car full of young men, none of them over 19, and, according to the prosecution case, all of them disenchanted with their local circumstances and opportunities given to them, lit a fire on the north-western edge of the Park. As Fire and Emergency Services crew and bushfire volunteers rushed to the scene, the youths moved first south, then east, lighting fires. After nearly a week the fire had burnt through almost all of the park, destroying a Rangers home but without loss of life or other property of significance. The fire, however, did not stop there. It entered the organic soils of these three wetland systems and burnt for months, and the fires were only regarded as extinguished after heavy rainfall in April. A very rough estimate of the amount of organic soil removed during these peat fires was 60 000 cubic metres, much of this lost as CO2 or CO or fine particulates, thereby releasing carbon that had been stored in the wetlands for literally thousands of years into the atmosphere. The fires continued to cast a pall of acrid peat smoke over some local residents, and at times blanketed the northern suburbs of Perth with smoke. The health consequences do not stop there. Fire is a severe oxidation event, and a peat fire is doubly significant, since peat is formed under conditions of no oxygen. Under these anaerobic conditions, and in the right circumstances, biogeochemical
1 2

Including Loch McNess and Lake Yonderup. These suburban settings are an idiosyncratic urban form - walled residential estates with cul-de-sacs, accessible by car only, with 5-10% of the estate undeveloped as land zoned for recreation, manicured lawns and palm trees, each house with a two-car garage and an air-conditioner. At night the garages are full, but by day one sees almost no-one. 29

Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

process occur which allow the build up of iron sulphides, or pyrite. Not all peats have these acid sulphate soil potentials, but the ones on the Swan Coastal Plain do. In fact most of them in coastal Nyungar Boodja do. While the peats stay anaerobic the iron pyrite is inert. However drying, and then a fire, changes all that. To cut a long story short our data have shown that after the fire in these wetlands, and when the rain came in winter, acidic surface waters have resulted, and a shallow plume of acidic groundwater can be detected. The surface waters of this burnt wetlands grew mosquitoes and biting midges and almost nothing else. In the groundwater plume were very high concentrations of metals, not just iron, but also arsenic, cadmium, aluminium and so on. So severe long term changes to the sediments and biology of wetlands and atmosphere were instigated, and severe but perhaps shorter term changes to local water quality and local air quality were triggered, both relevant for the people who live nearby. Our government departments respond to this situation in a fragmented context: planning departments authorise urban structures, local governments filed complaints, health departments measure toxicants, emergency services attend to life and property threats of fire, environmental agencies attend to park values, water agencies with water. None of them see the whole picture. This story is not told because its an isolated case, but because its symptomatic of what has been described above. Our overuse of water, our alienation from our surroundings, a naivety about fire, and a fragmented government, are properties of our modern ecology. Increased incidences of wildfire or peat fires, or acidic water, or mosquito borne disease, are emergent properties of the system. The system bites back, responding in multidimensional and unpredictable ways. My interpretation is that the young men, as calculated as it may seem, had no idea of the calamity they might cause by their actions. How should we interpret their actions? Could it be criminal behaviour? Was it malicious wanton attempt to cause harm to others? Two of the men have been convicted of offences associated with their actions. Charges of arson are extraordinary because it can be very difficult to isolate arsonists and gather enough evidence to charge them due to the secretive nature of what they do. Is this behaviour a psychiatric disorder? Arson can be regarded as a psychiatric disorder (psychopathologic firesetting). In the past the demographic of arson was predominantly middle aged men; this has shifted to younger men, even boys. Is this behaviour a response to an alienating urban form that does not cater for older boys or young men? They lived in an alienated urban setting, developing a particular sense of place that revolves around cars, roads, garages Is this a failure of a social system that does not prepare its young with an understanding of fire, and how to use it in non-urban settings? The more alienated we become from fire, the more scared we are of it. For millennia people have grown up with fire, everyday there was fire, in one form or another, fire was part of our psyche, learned in the family (the home is the hearth), tightly socially regulated, and recognised for the multifaceted thing it is, capable of sustaining, benefiting, creating and destroying. This has
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Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

gradually diminished over time urbanites no longer collect fire wood, set fires in fire places, cook with fire, deal with charcoal, glowing embers, smoke out their living rooms accidentally, no longer understand it. Is this the environment having an effect on us? The Environment has Effect on Health headline is the nave interpretation. Such headlines miss the point that the effect is one observable response in a series of inter-related processes. A systems approach provides consciousness tools to raise awareness to deal with messy cross-sectored puzzles like the story given here. They are as much health puzzles as they are planning, housing, environmental or legal ones. Is it an example of a loss of ecological consciousness? Can we tell the difference between the above interpretations, and a loss of ecological consciousness? 6. A Final Comment Using local anecdotes of the elements, particularly earth, water and fire, I hope to have developed a theme of never-ending interdependence in Nyungar boodja, and how we ignore it at our peril. We are linked to our past and our future in a way that cannot discount the systemic nature of our surroundings. I am wadjela and I have a relationship with boodja. We seem to have slowly but surely got the point about thinking global, but weve allowed ourselves to be seduced by globalisation, and now we have to relearn to think local, to slow down, and to cherish our locale. Relearning about place is as much environmental education, as learning about the globe. Perhaps it should be more. References Commoner, B. (1972). The closing circle: Confronting the environmental crisis. London: Cape. Kellert, S.R. (2002). Experiencing nature: Affective, cognitive, and evaluative development in children. In Kahn, P.H. and Kellert, S.R. (Eds). Children and nature: Psychological, sociocultural, and evolutionary investigations (pp. 117 151). New York: MIT Press. Jackson, L.E. (2003). The relationship of urban design to human health and condition. Landscape and Urban Planning, 64, 191200. Maller, C., Townsend, M., Pryor, A., Brown, P. and St Leger, L. (2006). Healthy nature healthy people: contact with nature as an upstream health promotion intervention for populations. Health Promotion International, 21(1), 45-54. McKay, K. and Horwitz, P. (2006). Annual Report of the Gnangara Mound Macroinvertebrate Monitoring Programme. Centre for Ecosystem Management, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Western Australia. Merchant, C. (1989). The death of nature: Women, ecology and the scientific revolution. New York: Harper Row.
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Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education in action: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

Miller, J.R. (2005). Biodiversity and the extinction of experience. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20, 430-434. Seddon, G. (1972). Sense of place. A response to the environment, the Swan Coastal Plain of Western Australia. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Ulrich, R.S. (1993) Biophilia, biophobia, and natural landscapes. In Kellert, S.R. and Wilson, E.O. (Eds). The biophilia hypothesis (pp. 74137). Washington: Island Press.

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