Unstable Relations: Indigenous People and Environmentalism in Contemporary Australia

 The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a global environmental movement in response to rampant resource extraction. This moment gave rise to a celebrated ‘green-black alliance’ between environmentalists and Indigenous groups in Australia. However, in recent years, this relationship has come under increased critical scrutiny in Australia and elsewhere, spurred in part by the global mining boom and continuing concerns about the effects of climate change. As the relationship between environmentalists and Indigenous peoples is subjected to renewed public inquiry, this book undertakes the vital task of submitting Indigenous-environmentalist relations to detailed analysis rather than broad-based summary. 

Environmentalists’ relations with both Indigenous people and images of indigeneity have long been unstable. This edited collection brings together leading anthropologists, social scientists, activists and writers to subject the Indigenous-environmentalist relation to rigorous, empirical inquiry, exploring possibilities for alliances and interrelations while also probing disagreements and dissonances. Examining noted controversies and campaigns such as the Wild Rivers Act and James Price Point, and key issues such as mining, native title rights, ‘feral’ species, forestry, national parks and payment for environmental services, the authors in this collection explore contemporary entanglements and engagements between environmentalists and Indigenous groups in Australia. The insights generated here have relevance beyond Australia as scholars investigate the politics of indigeneity in the present moment, and consider the economic futures of Indigenous minorities. Significantly, the collection involves both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors subjecting environmentalists to a kind of anthropological analysis, asking, for example, how environmentalists think about the categories of ‘modern’, ‘nature’ and ‘indigeneity’? How do their conceptualisations shape their practices, relationships and activism? 

Unstable Relations addresses the past and emerging political tensions that mark ‘green-black’ encounters; provides fine-grained ethnographic case studies