This essay was selected for publication in issue 32 of Kerb, an annual cross-disciplinary design journal produced through the department of landscape architecture at RMIT University School of Architecture and Urban Design.
The essay explores the relationship between stories, language and landscape – key themes of my PhD research. It argues that the language we use to speak of human-land relations shapes how we act with/on it, and that the Western/colonial language commonly used to story relations with land typically perpetuates un-lively relationships. An excerpt:
The English language might be imagined as a slack-wired farm fence, made not of rusted wire and mesh but words. On the inside: ways of thinking and seeing deemed worthy of perpetuation, protection and sustenance. Kept out: the unruly and challenging stories that speak of other ways of being, seeing and valuing.
What I’ve been doing for the last decade as a writer and editor is wandering this fence line, wire cutters in hand, making holes for unsaid and under-valued ways of seeing, storying and being to enter. Inviting them in to mingle and dance in the hope of finding sense in these strange times.
Strange is an understatement. Uncanny, maybe. Turbulent, absolutely. Transformative, unquestionably. However complex it is to define the place we stand, how we got here is clearer. As scholars like Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway, Carolyn Merchant and Freya Mathews have articulated, the tangle of environmental crises we find ourselves in can be traced to one particular species acting out variations of one multifarious story – human exceptionalism accompanied by mechanistic and dualistic approaches to the more-than human world.
Theologian Thomas Berry suggests the ‘deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the current story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation’. Are the stories being told by us Western moderns about human/land relations capable of meeting the survival demands of our present situation? Or are they doing the work of reinforcing the fence, tightening the wires, raising its height? […]