At the end of an eloquent account of "caring for country" (an Australian Aboriginal understanding of the gift of being born as kin in places of mutual sentience and care with all other species) as a resource in responding to the 'Anthropocene' (which she proposed we translate as "in the midst of great ad growing destruction"), the wonderful Deborah Bird Rose asks:
is it possible to re-imagine urban and suburban places as kinds of ‘Country’? I absolutely do not want to trivialise Aboriginal Country, and yet I do want to consider the possibility that the Western nature-culture binary presupposes that Country cannot be a city, or part of a city. But is this so? Is it not possible to go beyond the idea of natural areas within urban spaces, an approach which still seems to maintain the nature-culture divide, and to look more thoughtfully at how a city might be reconfigured if the aim of urban life was to inhabit and care for Country. Could the city, and city-dwellers, all of us urban flora and fauna, become part of a story of Country? Could we be working together for Country? Could we find lawful ways of being where we are whilst reconfiguring who we are so that even in cities we are able to nourish and strengthen our true backbone as kin within the gifts of Earth life?
"Country and the Gift," in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating knowledge, forging new constellations of practice, ed. Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (Routledge 2017)
[10/31: Not sure how this sad news passed me by, but Deborah Bird Rose passed away two years ago after a long illness. May her memory be for blessing.]
