Perth – Indigenous informed landscape design of university campus, WA

We start with the premise that the solutions to big environmental problems will be destructive if we continue to follow mainstream ways of making decisions. Our objective, following Deborah Bird Rose (1999:83), is “a practice of other-focused care that orients our attention into the here and now, and focuses it on living beings and environments, on the sacred and damaged places of the world today.” We aim to nurture an ethic of attentiveness to each other, place, and other species essential for finding ways to address environmental problems that are not themselves destructive.

We will engage with the concepts of place, landscape, and region in a process of seeking ethical ways to address environmental problems in place. At the start of the process, each of these concepts will be interrogated then used to analyse the deep causes of environmental problems and their legacies in contemporary understandings of humans, environments, and places.

The group will then receive technical training and work integrated learning combined with reflexive approaches to understanding local geographies. Students will receive training in qualitative and quantitative methods (in particular, ARCGIS), in how to integrate data. Students will work with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ecologists, community leaders, and geographers to build a sophisticated understanding of the site. The process culminates with a public planting at the end of semester where attentiveness will be practiced as we facilitate a group activity that seeks to draw together through practice geographical knowledge and an ethic of attentiveness.