Linking Culture and the Environment

R. Staiff 221
the Management Plan 2007–2014 makes clear, this land is an Aboriginal living
cultural landscape where deep ongoing relationships exist between the
Bininj people and their country. The poetry of Bill Neidjie, an Australian
Aboriginal senior elder, provides a portal into this relationship for nonindigenous
people. The landscape is the people and the people are the
landscape. Jacob Nayinggul, a senior elder of the Manilagarr clan puts it
this way: ‘Land and people go together. Every place has a clan name, and
every place has a clan.’ 1 Although Kakadu is inscribed on to the World
Heritage List for its ecological values, the national park is co-managed with
the Bininj people and it is Bininj ‘cultural rules’ that animate the management
praxis of Kakadu. Equally, the tourism vision for the park emerges
from Bininj epistemology. Jacob Nayinggul, who is also the current
Chairman of the Kakadu Board of Management, expresses it in the shared
vision for tourism in Kakadu: ‘Our land has a big story. Sometimes we tell
a little bit at a time. Come and hear our stories, see our land. A little bit
might stay in your hearts. If you want more, you will come back.’ 2 The visitor
experience at Kakadu is defined in terms of the ‘extraordinarily beautiful’
landscape, the ancient cultural heritage, the wildlife and the need for
respect and protection into perpetuity. It is clear from the tourism vision
statement that an understanding of Bininj culture, landscape and customary
law are one and the same and indivisible. Culture is inseparable from
the landscape.
Introduction: a Contextual Note
A major theme of sustainability has been the translation of the global discourse
of sustainable development into local praxis. 3 At the heart of this
theme is the significant acknowledgment that global policy frameworks are
one thing, but that the action on the ground must arise from the local milieu
so that a phenomenon like sustainability is immersed in the sociocultural
‘realities’ of communities, and, significantly, communities as diverse as
industrial cities in southern China, to agrarian communities in northern
Argentina, to the inhabitants of complex cities like Hong Kong or Sydney, to
the indigenous communities – whether they be the Aboriginal peoples of
Australia or the Inuit peoples of North America – to the island communities
like Bali or Fiji and so on and so forth. Also at the heart of this theme is the
recognition that sustainability was originally embedded in a scientific paradigm;
a paradigm that is often given the status of universal veracity by its
practitioners but which is not necessarily a universal discourse when considered
in the context of, say, indigenous knowledge(s). This is not to suggest
that the teleology of sustainable development is at odds with the epistemologies
of non-scientific cultures (there is a growing awareness that this is not
the case 4 ), but that an act of translation is crucial to the application of sustainability
principles within communities that do not operate within, for example,
a techno-scientific paradigm. Indeed, the argument has been extended.