Linking Culture and the Environment

222 Cultural Inscriptions of Nature
Local translation can be viewed as an imperative for all sustainability.
Following the lead of Agenda 21, a number of commentators have focused
on community empowerment and community-based action by advocating
ground-up strategies whether the context is developing societies or technoscience
rich societies. 5 The science of biodiversity is not a universal given,
even within western consumer cultures.
Cultural Inscriptions of Nature
The site specificity of the interface between the conservation of biodiversity,
local (destination) communities and tourism, particularly to protected
areas, has highlighted the fundamental role of culture. 6 Australian national
parks have a mandate to not only protect the natural environment using
established and scientifically verifiable environmental management strategies,
but also a mandate to educate the wider public about the primacy of
the nature conservation effort. 7 Linking the two has, until recently, been
undertaken by the largely science-trained staff and this has resulted in a
science-based education and interpretation programme for visitors to
national parks. However, the attraction of natural landscapes since the
inception of national parks in the USA in the late 19th century has always
been as much about aesthetics and the ‘appreciation of nature’ as it has
been about ecology. 8 While this is the case in western societies it is, perhaps,
even more so in eastern societies (where the natural world has had a
fundamental influence on cultural forms and cultural meanings), 9 and in
indigenous societies (where nature/culture/aesthetics and ecology are
indivisible entities). 10
The recognition of the differing cultural contexts of ‘nature’ as a concept
raises important issues for protected area management grappling
with the conservation imperative on one hand and the tourism industry
on the other. In Australia, this is a particularly acute problem because
‘community’ means multiple communities in a multicultural society and
‘nature’ means the coexistence of quite different conceptions of ‘nature’
within the one community. 11 These issues are exacerbated in those
Australian national parks that experience large (and growing) numbers of
international tourists (e.g., the Blue Mountains, Kakadu and Uluru-Kata
Tjuta). To maximize the opportunity for educating visitors to national
parks about the conservation of natural heritage (and therefore about conservation
values and a sustainability ethic), approaches are required which
are sensitive to a number of factors that pertain to the visitor. These include
the cultural background of visitors, the aesthetic attraction of parks (for
their scenic beauty), 12 the radically different notions of the natural environment
operating in a multicultural society, indigenous Australian perspectives,
13 differing levels of biological knowledge and different attitudes
to leisure and recreation. 14
All of these factors point to the need for the cultural construction of
nature to be at the heart of both the research and the application of the