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Since the 1970s, the Reef has been a site where Australian environmental policy has flourished, mirroring global environmental policy seeking to 'balance' human activity through 'ecologically sustainable development'. The article examines the parallel and intersecting processes of modern environmental policy and news media practice in the context of the Reef to unveil how Australia's news media are communicating critical moments in the protection of the Reef. Through two key conservation moments – the 1981 World Heritage Listing and the 2012 threat to place the Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger – the article examines the role of news media in different geographic contexts, highlighting the complex politics of protection from early conservation campaigns to the contemporary era of protecting the Reef in the context of global environmental crisis. We identify how ecologically sustainable development discourses can be used to communicate positions that challenge and discredit policy initiatives aimed at protecting natural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of environmental 'governance by commission', associated with evidence-based policy and market mechanisms, there is a need to (re)imagine Australia's nature politics. I identify two distinct domains of nature politics - one associated with distribution of goods produced in nature, and another concerned with constituting nature itself. The paper offers two analytically distinct readings of a tender bids hearing to select a contractor to assemble a diagnostic design for a government funded project of river rehabilitation. The tool that enables these incommensurable accounts is a purposefully crafted ethnographic story of the hearing. These dual readings engage alternative framings in order to see alternative political domains. The first reading mobilises an orthodox relativising framing to show a familiar politics evident in the competition for the contract; a politics over the distribution of goods produced from nature. This can be read as a politics over valuing nature. The second reading, proposing an alternative nature politics that should be understood as sitting alongside, utilises an alternative analytic framing. It offers a reading of the tender bids hearing as a politics contesting the form of the entities that should order Australian nature. In concluding I propose that the juxtaposed alternative readings, analyses made with disparate explicit metaphysical commitments, which reveal separate but connected political domains, constitute a politics of imagination, and ask how to configure the analyst who can engage such a politics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I want to ask whether there is anything to be gained by taking seriously a posthumanist analysis of the relationship between humanity and the natural world, one that in fact extinguishes the dualism and produces only ‘naturecultures’. I will examine this question through a new analysis of the relationship between gum trees and Australia. Most humanist accounts, such as those developed in ‘traditional’ social anthropology and sociology, privilege the activity, agency, and representations of humans, and in so doing render the natural world and its individual species as passive and of interest only insofar as they provide a palette of meanings for essentially human symbolism, dreamings, and imaginaries. Such an approach has an impeccable track record from Emile Durkheim to Mary Douglas and it is not one I want to challenge here per Se. What I do want to challenge is the implicit assumption that this is all there is to, or all we can say about, the relationship between nature and humanity. Rather than (only) ask what nature (or gum trees in this case) means, I want to ask (also) what nature does, and, importantly, what implications those actions have for the world, nature, humans, and ‘the social’. I argue that this approach takes us considerably further towards a more mature sociology of nature in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that new and often indirect forms of action have developed within the context of globalization and neoliberalism by discussing the action-at-a-distance approach of the Australian Landcare program. Aim to shape both the environment within which people make decisions and the ways they are likely to respond to that environment; Global restructuring of agricultural production.

Analyses the policy context in which farm forestry development occurs in Australia. Information on the government involvement in farm forestry; Details on the emergence of Australia's farm forest policy; Conclusions.