Repairing Australian landscapes

Public concern about the environment, including climate change, has receded in recent years. According to one regular poll series, the top concerns are healthcare, cost of living, crime, the economy, immigration and education. These issues are not necessarily the most important: they are the topics that dominate public and political debate, the ones that politicians and media commentators keep talking about.

All Australians - and especially our political leaders - should be having a lot more to say about the health and resilience of our landscapes and ecosystems. This cultural resonance and reinforcement is particularly important if community organisations such as Landcare groups are to flourish.

However, the explanation also goes beyond attitudes to landscapes. The widening gulf between what we are doing and what we know we need to do is also true of other major issues facing the country. All relate to a failure, not just of political vision or will, but of political philosophy: an inability to see and accept that focusing too narrowly on economic growth and material prosperity and opportunity is creating growing social and environmental costs that jeopardise our future as a nation. If environmental and social goals are always seen as secondary and subsidiary to economic priorities, we will never 'fix the place' (to use one participant's phrase). This is another reason why this is a challenge for all Australians.

A new vision and language of landscape management is now being reflected in policy, but few outside the sector would know this. Without a new narrative or vision to give policy a broader, compatible philosophical rationale and cultural context, we will always come up against the failure to translate policy, however well formulated and well intentioned, into effective capacity to deliver the results we seek. That was the case 25 years ago; it remains true today.

Conversely, what we have achieved in the last 20 to 30 years of landscape management provides the foundation for a bigger and bolder endeavour to protect and regenerate our unique environments. In doing that, it could become a symbol of a broader transformation of Australia into a genuinely sustainable society - environmentally, socially and economically. In inspiring this vision, the benefits would incalculable.