Deep mapping towards an intercultural sustainability discourse

Abstract

What is the place of Australia’s First Peoples in the sustainability agenda of the Anthropocene? Cooperative understandings between Indigenous Australians and mainstream others in the sustainability literature are found mainly in the realm of environmental and economic management in remote Australia. This focus on sustainability practices in remote communities is found in ‘sustainable economic development’ initiatives through tourism and mining; recognition of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and ‘two-way’ exchanges of knowledge about river systems, wildlife, and resource and land management. However, in contemporary Australia, over 70 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders live in urban locations in our culturally complex and expanding cities. The United Nations forecast a 60 per cent increase in global urbanisation by 2050 and argue for an ‘ecosystems services’ approach to urban development. How can Australia’s urban intercultural sustainability agenda be imagined now under such shared and entangled pressures? In this chapter the non-Indigenous author thinks through place and arts-based inquiry to open an urban sustainability conversation that recognises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and the importance of indigenous biodiversity to question new dominant environmental sustainability discourses such as ecosystem services.