Despite its relative infancy, ecological science plays a pre‐eminent role in current environmental decision‐making globally and has, over recent decades, permeated a broad range of academic disciplines. Developments in two areas of philosophical thought in particular, environmental aesthetics and the aesthetics of science, beg an exploration of their intersection with respect to the role of aesthetics in ecological science. Here, we provide a contemporary synthesis of both environmental aesthetics and aesthetics of science to explore aesthetic dimensions of contemporary ecological science, highlighting three main areas of convergence: (1) the influence of aesthetic experiences and judgements of nature by ecologists on ecological science and our contemporary understanding of nature; (2) the development and role of ecological ‘taste’ among ecologists; and (3) moral, cultural and political implications of the ecological imagination as underpinned by current ecological science. We identify a risk for feedback mechanisms to perpetuate a relatively homogeneous ecological aesthetic as a result of reciprocal influences between ecological science and society which may further promote inadvertent policy advocacy and stifle scientific innovation. We suggest ecological science would benefit from increased aesthetic literacy and reflection by broadening the ecological imagination and intentionally facilitating more diverse and equitable science to inform policy outcomes. Our argument should be of interest to philosophers of science, ecologists and those that draw on their outputs. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

The Institute of Australian Geographers encourages members to speak out in support of academic freedom. Academic freedom must be advanced to further the public good. Collegiality, including collegiate decision-making, is fundamental to academic freedom. Academic freedom and collegiality are being undermined in Australia by adverse political interference and counter-productive university actions taken in response. State suppression is evident in acute instances of interference, and in the chronic re-engineering of universities to service a narrow economic agenda. Conservative Australian governments have repeatedly intervened to overturn peer recommendations for research funding, while simultaneously instituting sector-wide cuts, and pushing an ideologically driven pro-academic freedom agenda based on weak evidence, and in disregard of institutional autonomy. A regressive legislative definition of academic freedom has been introduced that restricts the scope of shared freedoms and intra-mural expression, and elides state support and self-governance altogether. Historic and contemporary exclusion and silencing remains unaddressed, and is becoming compounded as university managements uncritically adopt commercial corporate models and perverse internal policies. Codes of Conduct are especially hazardous, as demonstrated in employment terminations, and Federal and High Court litigation. Awareness-raising and advocacy is necessary for law reform, beyond compliance behaviour, and the establishment of autonomous collegiate, inclusive and caring institutions capable of addressing the inter-related environmental and social justice challenges of the Anthropocene.

Systemic failure of our land management, legal, and regulatory institutions is revealed by the serious and adverse social and environmental impacts of land use practices in private agriculture, evident in severe land and water degradation, precipitous decline in biodiversity, and reduced resilience to natural hazards and climate change. The efficacy of the standard treatment of environmental law and regulation is often hampered by the cultural and legal priority of property rights. We take a different approach, using legal geography to refocus attention on the salience and agency of place and responses to degradation, such as conservation farming and regenerative agriculture, which are reforming dominant land management cultures and institutions from within. By recognising the role of place in leading geographically responsive land use decision-making and more sustainable, resilient, and productive agricultural practices, an alternative model of private land ownership may be possible, as well as greater environmental sustainability. For researchers, our approaches too must be sensitive and responsive to place agency and our methodologies must evolve to acknowledge the agency of place. Place agency in legal geography has great potential for application in reforming suboptimal industrial agricultural practices and legal models of property ownership, and also for revitalising our scholarship.

Our space in the Universe - planet Earth - and our continued place on it, are currently challenged by human activities, particularly those governed by ontologies of human entitlement and exceptionalism, and despite decades of environmental laws tasked with limiting anthropogenic impact and protecting non-human life and systems. Successive regulatory failures and short-comings, supplemented and compounded by sub-optimal human behaviours, suggest that anthropocentric law may not be best placed to achieve the aims desired and engender the necessary shift in thinking required. Notwithstanding their environmental deterministic connotations, natural laws (Smith 2010), place laws (Bartel 2018), that acknowledge the influence of the biophysical world and of geography, and which reflect relational-material appreciations, and architecture (Lessig 1998), as here extended to moral architecture, may have potential. These more plural geocentric (Lynn 1998) and also omnicentric (Charpleix 2020) approaches may be better suited to answering the complex social and ecological questions of the Anthropocene, given that they decentre the human and provide greater recognition of non-human agency.

Space, place and law are at a crossroads. Unprecedented social and environmental challenges, escalating community expectations and dire forecasts are finding their match in competing and corrosive forces of regression. Introducing this collection as activity-orientated, reflecting an appreciation of the world, and humans in and of it, as inter-related and co-constituted, and dynamic rather than static, is undertaken in the hope that heightened awareness of the relational-material nature of human existence may assist in avoiding further regression. The chapters provide a diverse representation of voices and cross-section of methodologies, including embodied experiences, legal pluralism and hybridity, alternative viewpoints, transformative law reform, non-human agency, new horizons and ways forward. Cross-cutting themes vital to both current scholarship and contemporary needs include gender equality, more inclusive places and spaces, and justice for First Nations' peoples. Inter-related is much-needed reform of dominant human-nature relationships, including, but not limited to, property and practices of power.

Offsets-based approaches attempt to compensate for the loss of cultural and natural heritage destroyed by development. Similar approaches have been extended worldwide, from wetland mitigation to Indigenous cultural heritage management. Offsets are criticised for becoming a licence to destroy, for infringeing the mitigation hierarchy and for failing to ensure equivalence: exchanging "apples and oranges". The principle of like-for-like replacement is rarely ever achievable in practice. It is an impossible ideal: all places are unique. Rather than piecemeal reform, fundamental transformation is required, by recognising the co-constituted web of social and natural interactions which comprise and produce places. Place agency-based approaches are preferable for both cultural and natural heritage, given their mutual embeddedness.

Ecological Management & RestorationVolume 21, Issue 3 p. 264-268 Workshop Reports Australian Academy of Science 2020 Fenner Conference on the environment – Managing wild and weedy Australia across boundaries and disciplines Sonia Graham, Corresponding Author sgraham@uow.edu.au orcid.org/0000-0003-4195-4559 Search for more papers by this authorRobyn Bartel, orcid.org/0000-0002-6133-3146 Search for more papers by this author Sonia Graham, Corresponding Author sgraham@uow.edu.au orcid.org/0000-0003-4195-4559 Search for more papers by this authorRobyn Bartel, orcid.org/0000-0002-6133-3146 Search for more papers by this author First published: 30 September 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/emr.12433 This report was prepared by Sonia Graham and Robyn Bartel. The conference was sponsored by: Australian Academy of Science; NSW Office of the Chief Scientist and Engineer; University of Wollongong Faculty of Social Science; Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society & Space; and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, and also supported by The University of New England and the University of Melbourne. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume21, Issue3September 2020Pages 264-268 RelatedInformation

This chapter explores the potential for reimagining wilderness and the wild in Australia in the wake of the 2019–2020 bushfire season that consumed nearly 13 million hectares, including large areas of preserved wilderness across the continent. Renewed interest in traditional Indigenous land management practices and philosophies have focused on cultural burning and fuel load reduction, and called into question assumptions about the appropriate role of humans in managing landscapes for certain ends. There is now growing recognition that the exclusion of Indigenous peoples, based on human/(non-human) nature binaries and via so-called 'fortress-conservation' approaches, is deficient not only on equity grounds but may also be sabotaging environmental aims. Wilderness is not country remote from humans, or devoid of people, rather it is uncared-for-country. Wild country is country that needs to be cared for properly. According to this framing, what Europeans might call wilderness is more accurately 'quiet' country, and is quiet as a result of proper care being taken (Rose 1988, 386). Such a radical reframing may well be one means by which further extinctions and bushfire events of this scale may be avoided in future. This will require active responsibilities also being taken by non-Indigenous Australians.

Academic freedom is under threat internationally. Several high profile incidents suggest that academic freedom is a principle neither well understood nor appreciated by key decision makers and stakeholders whom one might expect to champion it, be they in government or within the academy itself. Among those incidents are the arbitrary exercise of ministerial discretion to override the Australian Research Council expert peer review recommendations for allocation of funding, recent attacks on the credibility of academic publishing internationally, and the atrocious treatment of scholars by authoritarian regimes across the globe. In light of such developments, the membership of the Institute of Australian Geographers recently adopted a resolution that, inter alia , called on the Council of the Institute of Australian Geographers ‘not to be silent on the issue of attacks on critical scholarship, academic freedom and the integrity of academic procedures in higher education, research and publishing’. Given the complexity of the issues, this paper invites further discussion and debate on how Australian geography and geographers might better appreciate and advance academic freedom including via the promotion of scholarship that gives full effect to the principle.

Resolution of the troubled relationship between private property and the environment appears to have reached an impasse. This chapter discusses the documented experiences of leaders in regenerative agriculture, who have attempted to go beyond ecological restoration through creating 'farmscapes' that reconcile agricultural practices with the Australian environment. It argues that place-based approaches that reconcile humans with nature, and the particular potentials and emergent conditions of living landscapes, rather than restoring a 'nature' that has been 'lost' or is external to humans, can address the underlying anthropocentrism of Anglo-Australian property. Reconciliation approaches de-centre the human, and recognise that the environment is dynamic, reflexive and a relational–material co-becoming, rather than an end point. Reconciliation is suggestive of a different ontological relation between humans and nature; it moves beyond the limits of the subject/object dichotomy by acknowledging their connectivity and relationality. Private land ownership may present unique opportunities to support regenerative agriculture and ecological reconciliation.

The growing recognition of place agency, particularly in relational‐material conceptualisations, presents a challenge and an opportunity for legal geographic scholarship. Place is often invisibilised and abstracted by formal rules and institutions, but place shapes (and is shaped by) the law, and coproduces informal lore, norms and cultural practices that interact with formal law and influence governance. Such place‐work is particularly important for environmental law, for which place is or should be central, and is well overdue for scholarly interrogation. The focus of this paper is Silent Spring, often credited as having launched the modern environmental movement. The lens of legal geography is deployed to illustrate the significance of Rachel Carson's foregrounding of place and non‐human agency, validation of lay knowledges and alternative approaches in both science and policy. Carson's work demonstrates remarkable prescience in heralding relational ontologies, the relevance of materiality, and the value of collaborative governance. There is a challenge here for environmental law to recognise and embrace the many voices of place at multiple scales, and the role of place in generating its own legal order – a legal pluralism hitherto largely ignored. An opportunity exists to appreciate place law more fully, and deploy this recognition to address the environmental, regulatory and institutional problems of our time, including those that define the Anthropocene.

nd remain a low priority option on the mitigation hierarchy. Previous experience in biodiversity conservation suggests that extension of the approach to other fields, including cultural heritage, may be premature. The case studies conducted for this research demonstrate that significant policy failures have occurred and public good objectives thwarted. Past practice indicates that reforms are required in both parameters as well as the philosophies underpinning offsets approaches. Comparing cultural heritage management to biodiversity preservation may also be another case of comparing unlike categories. A policy that may work for a certain set of values in particular circumstances, may not work for all. However, integration of the management of cultural and heritage may provide benefits, including respect for Indigenous co-creation of landscapes. Integration of the consideration of natural and cultural values through a landscape approach may achieve better outcomes for both, considering that such a frame would reflect the reality of human and environment inter-relationships and embeddedness. This may also lead to useful reforms of offsets approaches. Shifting to an integrated focus at a landscape scale would facilitate much-needed regard for cumulative damage and legacy issues. Future offset policies could go beyond compensation for current losses, and incorporate treatment of the debts incurred by harmful practices in the past.

This chapter draws on a case study of the Namoi catchment of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, including interviews conducted with a purposive sample of key stakeholders, irrigators and landholders. The Namoi Catchment Management Authority (CMA), the watershed-based administrative unit responsible for water from 2004 until 2014, described and committed to a process of adaptive management based on single, double and triple-loop learning, although their description of triple-loop learning was focused on people and processes rather than values and paradigms. There is a need to move away from 'broad abstractions' towards 'local realities' and towards tailoring bespoke and unique solutions. Re-locating water, recognising its genius loci, would counter the historic and current de-territorialisation and dematerialisation that occurs through conceptual abstraction and technical control. Places and water have their own agency and may also exercise their agency through people – through local stories and appreciations.

Reconceiving the relationship between private property and the environment is a major challenge of our time. Ecological restoration is one construct that is being used to reimagine this relationship. While preferable to more exploitative human-nature relationships, ecological restoration in Australia is generally aimed at reinstating pre-1788 habitats, which may be neither desirable nor feasible, and perpetuates an anthroparchic approach to management. Environmental laws may similarly engender maladaptive behaviours, and perverse consequences include frustrated aims, landholder resistance and poor penetration of the broader neo-liberal imperative to maximise profit. This paper critiques some dominant approaches to restoration and considers an alternative - reconciliation. We illustrate its potential by drawing upon the narratives of landholders whose agricultural land use practices are place-based. Their approaches de-centre the human, and the environment is not an end-point but a relational-material co-becoming. Instead of restoration, there has been reconciliation between human and nature, and between European agricultural practices and Australian landscapes. The farmscape is the result, and a similar way forward for environmental law is proposed, one that is dynamic, reflexive and place-based, that aims to reconcile humans with nature rather than at humans restoring a 'nature' that is external and prior to us.

Australia has a history of quixotic water policies, forged by dreams of abundance and facilitated by technological and regulatory mechanisms, including impoundments, irrigation schemes and over-allocation of both surface and artesian water. The consequences of such quixotic water policies are social as well as biophysical. To date, deteriorating river health and declining water quality and quantity caused by poor management practices have impeded human wellbeing as well as the operation of ecological systems. This chapter analyses these issues through undertaking a case study of northern New South Wales catchment of Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), identifying management fashions and deficiencies. The Namoi catchment sits within MDB in northern New South Wales. Even with its relative biophysical advantages, Namoi shares the poor ecosystem health of most other catchments in MDB. The MDB itself is a catchment, one that spans four States and one Territory, all with divergent jurisdictional-based views regarding water use and economic interests as well as heterogeneous perspectives within their boundaries.

The nine articles comprising this special issue of Geographical Research bring together a diverse range of scholarship by Australian legal geographers and combine the products of two initiatives: an innovative workshop at the University of New England and the Inaugural Australian Legal Geography Symposium at the University of Technology Sydney (with thanks to the generous support of the Institute of Australian Geographers, the University of New England, and the University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Law). The workshop and symposium invited researchers to contribute their work in a slightly unconventional way – rather than presentations followed by questions and answers, these gatherings were based on the prior submission of ideas or works in progress in order to accelerate iterative revisions of drafts through collegial dialogue and sometimes also contestation. The outcome was a far richer collection of pieces that genuinely reflect the feedback and contributions of colleagues working on different topics but using the shared methodology of legal geography. Consequently, you will find in this issue articles connected neither spatially nor temporally but in their intellectual approach to their topics. So what is this approach? What does legal geography offer, as a methodology, to law and geography as separate and distinct disciplines? Legal geography is a critical theoretical approach to questions at, and about, the intersection of laws and geographies. By law, we include positive law and policy, regulation and regulatory frameworks, and the broader contexts of governance, normative discourse and power. By geography, we include scale, space, place, environment, climate, ecology, and the more-than-human. The articles here traverse all these aspects of law and geography. Legal geography explores various aspects of the many ways in which law and geography are co-constitutive and co-destructive by providing the conditions for and limits to changes to each other; hence, our use of the plural forms laws and geographies. In the piece that opens this special issue, Robyn Bartel canvasses how explorations in legal geography could build on geography's rich history in policy and application, and, through identifying some of the structural and systemic barriers that may currently stymy current endeavours, the paper provides pathways toward more fruitful engagements. In 'Shall we tell the Minister?' Robert Gale explores the research-policy nexus question further by describing the promises and challenges of, and conditions for, policy-relevant scholarship in geography. Gale invites us to consider place as a geographic institution and heralds the potential of scale as a policy-relevant assessment criterion. Josephine Gillespie's work into tenure and property in Cambodia establishes how a local legal lens is essential to accommodate geographical differences across space and time and between cultures and settings. And we (Bartel and Graham) explore one application in the area of native vegetation law reform in New South Wales and specifically how place attachment and place-care behaviours may be recognised and supported within, rather than in spite of, existing private property relationships. As demonstrated in Emily O'Gorman's piece, legal geography is neither ahistorical nor apolitical. Her account of the ways in which animals and their environments co-constitute another tragic chapter in the legal geography of the Coorong, South Australia, is presented through a critical analysis of the pelican slaughter of 1911. Tayanah O'Donnell presents a timely legal geographical analysis of coastal climate change litigation. O'Donnell contends that because litigation is central to the truth-claims of legal discourse, disputes over the regulation of coastal erosion illustrate clearly the mutual relationship between people and place and specifically the co-disruption of established legal categories and of the coast itself arising out of this litigation. Jason Prior and Penny Crofts have woven a tapestry of legal philosophy, cultural geography, and political theory in their exceptional analysis of the idea and enactment of sanctuary. Taking Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre as their case study, Prior and Crofts connect the symbolic and legal terrain of sanctuary to its lived and material existence. They contend that the ancient concept of sanctuary continues to provide not a 'lawless space' but an alternative regulatory approach that is a testament to the progressive properties of legal pluralism. Daniel Robinson and Miranda Forsyth explore the relationship between people, place, law, and the more-than-human in Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, and Samoa through tracing the change to, and implementation of laws created to protect traditional knowledge at different scales and jurisdictions, by different legal cultures and at different moments throughout multiple histories of colonisation. Their article traces also the effects of these legal changes on people, place, and nature, and advocating for the expansion of legal pluralism to recognise and protect Indigenous people's knowledge of places and plants. In 'Catch 22: Wetlands Protection and Fishing for Survival', Josephine Gillespie again argues powerfully for the need to adopt a legal geographical approach, in this case to protect Cambodian lakescapes and their wetland ecologies. Gillespie demonstrates that a methodology separating people from place fails to achieve an effective and therefore enduring legal response because it is scale-insensitive with a devastating paradoxical outcome that protects neither the wetland ecologies nor the communities depending on their protection. …offers the best route to explicate the grounded, embodied effects of law in the constitution of the world, and to challenge the impression that law aspires to dematerialization, that it seeks to marginalize specificity (i.e. local distinctiveness) and that law seeks to erase spatiality, or, indeed ever could. None declared.