Deep Ecology and Australian Suburbia: Learning from Aboriginal Australia philosophy

Arne Naess’ ‘Deep Ecology’ was a fundamental philosophical and conceptual shift from the dominant Western thinking that can be traced back to the Greek and Roman Empires. Like all philosophy, it was born of and is most... [ view full abstract ]

Arne Naess’ ‘Deep Ecology’ was a fundamental philosophical and conceptual shift from the dominant Western thinking that can be traced back to the Greek and Roman Empires. Like all philosophy, it was born of and is most relevant to a specific time and place being northern Europe. Although the fundamentals of the Deep Ecology philosophy were new to modern Western thinking, it is not new to traditional Indigenous cultures, including the world’s oldest culture, that of Aboriginal Australia. While the past four decades has seen an increasing recognition of Aboriginal philosophical approaches, there is very little understanding of what this philosophical approach is and means for the management of the Australian environment in which humans are a central part.

Since European arrival, Australia has been one of the world’s most urban societies. Unlike northern Europe, urban Australia is low density and suburban, a legacy of British and North American influences. Nearly 90% of Australians live in detached houses surrounded by gardens. Managed by individual residents, this land use accounts for about 70% of the total area of cities like Melbourne. Deeply culturally embedded, the Australian desire for living in low-density suburbs is unlikely to change soon.

Contemporary cities are widely recognized as causing severe environmental degradation and are not sustainable. Yet in Australia introduced philosophical and design approaches are still used to address the unsustainable impacts of urban forms introduced from another time and place. While impractical to remove the existing suburban form in Australian cities, there is a significant opportunity to retrofit them using Australian Aboriginal philosophical and land management understandings developed and tested over tens of thousands of years.

This paper establishes a contemporary Australian `Deep Ecology’ philosophical approach to sustainably living in the suburbs that recognizes and works with the legacies of Aboriginal, English, American and contemporary Australian influences.