Environment and Society: Conservation, Communities and Eco-trekking - Understanding the impacts of World Heritage listing for the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea

Audio recording of seminarClimate change now makes daily impacts on all our lives, but societies have always been engaged with natural environments. In cities as well as in rural areas, human societies not only draw resources from the land and water, hunt animals or harvest crops or do both, but they share ancestries with heroic animals and birds, they shape their myths and philosophies around nature, and they invent wildernesses into which to retreat or over which to fight. More than physical interactions, societies make meanings from their entangled relationships with nature – they understand themselves and others through interactions with animals, plants and places. In the constant interactive processes which Appadurai has called ‘making localities’, human societies are shaped by environments at the same time as they change and reshape the places around them. In the Environment and Society node, researchers are drawing critically on approaches such as Political Ecology, Cultural Politics and Environmental History and Anthropology as they find ways to engage social justice and cosmopolitan civil societies with conservation and environmental sustainability