Ecological turn in culture

In this text we are exploring what “an ecological turn in culture” could mean, a turn that follows a different path than sustainable development and greening, two currently dominant frameworks for thinking about environmental issues within culture. In the first part of the text, we will offer a multiperspective critique of sustainable development and greening. In the second part, we will turn towards what we call “the ecological turn in culture”. In doing so, we invite symbiotic, convivial, plural, caring, just and life-affirming ways of thinking, practicing, and living culture: ways that don’t fall into traps of maintaining the status quo.

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The problem with both sustainable development and greening is that they are not questioning at least three key roots of the ecological crisis today, as we see it. First, they are not questioning the capitalist world order, and its global neoliberal system of power-making, which is extracting life and creative forces of the Earth and across the Earth. These approaches obscure the role of exploitative, industrial, capitalist, colonial power relations and the destruction they have on the world.
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As an illustration, we find the following project very important. It boldly brings a very different way of relating to the world in a package that is very familiar to cultural policy – a heritage management plan of a Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, an UNESCO World Heritage site. Healthy land, healthy people is an example of heritage management and protection project from the southwest of Australia, where The indigenous community has succeeded in putting together a management plan for a particular cultural landscape that is important for them in many ways.

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