Creating regenerative societies that live within ecological limits
Colonisation is invasion: a group of people taking over the land and imposing their own culture on the Indigenous population of that land.
Modern colonisation dates back to the Age of Discovery in the 15th century, as European nations sought to expand their influence and wealth.…
Decolonisation seeks to reverse and remedy colonisation.
The word “decolonisation” was first coined by the German economist Moritz Julius Bonn in the 1930s to describe former colonies that achieved self-governance.
Many struggles for independence were armed and bloody. The Algerian War of Independence (1954- 1962) against the French was particularly brutal.…
Biocultural theory is an integration of both biological anthropology and social/cultural anthropology. While acknowledging that “the term biocultural can carry a range of meanings and represent a variety of methods, research areas, and levels of analysis” (Hruschka et al. 2005:3), one working definition of biocultural anthropology “a critical and productive dialogue between biological and cultural theories and methods in answering key questions in anthropology” (Hruschka et al.…
Biocultural rights represent a bold new departure in human rights law that recognizes the importance of a community’s stewardship over lands and waters. Instead of focusing on individual rights and private property, biocultural rights explicitly recognize a community’s identity, culture, governance system, spirituality and way of life as embedded in a specific landscape.…
The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. [1]
Scientists arguing for the recognition of this new geologic unit of time, argue that we have significantly altered the Earth through human activity and we have left the previous geologic era or epoch, called ‘The Holocene’.
The following information is from Australia’s most trusted climate scientists, at the Climate Council:
“Climate is different from weather. When we talk about the Earth’s climate, we are referring to the average weather conditions over a period of 30 years or longer.…
Community Economies research and practice seeks to bring about more sustainable and equitable forms of development by cultivating and acting on new ways of thinking about economies and politics.
Building on J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist critique of political economy, this approach challenges three problematic aspects of how “the economy” is understood: seeing it as inevitably capitalist, assuming that it is a determining force rather than a site for politics and transformation, and separating economy from ecology. …
A citizens’ assembly is a form of democracy which allows people to make decisions at a city, national or even at the international level. A citizens’ assembly is a randomly selected group of residents according to the demographic criteria such as gender and age.…
“The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available.” [1]
In population ecology, carrying capacity corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration).…
An emerging theory of law called Earth Jurisprudence – also known as ‘Earth Laws’ or ‘Wild Law’ – recognises human interconnectedness and dependence with nature as a prerequisite for ecological sustainability and as the appropriate foundation of our legal system.
The current legal system is human-centred and has been shaped to promote infinite economic growth and industrial development.…