Abstract
Environmentally sustainable development is one of the key challenges faced by societies today. Yet it is not a new challenge; throughout history, societies have faced the need to live within environmental constraints. Some have done so well, and some poorly. One society which did well for tens of thousands of years is that of Aboriginal Australia. This paper explores some lessons from Aboriginal Australia which have resonance in the modern world and shows that countries which have learned those lessons are in fact more sustainable than those which have not. It thus suggests that there is much that the pantheon of human experience can teach the modern world as it endeavours to create a sustainable future.
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Notes
As opposed to economic and social assets, about which Aboriginal Australia might have many lessons but for which there is insufficient space to address in the paper. My thanks to an anonymous referee for clarifying the distinction between these three types of sustainability.
See, for example, Xu (2004), who focuses on traditional Chinese agriculture Ostri (2005) who focuses on traditional Nepalese water management techniques and Dalle et al. (Dalle et al. 2006) who focus on the traditional knowledge of Ethiopian pastoralists about local resources (or Ghimire et al. 2004; or Donovan and Puri 2004, for the more general literature comparing indigenous and modern scientific knowledge about a resource). More broadly, there is the common pool resources (CPR) literature which examines how societies manage communal resources such as fisheries, irrigation systems, aquifers or forests. Martin (1989) categorises thousands of case studies and Ostrom (1990) develops a set of good governance principles based upon the literature.
This is an issue for Aboriginal Australia, in the context of white settlement, but is broader than the scope of this paper.
Although key environmental and religious leaders have recently been seeking points of common interest, as outlined in The Economist (Anonymous 2009) recently.
The Pintupi word is walytja, a word which literally means “one’s own”, and can refer equally to tools, family or even oneself. Its antonym is yapunta, which literally means “orphaned (Myers 1982). These terms provide a rather neat illustration of how Aboriginal people view property.
Although Agenda 21 (http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/) envisages a greater role for political decentralisation.
A full set of results is available from the author upon request.
In an attempt to increase the explanatory power of each model, I added to the models population density, the proportion of GDP which is accounted for by manufacturing, the United Nations Human Development Index, the proportion of a country which is comprised of national parks and a measure of openness to trade. A higher population density and a greater proportion of GDP accounted for by manufacturing have been associated with lower sustainability in the past (Grossman and Krueger 1995), whilst openness to trade has been associated with greater sustainability (Antweiler et al. 2001). The Human Development Index is used as a broader measure of national well-being than per capita GDP, and the national parks measure is designed to capture the extent to which each country values nature. None of these variables added a great deal of explanatory power, with the best-specified giving R 2 values slightly in excess of 0.6. Further details of these models are available from the author upon request.
It is only significant at the ten per cent level in Model Three.
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Wills-Johnson, N. Lessons for sustainability from the world’s most sustainable culture. Environ Dev Sustain 12, 909–925 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-010-9231-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-010-9231-2