For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit (David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005).
This is the cultural challenge we face in the shift from the dominant narrative of extractivism, shaped by the expansionist-growth imperative of European imperialism, full of evangelical civilising intent, and the naked transactional intent of global capitalism, which has invaded every aspect of our lives through neo-liberal economics combined with algorithmic manipulation of our information ecosystem, with the challenges of AI bearing down on us.
NENA Arts & Culture Hub (NACH)
My next adventure is working with Gippsland artist, Catherine van Wilgenburg, as the co-convenor of a re-launched NENA (New Economy Network Australia) Arts and Culture Hub, (NACH), which is slang for ‘naturally’. This references how things naturally (intrinsically) are—in terms of both human behaviour and the way all life systems on our planet Earth are inscribed as complex eco-systems, all dancing to the tune of relationship. Through a variety of projects and media, the NACH community will work with like-minded groups and individuals to help our community shift from thinking that our embedded common-sense ideas about human dignity and freedom are best served by individualised consumer-based consumerism.
We will help tell the new story of relationalism, based on a relationist ethos in how we live, work and play together—not as separate from the natural world, but as intrinsically part of it. That we live in a thoroughly animated world where each of us (all of nature) has their own spiritual agency, their own languages—whether in the sounds of human language, or those of mycelium networks beneath our feet, the songs of whales and dolphins, the calls of crickets and birds, and the myriad worlds of the animal kingdom.
As Aboriginal Elder, Tjilpi Bob Randall once said to me so many years ago when we first met: “Barbara, look around you. Listen to the rustle of the insects in the bush, to the sound of the wind in the trees, to the call of the birds in the sky. All this is your family and they just love you.”
As he said these words to me, they had a profound, almost shape-shifting effect—an enveloping sense of vibrant warmth and belonging. This is what draws humans to the ‘healing power of nature’. And yet the other story we non-Indigenous people have carried about nature is its extractive use-value for us—as a resource to exploit for our pleasure (tourism, game fishing and hunting), but also along with bushwalking and enjoying nature, the latter which has underpinned our concern for nature conservation. We also regard nature as a resource for our wealth creation (mining, agriculture, infrastructure) or as a dumping ground for our waste and pollution. This is the story of human hubris.
Through the work of NACH, we will contribute to telling the new story of relationalism.
Putting Relationalism into the Economy
Currently the world is only 9% circular in its use of resources. This means 91% of the resources are being used for a single purpose or are being wastefully consumed. Left unabated, this linear resource use mindset is resulting in economic and environmental losses and creating social tensions (Bega Circular Valley).
In September this year, I joined over 200 people online to listen to a panel of speakers organised by Circular Australia and Aurecon to talk about a range of circular economy precincts that are being established in Australia, which are outlined in their report Activating place-based circular economy in Australia, September 2024.This is the beginning of a movement to transition Australia’s industrial and agriculture system towards circularity.
The report defines circular precincts as geographically bound places, bringing people and organisations together to deliver more sustainable solutions, including: designing out waste and pollution from materials and products; retaining assets, products and materials at their highest value; and importantly, conserving natural resources and regenerating nature. This brings together new materials technologies, waste recycling and new ways of place-based thinking and planning.
As I listened to these regional planners, industrialists, scientists and agriculturalists, I realised that this movement represents the practical outcome of a significant shift from ‘silo thinking’ in our modern industrialised society—in terms of government policy and regulatory frameworks, professional disciplines, and the responsibilities of different levels of government. It also represents a shift to relational thinking, which closely aligns with the insights of modern ecological sciences that reveal how everything is connected at multiple levels—from the life of soil beneath our feet to the weather systems that swirl across our planet.
Circular Precincts – The Report
Precincts function as local ecosystems of materials, structures, people, technologies, economic flows, natural assets, and information, generating synergies when approached holistically. They also exist within a broader system that must be understood to define their boundaries and purposes. Taking a systems thinking approach shifts us from linear resource consumption to closed-loop systems, where every resource and product is viewed as part of an integrated ecosystem.
This approach emphasises sustainable practices throughout the lifecycle of buildings, infrastructure, and community services, from initial design and construction to ongoing use and eventual repurposing or recycling. By fostering collaboration among urban planners, architects, engineers, organisations and residents, systems thinking in circular precincts helps optimise resource efficiency, reduce environmental impact, and enhance the overall resilience and liveability of the place.
This fundamentally changes the way people live, learn, work and play. It will change consciousness and more deeply embed relational thinking in our modern culture.
The report outlines how circular precincts are essential steps to Australia’s transition to a circular economy. They create physical spaces for businesses to integrate sustainable infrastructure, such as renewable energy systems, waste management facilities, recycling, repair, remanufacturing, reuse solutions, low-carbon transport, and green spaces. They stimulate economic growth, creating jobs and new sustainable products and services, while supporting liveable and sustainable communities.
Importantly, they provide opportunities to utilise First Nation’s unparalleled knowledge and expertise, including how to Care for Country, which is a multi-layered eco-spiritual way in which we humans regards ourselves as intrinsically part of the natural world, rather than separate from, with control over it.
One of the case studies they cite is right here in the Blue Mountains: the Planetary Health Initiative led by Blue Mountains City Council—how this Initiative supports local action to restore the health of natural systems in the Blue Mountains, while supporting community health, wellbeing, resilience and hope in the face of climate change and increasing natural disasters. Inspired by the wisdom and knowledge of First Nations people and working collaboratively in partnership with community, environment organisations, the business sector, tertiary institutions and other key stakeholders, the Initiative is demonstrating innovative and creative ways to take local action to restore planetary health, and live in harmony with nature.
The Old Story—Extractivism
Indigenous philosophers such as Dr Mary Graham, drawing on the learnings from Australian indigenous culture practices that underpinned a civilisation that has lasted across millennia, including the last Ice Age, has defined the logic underpinning Western economic and political thinking, and its latest manifestation in neo-liberalism, as extractivism. She demonstrates how extractivist logic underpins the industrial revolution and European imperialism that is expansionist—constantly looking for new frontiers to conquer to satisfy a growth imperative, whether in the name of population growth, material welling, or political power.
But underpinning this growth imperative was a civilising, religious evangelical imperative, an assumption that the material wealth of the European powers was proof-positive that they represented the highest form of human civilisation and knowledge. This in turn resulted in the idea of the inherent ‘racial/ethnic’ superiority of the ‘white man’ over all other racial/ethnic groups. Driven by this expansionist imperative, by the early twentieth century, the British could loudly proclaim that the sun never sets on the British Empire—having established colonial control over large areas of Africa, North America, South Asia and the Pacific, even surviving the post war movement for nation state independence as the British Commonwealth of Nations.
This legacy of European imperialism, and American economic imperialism since WWII, continues to shape world politics today—from the various conflicts in the Middle East, including the current Israeli-Palestinian war, the multiple armed conflicts in Africa, and the fight for global economic and political influence between the US, China, India and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Along with physical violence visited upon Indigenous peoples in order to take control of their lands, their languages, cultures and knowledges were also systematically suppressed—a form of epistemic violence that has produced epigenetic, intergenerational trauma underpinned by racial exclusion and social marginalisation from mainstream Australian society. This has left an enduring psychic/spiritual wound at the heart of Australian society.
Justification for the forced removed of Indigenous people from their own lands where they had lived for over 65,000 years, and the granting of private title to colonial settlers, was based on the ‘productivity’ imperative: to make better and more productive use of the land and to bend the environment to the new settler’s will through intrusive technologies, such as mechanical harvesting and clear-felled land clearing, chemical fertiliser in soils to intensify crop yields, open cut mining of minerals, and the damming of rivers to allow irrigation in arid areas, which in the long term have decreased soil levels and their fertility, and choked river systems leading to recent mass fish kills.
Due to hubris of ‘white man’ cultural superiority, Indigenous knowledges about how to live sustainably with the Australian landscape. were ignored. The result has been significant and increasing species extinctions amongst Australia’s unique mammals, birds and insects and the continued pace of environmental degradation of soils and waterways. We are now in the middle of multi-faceted crises that are the blowback from neo-liberal economic-driven strategies. These not only include increasing wealth inequality and resultant social conflict within and between nation states. It also includes climate change from global warming and environmental degradation that have resulted from industrial and agricultural practices. We face a future where 2+ degrees global warming will radically impact on ecosystems and related agricultural practices, along with the habitats of all lifeforms, including humans. Militarised conflict between and within nation states and mass movement of displaced people are expected to follow. Many areas of dense human habitation along coastal plans and river deltas will be inundated, with increasing risks of flooding storms and wildfires.
Blowback – Imperialism + Neoliberal Economics
In his Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), David Harvey explains how the political and economic doctrine of neo-liberalism is built on a distorted understanding of the ideals of human dignity and individual freedoms that are core to the Enlightenment inheritance of the Western cultural (civilisational) tradition.
Spearheaded in the 1980s by Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganism in the US, and increasingly influential across the world, it was reinforced by the failure of state controlled central planning systems in the USSR and China. Harvey shows how neo-liberalism’s economic and political practices proposed that human wellbeing (dignity and freedom) could be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills (from the shackles of government regulation) within an institutional framework characterised by small government, strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.
In this way of thinking, nation states and business corporations took on the mantle of ‘individuals’, each pursuing their own interests, in the spirit of that mythical creature, ‘homo economicus’. This doctrine is based on the idea that we (individuals, corporations, nation states) are all rational ‘beings’ who, in the pursuit of wealth for our own self-interest, will maximise human ingenuity, which benefits all whereby wealth trickles down from points of wealth creation to everyone. The failure of this bold assumption is now all too evident in rising levels of wealth inequality, now taking on an intergenerational dimension that is tearing at the social fabric of even wealthy democratic nations like Australia, the US, UK and Europe. And fuelling rising ethno-nationalism linked to conspiracy thinking populism, which is threatening the very foundations of multiracial societies like the US.
The COVID 19 global pandemic revealed how vulnerable nation states and bioregions are to the global supply chains that have dominated industrial production in the name of greater efficiency. This has taken the gloss of the idea of an integrated global economic system transformed by ever smarter technologies.
There is now a growing new emphasis on bioregional economic sustainability in the face of unexpected shocks and a populist backlash against immigration, including an increasing unwillingness to extend humanitarian help to refugees and asylum seekers fleeing conflict. One ugly face of this is the growth of ethnic and religious nationalism. The impact of climate change via global warming has brought into stark relief the fundamental truth of a relationist logic that inscribes life on earth. This extends to the impact of the volatility of financial markets driven by a relentless pursuit of return on investment to shareholders as an end-itself, and the profit-driven clickbait algorithms that have polluted our information ecosystem.
It also underpins the growing mental health crises in human populations, especially among the young which in Australia have risen by nearly 50 percent in the last 15 years—attributed to the increase of stressors in our society of alienated individualism, valorising wealth and fame, rather than kindness and community wellbeing.
The New Story—Relationalism
Indigeneous Relational Thinking
Dr Mary Graham suggests that Aboriginal relationality – the foundation Law of Aboriginal culture – is an ‘elaborate, complex and refined system of social, moral, spiritual and community obligations that provided an ordered universe for people.’ Importantly, she asserts that within the context of this system, relationality embraced uncertainty and imprecision, consented to being driven by feeling.
Being able to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity sits in marked contrast with the modern imperative for certainty and control in pursuit of ‘final truths’ or political and economic power. Hence the blowback in conspiracy thinking, ethno-nationalism and the populist search for the ‘strong man leader’, to control the nefarious ‘others’ who threaten ‘us’.
Indigenous Australians grow up knowing they are part of extended kinship groups and Country, with all the rights and obligations that entails, but they also have a great sense of personal agency. Discussing the concepts of individuality, autonomy, and personal agency across the indigenous and non-Indigenous divide is fraught with terminological difficulties. The relational vision of a person as a hub within a network between humans and other agencies Is nothing like the individualist vision of a person who, as a body and a mind, can be regarded as separate entity. Moreover the very concept of agency spread across all points of the natural world – human, animal, landforms, spirits – does not allow for a personal agency that gives one autonomous control. Life is adjusting to the flow of intertwining agencies, power is understanding and surfing that flow. That is why listening is an indigenous super-power.
The illusion of some kind of individual freedom is perhaps the result of the much greater tolerance for the realities of human and other natures. Western ‘civilised’ culture dominates people through demands for conformity and a very limited acceptance of what is ‘normal’ – from body shapes to behavioural variety. Indigenous cultures with naked face-to-face human relations are usually much more realistic as to what people can be like, and accept variety with more humour and tolerance. But this tolerance does not exempt from the need to fit into the flow and the interrelation with the agencies of all other beings in order to be a proper human agent/being.
As discussed in my recent blog, ‘A Canoe Journey into Enlightenment 2.0’, Deakin University IKSL (Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab) led by Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, and Right Story/Wrong Story, has been hosting a series of yarning exchanges with a range of other First Nations thinkers in Australia and other parts of the world, to explore the importance of Indigenous thinking in addressing some of the core underlying issues of the modern world. Enlightenment 2.0 is the failed attempt to modify Enlightenment 1.0, because the deep logic and ethos of relationality has not been understood or adopted.
Yunkaporta asserts that Indigenous thinking distinguishes between LAW, which represents the fundamentally relational ecosystems laws that prescribe all forms of life on planet Earth, and LORE, which are the cultural stories that guide human behaviour and thinking about the need to obey this LAW. In Aboriginal Australia this body of Lore is encoded in the songlines/songspirals and ceremonies, the multi-layered nature of which, including secret esoteric dimensions, is held in sacred trust by Elders, the senior lawman and senior lawwomen of the different language groups (nations)—and passed down through the generations through ceremony.
However this distinction has to be read cautiously. Marcia Langton, in ‘Law: The Way of the Ancestors’ (2023) makes the point that Aboriginal definition of LAW equally includes culture. That Law and culture are inseparable; Country holds all knowledge as an integrated whole, not compartmentalised into separate disciplines. She also points out that ‘art’ functioned then as it functions now – as visual documents that serve as articles of law, constitutional charters and title deeds to land, among other things. Aboriginal people have always used the visual and performative to practices and transmit law. Langton quotes contemporary artist and law man Djambawa Marawili saying, ‘land and sea can’t talk for themselves; we have to talk for them’.
As demonstrated in the wonderful exhibition, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, held in Canberra at the National Museum of Australia in 2017, the IKSL scholars explain that everywhere in the land and sea, ancient entities of Lore keep stories of long-ago battles, crimes, dramas and disasters. They all hold cautionary tales and the responsibility of abiding in the stories of wrong doing and calamity, for the benefit of all. They are respected and revered for this, even the ones who committed unspeakable crimes, as they must forever keep the Law, encoded in Lore for us, informing the ways we negotiate our boundaries and protocols for right conduct and right relation. These must be maintained in times of conflict and pain, when it is far more difficult to act with integrity than it is in times of peace and love.
Based on the experience of what IKSL calls the ‘compost of many failed projects and interventions’, working with Indigenous scholars from Algoma University in Canada, IKLS have felt the need to publish ‘Protocols for Non-Indigenous People Working with Indigenous Knowledge’ (2024). This draws on the experience of Indigenous thinkers working with non-Indigenous people (scholars, creatives, activists, businesses and government officials), in dealing with the strong tendency for modern capitalist culture to select bits and pieces of Indigenous thinking, without understanding or following its deeply relational logic and instead falling into extractivist behaviours, particularly when working with Indigenous people on projects that involve them.
They maintain such protocols are needed as mechanism to mediate and translate functions for operability between otherwise incompatible knowledge and value systems. As with computer systems, there also needs to be ‘firewalls’ to protect the health and integrity of Indigenous systems from corruption and distortion. They insist that when seeking to work with Indigenous people on projects involving their communities, outsiders (non-Indigenous) may be invited into Indigenous circles, or may seek invitation, but cannot invite themselves. They should know that permissions only last as long as relationships are well-maintained. You can’t hold them alone, forever. When non-Indigenous people work with Indigenous people, they need to continually measure and reflect on their impact on relational and biocultural systems health. They assert this is best done in relationship with an adept local who can advise them.
However while fundamental differences in knowledge systems thinking and power imbalances present difficulties, in their Protocols document they nevertheless conclude: “Do not wander off. Bekaa (wait). Maadanaamo (start breathing). For when you let go of your systems, what you think you know, biases, ego, that is when the bumps, bruises will subside and we can drink tea with our hearts under the stars.”
Non-Indigenous Relational Thinking
While we non-Indigenous Australians can be inspired by the depth of relational thinking embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems, we can also be inspired by similar relational thinking that is growing in non-Indigenous culture—a distinct turning away from the narrow linear idea of consumer-driven growth as the recipe for successful and happy societies.
However we also need to be aware of the strong tendency in Western/modern culture, shaped as it has been by the logic of capitalism and the hubris of the superiority of western ways of thinking, that many of the tendencies in ‘Enlightenment 2.0’ merely incorporate ideas plucked from Eastern religions and Indigenous culture and fail to practice truly relational thinking that respects the full intent of the knowledge system from where these ideas have been plucked.
Nevertheless, there is a growing movement of authentic relational thinking happening in the cracks and crevices of the collapse of the dominant old story, even as it is still focused on expansionary economic growth, the valorisation of wealth and fame, and reliance on market forces. This new way of being, thinking and doing is finding ways to honour and sustain human dignity and freedom through thoughtful respect and a deepening realisation that our search for meaning, purpose and belonging can best be found through relational thinking. There has been a widespread engagement with issues of sustainability and environmental regeneration among non-indigenous scholars and practitioners in government, not-for-profit and business groups. The circular economy movement is part of this turning towards relationalism in practice.
We all recognise that consumer-driven growth-based economic thinking has not produced greater community wellbeing. The freedom and ability to travel to far flung destinations by increasing numbers of people, combined with Instagram selfie culture, has resulted in troubling over-tourism threatening the very places we value and the communities that created them. The ability to invest and trade in the stock market has produced a pernicious business culture focused on profit for shareholders, rather than service to customers and respect and care for employees that are creating the service/goods—pitting ‘mum and dad’ investors against workers and fellow citizens, including in the housing sector.
As Clive Hamilton notes (Growth Fetish, 2003), despite high and sustained levels of economic growth in the West over a period of 50 years—growth that has seen average real incomes increase several times over—the mass of people are no more satisfied with their lives than they were then. He cites studies that show that extrinsically (wealth, fame and beauty) oriented individuals are shown to have shorter, more conflictual and more competitive relationships with others thus impacting the quality of life of those around them.
This observation has continued to accelerate under the pincer movement of rising wealth inequality, time pressures on the necessity for two-income families to secure sufficient household incomes, and the valorisation of wealth and fame through advertising and the addictive clickbait nature of social media. Today we are increasingly worried about social issues such as rising levels of suicidal ideation, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and increasing fractiousness and divisiveness in our communities and political culture.
We are also worried about the world we are leaving for the generations to come; our grandchildren and their grandchildren. That life promises to get more and more difficult. That dreams of more prosperity and ‘good times’ are fallacious. In the face of this, there is a much greater interest in personal and community resilience, which is closely linked to the quality of our relationships with one another, with the way our cities and neighbourhoods function, and with our connection to the healing power of nature.
However as the Circular Precincts Report makes clear, significant challenges remain for this circular economy movement to become the mainstream. It needs to be led by strong business and political leadership, with appropriate investment and regulatory mechanisms to drive the change.
Relational Circularity
Just as the natural world displays relational circularity in the cycles of birth and death of all living forms, the cycle of seasons in our weather patterns and in the daily circle of night and day determined by the relationship between planet Earth and the Sun, and in the tidal impacts of the moon’s monthly cycle, so human beings are rediscovering how to realign themselves with these ancient and fundamental patterns that inscribe our world.
We personally experience this relational circularity in our own lives, through our dreams, our emotions, our family connections, the links between our bodies and the environment, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the world our senses reveal to us through touch, sight, sound and smell, and kinaesthetic movement. The preoccupation with extending our lives through medical technological intervention has led to a counter movement for access to assisted dying and the right to die in the face of declining health in old age or as a result of serious terminal illness. For many people, being ‘marooned’ with dementia or physical incompetence in aged care is a far scarier prospect than death. We are turning away from the hubris of technology’s ability to defeat death, and embracing death as a natural part of life.
Instead of regarding waste as a cost-free externality to be solved by nature, industrial ecology precincts, such as Kwinana in WA, are designing out waste, while areas like the NSW Hunter see the transition from a coal-economy as an opportunity to create an innovation driven new regional economy. Other initiatives inform regenerative, sustainable community ecologies in projects like Kensington Village in Melbourne, the Planetary Health Initiative in the NSW Blue Mountains, the Bega Circular Valley project, and numerous other initiatives being pursued in Australia. These sit alongside similar projects across the world in both wealthy highly developed economies, and in poorer areas of the so-called Third World/Global South.
This idea of relational circularity has even extended to the fashion industry, given the high levels of textile waste generated by ‘fast fashion’. Recent London fashion shows such as the Endless Runway, curated by eBay, and Style for Change, curated by Oxfam have featured the new trend focus on pre-loved clothes and innovative upcycling of secondhand clothing as the new ‘cool’. At the same time circular economy investors are finding ways to re-use fast fashion textile waste currently accumulating in vast waste dumps in Africa, through new industrial processes.
Perhaps the greatest challenge comes from plastic – that miracle material produced by chemical scientists. What do we do about the huge amounts of soft plastic that clog our oceans and waterways and the micro-plastics in our food chain—resulting from our love affair with human convenience? What do we do about the scourge of microplastics (plastic particles 5mm or less in one dimension) that are having toxic effects at every level of biological organisation, from tiny insects at the bottom of the food chain to apex predators, like humans (Science Advisor, September 2024)? This presents a significant challenge to our new materials technologists—both in recycling plastics, removing them from the environment, and in designing new materials that can replace plastics in our economy.
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