Moral Ecologies and Crimes Against Nature – just out

sketch-of-stringybark-creek-ambush Sydney Mail, November 16, 1878.

Moral whats?

A term coined by American historian Karl Jacoby in his influential Crimes Against Nature. Jacoby used the term to indicate the usually unwritten attitudes and assumptions held by local people about their environment and how it should be managed and ‘that against elite, top-down conservation schemes that sought to criminalise customary and often sustainable practices such as the taking of wood and game, those already dwelling on the land resisted by continuing to live their lives as before.’ As described in the Introduction:

‘This book offers the first systematic study of how elite conservation schemes and policies define once customary and vernacular forms of managing common resources as banditry—and how the ‘bandits’ fight back. Drawing inspiration from Karl Jacoby’s seminal Crimes against Nature, this book takes Jacoby’s moral ecology and extends the concept beyond the founding of American national parks. From eighteenth-century Europe, through settler colonialism in Africa, Australia and the Americas, to postcolonial Asia and Australia, Moral Ecologies takes a global stance and a deep temporal perspective, examining how the language and practices of conservation often dispossess Indigenous peoples and settlers, and how those groups resist in everyday ways. Drawing together archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers and historians, this is a methodologically diverse and conceptually innovative study that will appeal to anyone interested in the politics of conservation, protest and environmental history.’

My chapter is on the relationship between the constituencies of northeastern Victoria before, during and after the Ned Kelly bushranging outbreak of the late 1870s, and their attitudes towards their environment, an embryonic form of moral ecology. Here is the full chapter list:

Moral Ecologies: Histories of Conservation, Dispossession and Resistance

Carl J. Griffin, Roy Jones, Iain J. M. Robertson

Pages 1-34

Conservation as Dispossession

Front Matter

Pages 35-35

PDF

Politics of Conservation, Moral Ecology and Resistance by the Sonaha Indigenous Minorities of Nepal

Sudeep Jana Thing

Pages 37-58

Global Ecologies and Local Moralities: Conservation and Contention on Western Australia’s Gascoyne Coast

Roy Jones, Joseph Christensen, Tod Jones