About The Author
Nao Nakanishi, a descendant of a samurai family that dates back 17 generation to the year 1576 completed master's and doctoral course in education from Kyoto University. Between 1993 and 2000, he conducted research studies on the adaptation of Aborigines to the tropical rainforest environment at the Department of Physiology of Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, and also obtained the Ph.D degree in environmental studies from Kyoto University. In 1995, he was awarded the research encouragement prize by Australia-Japan Foundation, and translated and published Adult and Continuing Education in Australia. He also published Theory of Migrant Culture in Australia in 1999, and Articulation: Strategies for cultural Reproduction by Aboriginal Australians in 2000.
About The Book
Environmental Identity: Towards Sustainable Development with Indig-enous Australians examines the different concepts of a unified environment including living things as well as the natural surroundings like forests, rivers, rocks etc. Westerners tend to rely more on cognition and a separating view distinguishing between nature and culture. Aborigines with a 50 000 year continuous culture developed a unique concept of the environment which lacks the concept of private land and therefore did not modify nature. They learned how to adapt to the changes of nature and climate. An important study for environmental scientists, anthropologists, psycholo-gists and physiologists. As many of the Aboriginal values are also shared by people in Southeast Asia, even if only rudimentary, makes this study of interest to a wider area than Australia
Foreword
Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in shelter and possession were sensible adaptations to Australian's ENSO-driven resource unpredictability. When local conditions deteriorated, Aborigines simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better. Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not all of which were likely to fail simultaneously. Instead of having fluctuating populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they maintained smaller populations that enjoyed an abundance of food in good years and a sufficiency in a bad years. It is very important for us to adapt to natural environment in order to promote sustainable development. Even within the relative moist and productive eastern side of the continent, exchanges between societies were limited by the 1,900 miles from Queensland's tropical rainforest in the northeast to Victoria's temperate rainforest in the southeast, a geographic and ecological distance as great as that from Los Angels to Alaska. Some apparent regional or continentwide regressions of technology in Australia may stem from the isolation and relative few inhabitants of its population centers. The boomerang, that quintessential Australian weapon, was abandoned in the Cape York Peninsula on northeastern Australia. As this study based on the original fieldwork research in this area, the data are valuable to promote sustainable development there. Today, Australia is populated and governed by 20 million non-Aborigines, most of them of European descent, plus increasing numbers of Asians arriving since Australia abandoned its previous White Australia immigration policy in 1973. The Aboriginal population declined by 80 percent, from around 300,000 at the time of European settlement to a minimum of 60,000 in 1921. Aborigines today from an underclass of Australian society. Many of them live on mission stations or government reserves, or else work for whites as herdsmen on cattle station. Why did Aborigines fare so much worse? This book suggests new perspective beyond my basic answer to this question. The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians. Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy. As this author has written widely on the subject of Aboriginal Australians, he considers the society as the ideal relationship between human beings and nature. I'm sorry that I cannot make adequate comments on his topics, but I appreciate his interest. I have my best wishes for the success of his work.
Hindu (932)
Agriculture (123)
Ancient (1099)
Archaeology (791)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (922)
Biography (725)
Buddhist (548)
Cookery (166)
Emperor & Queen (575)
Islam (245)
Jainism (321)
Literary (888)
Mahatma Gandhi (386)
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Visual Search
Manage Wishlist