Cirrus@Austlit

'In 2003, Australian environmental historian Tom Griffiths was commissioned by the Australian Academy of Humanities to address what should be the national research priority of an “Environmentally Sustainable Australia”. He delivered a perhaps circumstantially upbeat speech describing the period both as “a critical and exciting time in environmental scholarship” (Griffiths). He said the increasing awareness of an impending global environmental crisis coincided with a sense of “inhabit[ing] a promising moment in the evolution of disciplinary knowledge”. Griffiths cited the editors of a 1999 anthology of humanistic studies of the environment who identified “systemic socioeconomic and cultural causes” (Conway, Keniston, and Marx 6) as being the most pressing environmental problems, and acknowledged that the solutions to these problems lay beyond the reach of scientific or technical knowledge. In his view, “stories” were what changed the way people acted and the way they used available knowledge. Having described Australian history as “a giant experiment in ecological crisis and management, sometimes a horrifying concentration of environmental damage and cultural loss, and sometimes a heartening parable of hope and learning”, he told his audience, “the stories we live by determine the future. So, in harnessing the power of narrative, in listening to, rediscovering and generating true stories, we change the world” (Griffiths).' (Introduction)