Academic literature on the topic 'Water Pollution Environmental aspects Victoria Melbourne'

Urban drainage systems historically were developed on principles of hydraulic capacity for the transport of storm water to reduce the risk of flooding. However, with urbanization the percent of impervious surfaces increases dramatically resulting in increased flood volumes, peak discharge rates, velocities and duration, and a significant increase in pollutant loads. Storm water and urban runoff are the leading causes of the impairment of receiving waters and their beneficial uses in Australia and the United States today. Strict environmental and technology controls on wastewater treatment facilities and industry for more than three decades have ensured that these sources are less significant today as the cause of impairment of receiving waters. This paper compares the approach undertaken by the Environmental Protection Authority Victoria for the Melbourne metropolitan area with the approach implemented by the California Environmental Protection Agency for the Los Angeles area to control storm water pollution. Both these communities are largely similar in population size and the extent of urbanization. The authors present an analysis of the different approaches contrasting Australia with the USA, comment on their comparative success, and discuss the relevance of the two experiences for developed and developing nations in the context of environmental policy making to control storm water and urban runoff pollution.

AbstractThis is the first detailed report on the distribution of Ni, As, Sr and Ag in water, sediments and macrophytes from Lake Victoria, complemented with recent data on the heavy metals Cr, Cu, Zn, Cd and Pb. The study was conducted over an 11-month period at five sites in the Kenyan part of Lake Victoria: four sites in the Winam Gulf influenced by various anthropogenic pressures including a site near Kisumu City, and one in the main lake, perceived to have lesser direct anthropogenic influence. Compared with the main lake site, the water in Winam Gulf had significantly higher values for electrical conductivity and concentrations of dissolved components: organic carbon and bound nitrogen, as well as major and most trace elements. This contamination is also evident in surface sediments, which contained significantly higher levels of Cr, Zn, As, Ag, Cd and Pb compared with the main lake site. The mean levels of Cr, Cu, Zn, Ag and Pb exceeded probable effect levels at least at one of the gulf sites. The sediments at the Kisumu City site were classified as severely polluted with Cu (up to 259 mg/kg dw) and Pb (up to 1188 mg/kg dw). The sediment cores showed significantly higher levels of Cu, Zn, Ag, Cd and Pb in the surface (0–3 cm) versus subsurface (22–25 cm) layer at the Kisumu City site, indicating increasing pollution by these elements within the last 15 years. This is also the first report on trace elements in the emergent water plant Vossia cuspidata and submerged plant Ceratophyllum demersum from this lake. Even though the accumulation of most elements is comparable between C. demersum (whole plant) and V. cuspidata roots, the latter shows a better bioindicative potential. Contamination of the gulf with Ni, Cu, Zn, Ag, Cd and Pb is well mirrored in V. cuspidata roots. V. cuspidata strongly restricts the acropetal transport of trace elements, and hence using the shoots as fodder does not pose a risk to livestock.

AbstractProviding sources of sustainable and quality potable water in Uganda is a significant public health issue. This project aimed at identifying and prioritizing possible actions on how sustainable high quality potable water in Uganda’s water supply systems could be achieved. In that respect, a review of both the current water supply systems and government programs on drinking water in Uganda was completed. Aspects of quantity, quality, treatment methods, infrastructure, storage and distribution of water for different water systems were evaluated and compared with the existing water supply systems in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean, for purposes of generating feasible recommendations and opportunities for improvement. Uganda utilizes surface water, groundwater, and rainwater sources for consumption. Surface water covers 15.4% of the land area and serves both urban and rural populations. Lake Victoria contributes about 85% of the total fresh surface water. Potable water quality is negatively affected by the following factors: disposal of sewage and industrial effluents, agricultural pesticides and fertilizers, and surface run-offs during heavy rains. The total renewable groundwater resources in Uganda are estimated to be 29 million m

Introduction Ngarrindjeri futures depend on the survival of the land, waters, and other interconnected living things. The Murray-Darling Basin is recognised nationally and internationally as a system under stress. Ngarrindjeri have long understood the profound and intricate connection of land, water, humans, and non-humans (Trevorrow and Hemming). In an effort to secure environmental sustainability the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA) have engaged in political negotiations with the State, primarily with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), to transform natural resource management arrangements that engage with an ethics of justice, redistribution, and recognition (Hattam, Rigney and Hemming). In 1987, prior to the formation of the NRA, Camp Coorong: Race Relations and Cultural Education Centre was established by the Ngarrindjeri Lands and Progress Association in partnership with the South Australian Museum and the South Australian Education Department (Hemming) as a place for all citizens to engage with the values of a land ethic of care. The complex includes a cultural museum, accommodation, conference facilities, and workshop facilities for primary, secondary, and tertiary education students; it also serves as a base for research and course development on Indigenous and Ngarrindjeri culture and history (Hattam, Rigney and Hemming). Camp Coorong seeks to share Ngarrindjeri cultural values, knowledges, and histories with students and visitors in order to “improve relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people with a broader strategy aimed at securing a future for themselves in their own ‘Country’” (Hemming 37). The Centre is adjacent to the Coorong National Park and 200 km South-East of Adelaide. The establishment of Camp Coorong on Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar (land/body/spirit) occurred when Ngarrindjeri Elders negotiated with the Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS) to establish the race relations and cultural education centre. This negotiation was the beginning of many subsequent negotiations between Ngarrindjeri, local, State, and Federal governments about reclaiming ownership, management, and control of Ngarrindjeri lands, waters, and knowledge systems for a healthy Country and by implication healthy people (Hemming, Trevorrow and Rigney). As Elder Tom Trevorrow states: The waters and the seas, the waters of the Kurangh (Coorong), the waters of the rivers and lakes are all spiritual waters…The land and waters is a living body…We the Ngarrindjeri people are a part of its existence…The land and waters must be healthy for the Ngarrindjeri people to be healthy…We say that if Yarluwar-Ruwe dies, the water dies, our Ngartjis die, the Ngarrindjeri will surely die (Ngarrindjeri Nation Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan 13). Ruwe/Ruwar is an important aspect of the public pedagogy practiced at Camp Coorong and by the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA). The NRA’s nation building activities arise from negotiated contractual agreements called KNYs: Kungan Ngarrindjeri Yunnan (Listen to Ngarrindjeri people talking). KNYs establish a vital aspect of the NRA’s strategic platform for political negotiations. However, the focus of this paper is concerned with local Indigenous experience of teaching and experience with the education system rather than the broader Ngarrindjeri educational objectives in the area. The specific concerns of this paper are the performance of storytelling and the dialectic relationship between the listener/learner (Tur and Tur). The pedagogy and place of Camp Coorong seeks to engage non-Indigenous people with Indigenous epistemologies through storytelling as a pedagogy of experience and a “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler and Zembylas). Before detailing the relationship of these with one another, it is necessary to grasp the importance of the interconnectedness of Ruwe/Ruwar articulated in the opening statement of Ngarrindjeri Nations Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan: Caring for Ngarrindjeri Sea, Country and Culture: Our Lands, Our Waters, Our People, All Living Things are connected. We implore people to respect our Ruwe (Country) as it was created in the Kaldowinyeri (the Creation). We long for sparkling, clean waters, healthy land and people and all living things. We long for the Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country) of our ancestors. Our vision is all people Caring, Sharing, Knowing and Respecting the lands, the waters, and all living things. Caring for Country The Lakes and the Coorong are dying as irrigation, over grazing, and pollution have left their toll on the Murray-Darling Basin. Camp Coorong delivers a key message (Hemming, 38) concerning the on-going obligation of Ngarrindjeri’s Ruwe/Ruwar to heal damaged sites both emotionally and environmentally. Couched as a civic responsibility, caring for County augments environmental action. However, there are epistemological distinctions between Natural Resources Management and Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar. Ngarrindjeri conceive of the River Murray as one system that cannot be demarcated along state lines. Ngarrrindjeri Elder Uncle Matt Rigney, who recently passed away, argued that the River Murray and the Darling is embodied and that when the river is sick it impacts directly on Ngarrindjeri personhood and wellbeing (Hemming, Trevorrow and Rigney). Therefore, Ngarrindjeri have a responsibility to care for Ngarrindjeri Country and Ngarrindjeri governance systems are informed by cultural and ethical obligations to Ruwe/Ruwar of the lower Murray River, Lakes and Coorong. Transmitting knowledge of Country is imperative as Aunty Ellen Trevorrow states: We have to keep our culture alive. We want access to our special places, our lands and our waters. We need to be able to protect our places, our ngatji [totems], our Old People and restore damaged sites. We want respect for our land and our water and we want to pass down knowledge (cited in Bell, Women and Indigenous Religions 3). Ruwe/Ruwar is an ethic of care where men and women hold distinctive cultural and environmental knowledge and are responsible for passing knowledge to future generations. Knowledge is not codified into a “canon” but is “living knowledge” connected to how to live and how to understand the connection between material, spiritual, human, and non-human realms. Elders at Camp Coorong facilitate understandings of this ontology by sharing stories that evoke questions in children and adults alike. For settler Australians, the first phase of this understanding begins with an engagement with the discomfort of the colonial history of Indigenous dispossession. It also requires learning new modes of “re/inhabition” through a pedagogy informed by “place-consciousness” that centralises Indigenous connection to Country (Gruenewald Both Worlds). Many settler communities embody a dualist western epistemology that is necessarily disrupted when there is acknowledgment from whence one came (Carter 2009). The activities and stories at Camp Coorong provide a positive transformative pedagogy that transforms a possessive white logic (Moreton-Robinson) to one of shared cultural heritage. Ngarrindjeri epistemologies of connection to Country are expressed through a pedagogy of storytelling at Camp Coorong. This often occurs during weaving, making feather flowers, or walking on Ngarrindjeri Country with visitors and students. Enactments such as weaving are not simply occupational or functional. Weaving has deep cultural and metaphorical significance as Aunty Ellen Trevorrow states: There is a whole ritual in weaving. From where we actually start, the centre part of a piece, you’re creating loops to weave into, then you move into the circle. You keep going round and round creating the loops and once the children do those stages they’re talking, actually having a conversation, just like our Old People. It’s sharing time. And that’s where our stories were told (cited in Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin 44). At Camp Coorong learning involves listening to stories while engaging with activities such as weaving or walking on Country. The ecological changes and the history of dispossession are woven into narrative on Country and students see the impact of the desecration of the Coorong, Lower Murray and Lakes and lands. In this way the relatively recent history of colonial race relations and contemporary struggles with government bureaucracies and legislation also comprise the warp and weave of Ngarrindjeri knowledge and connection to Country. Pedagogy of Experience A pedagogy of experience involves telling the story of Indigenous peoples’ sense of “placelessness” within the nation (Watson) as a story of survival and resistance. It is through such pedagogies that Ngarrindjeri Elders at Camp Coorong reconstruct their lives and create agency in the face of settler colonialism. The experiences of growing up in Australia during the assimilation era, fighting against the State on policies that endorsed child theft, being forced to live at fringe camps, experiencing violent racisms, and, for some, living as part of a diaspora in one’s own Country is embedded in the stories of survival, resilience and agency. “Camp Coorong began as an experiment in alternative teaching methods developed largely by George Trevorrow, a local Ngarrindjeri man” (Hemming 38). Classroom malaise was experienced by Ngarrindjeri Elders from Camp Coorong, such as Uncle Tom and Aunty Ellen Trevorrow and the late Uncle George Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla, and others when interacting or employed in schools as Aboriginal Education Workers (AEWs). It was the invisibility of these Elders’ knowledges inside schools that generated the impetus to establish Camp Coorong as a counter-institution. The spatial dimension of situationality, and its attention to social transformation, connects critical pedagogy to a pedagogy of place at Camp Coorong. Both discourses are concerned with the contextual, geographical conditions that shape people, and the actions people take to shape these conditions (Gruenewald, Both Worlds). Place-based education at Camp Coorong advocates a new localism in order to stimulate community revitalisation and resistance to globalisation and commodity capitalism. It provides the space and opportunity to develop the capacity for inventiveness and adaptation to changing environments and resistance to ecological destruction. Of concern to the growing field of place-based education are how to promote care for people and places (Gruenewald and Smith, xix). For Gruenewald and Smith this requires decolonisation and developing sensitivity to forms of thought that injure and exploit people and places, and re/inhabitation by identifying, conserving, and creating knowledge that nurtures and protects people and places. Engaging in a land ethic of care on Country informs the educational paradigm at Camp Coorong that does not begin in front of bulldozers or under police batons at anti-globalisation rallies, but in the contact zones (Somerville 342) where “a material and metaphysical in-between space for the intersection of multiple and contested stories” (Somerville 342) emerge. Ngarrindjeri knowledge, environmental knowledge, scientific knowledge, colonial histories, and media representations all circulate in the contact zone and are held in productive tension (Carter). Decolonising Pedagogy and Pedagogies of Discomfort The critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller. Reciprocity is based on the principles of interconnectedness, balance, and the idea that actions create corresponding action through the gift of story (Stewart-Harawira). Camp Coorong is a place for inter-cultural dialogue through storytelling. Being located on Ngarrindjeri Country the non-Indigenous listener is more able to “hear” and at the same time move along a continuum of a) disbelief and anger about the dispossession of Indigenous peoples; b) emotional confusion about their own sense of belonging in Australia; c) shock at the ways in which liberal western society’s structural privilege is built on Indigenous inequality on the grounds of race and habitus (Bordieu and Passeron); then, d) towards empathy that is framed as race cognisance (Aveling). Stories are not represented through a sanguine vision of the past, but are told of colonisation, dispossession, as well as of hope for the healing of Ngarrinjderi Country. The listener is gifted with stories at Camp Coorong. However, there is an ethical obligation to the gifting that learners may not understand until later and which concern the rights and obligations fundamental to notions of deep connection to Country. It is often in the recount of one’s experience at Camp Coorong, such as in reflective journals or in conversation, that recognition of the importance of history, social justice, and sovereignty are brought to light. In the first phase of learning, non-Indigenous students and teachers may move from uncomfortable silence, to a space where they can hear the stories and thereby become engaged listeners. They may go through a process of grappling with a range of issues and emotions. There is frustration, anger, and blame that knowledge has been omitted from their education, and they routinely ask: “How did we not know this history?” In the second stage learners tend to remain outside of the story until they are hooked by an aspect that draws them into it. They have the choice of engagement and this requires empathy. At this stage learners are grappling with the antithetical feelings of guilt and innocence; these feelings emerge when those advantaged and challenged by their complicity with settler colonialism, racism, and the structural privilege of whiteness start to understand the benefits they gain from Indigenous dispossession and ask “was it my fault?” Thirdly, learners enter a space which may disavow and dismiss the newly encountered knowledge and move back into resistance, silence, and reluctance to hear. However, it is at this point that a choice emerges. The choice to engage in the emotional labour required to acknowledge the gift of the story and thereby unsettle white Australian identity (Bignall; Boler and Zembylas). In this process “inscribed habits of attention,” as described by Boler and Zembylas (127), are challenged. These habits have been enabled by the emotional binaries of “us” and “them”. The colonial legacy of Indigenous dispossession is an emotive subject that disrupts national pride that is built on this binary. At Camp Coorong, discomfort is created during the reiteration of stories and engagement in various activities. Uncertainty and discomfort are necessary parts of restructuring the emotional habitus and reconstructing identity. The primary ethical aim of a pedagogy of discomfort is the creation of contestability. The learner comes to understand the rights and obligations of caring for Country and has to decide how to carry the story. Ngarrindjeri ethics of care inspire the learner to undertake the emotional labour necessary to relocate their understanding of identity. As a zone of cultural contestation, Camp Coorong also enables pedagogies that allow for critical reflection on common educational practices undertaken by educators and students. Conclusion The aim of the camp was to overturn racism and provide employment for Ngarrindjeri on Country (Hemming, 38). Students and teachers from around the state come to Camp Coorong and learn to weave, make feather flowers, and listen to stories about Ngarrindjeri Country whilst walking on Country (Hemming 38). Camp Coorong fosters understanding of Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar and at the same time overturns essentialist notions developed by deficit theories that routinely remain embedded in the school curriculum. Camp Coorong’s anti-racist epistemology mobilises an Indigenous pedagogy of storytelling and experience as a decolonising methodology. Learning Ngarrindjeri history, cultural heritage, and land ethic of care deepens students’ understanding of connecting to Country through reflection on situations, histories, and shared spaces of human and non-human actors. Pedagogies of discomfort also inform practice at Camp Coorong and the intersections of theory and practice in this context disrupts identity formations that have been grounded in a white colonial construction of nationhood. Education is a means of social and cultural reproduction, as well as a key site of resistance and vehicle for social change. Although the analysis of domination is a feature of critical pedagogy, what is urgently required is a language of hope and transformation understood from a Ngarrindjeri standpoint; something that is achieved at Camp Coorong. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the process of collaboration that occurred at Camp Coorong with Aunty Ellen Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla, and Deborah Rankine. The key ideas were established in conversation and the article was revised on subsequent occasions whilst at Camp Coorong with the aforementioned authors. This paper was produced as part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, ‘Negotiating a Space in the Nation: The Case of Ngarrindjeri’ (DP1094869). The Chief Investigators are Robert Hattam, Peter Bishop, Pal Ahluwalia, Julie Matthews, Daryle Rigney, Steve Hemming and Robin Boast, working with Simone Bignall and Bindi MacGill. References Aveling, Nado. “Critical whiteness studies and the challenges of learning to be a 'White Ally'.” Borderlands e-journal 3. 2 (2004). 12 Dec 2006 ‹www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au› Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1998. ——-. Kungun Ngarrindjeri Miminar Yunnan. Listen to Ngarrindjeri Women Speaking. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2008. ——-. “Ngarrindjeri Women’s Stories: Kungun and Yunnan.” Women and Indigenous Religions. Ed. Sylvia Marcos. California: Greenwood, 2010: 3-20. Bignall, Simone. Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Boler, Megan and Michalinos Zembylas. “Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Difference.” Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change. Ed. P. Trifonas. New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003: 110-36. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications, 1990. Carter, Paul. “Care at a Distance: Affiliations to Country in a Global Context.” Lanscapes and learning. Place Studies for a Global Village. Ed. Margaret. Somerville, Kerith Power and Phoenix de Carteret. Rotterdam: Sense. 2, 2009. 1-33. Gruenewald, David. “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place.” Educational Researcher 43.4 (2003): 3-12. ——-. “Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education.” American Educational Research Journal, 40.3 (2003): 619-54. Gruenewald, David and Gregory Smith. “Making Room for the Local.” Place-Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity. Ed. David Gruenewald & Gregory Smith. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008. Hattam, Rob., Daryle Rigney and Steve Hemming. “Reconciliation? Culture and Nature and the Murray River.” Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia. Ed. Emily Potter, Alison Mackinnon, McKenzie, Stephen & Jenny McKay. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007:105-22. Hemming, Steve., Tom Trevorrow and Matt, Rigney. “Ngarrindjeri Culture.” The Murray Mouth: Exploring the Implications of Closure or Restricted Flow. Ed. M Goodwin and S Bennett. Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation, Adelaide (2002): 13–19. Hemming, Steve. “Camp Coorong—Combining Race Relations and Cultural Education.” Social Alternatives 12.1 (1993): 37-40. MacGill, Bindi. Aboriginal Education Workers: Towards Equality of Recognition of Indigenous Ethics of Care Practices in South Australian School (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Adelaide: Finders University, 2008. Stewart-Harawira, Makere. “Cultural Studies, Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogies of Hope.” Policy Futures in Education 3.2 (2005):153-63. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: the High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision.” Taking up the Challenge: Critical Whiteness Studies in a Postcolonising Nation. Ed. Damien Riggs. Belair: Crawford House, 2007:109-24. Ngarrindjeri Nation. Ngarrindjeri Nation Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan: Caring for Ngarrindjeri Sea Country and Culture. Ngarrindjeri Tendi, Ngarrindjeri Heritage Committee, Ngarrindjeri Native Title Management Committee. Camp Coorong: Ngarrindjeri Land and Progress Association, 2006. Somerville, Margaret. “A Place Pedagogy for ‘Global Contemporaneity.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42 (2010): 326–44. Trevorrow, Tom and Steve Hemming. “Conversation: Kunggun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan, Listen to Ngarrindjeri People Talking”. Sharing Spaces, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses, to Story, Country and Rights. Ed. Gus Worby and. Lester Irabinna Rigney. Perth: API Network, 2006. 295-304. Tur, Mona & Simone Tur. “Conversation: Wapar munu Mamtali Nintiringanyi-Learning about the Dreaming and Land.” Sharing Spaces, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses, to Story, Country and Rights. Ed. Gus Worby and. Lester Irabinna Rigney. Perth: API Network, 2006: 160-70. Watson, Irene. "Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country, and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples." South Atlantic Quaterly 108.1 (2009): 27-51.

There is a moment in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth devised to expose the sheer audacity of fossil fuel lobby groups in the United States. In their attempts to address significant scientific consensus and growing public concern over climate change, these groups are resorting to what Gore’s film suggests are grotesque distortions of fact. A particular example highlighted in the film is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CPE—a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil) “pro” energy industry advertisement: “Carbon dioxide”, the ad states. “They call it pollution, we call it life.” While on the one hand employing rhetoric against the “inconvenient truth” that carbon dioxide emissions are ratcheting up the Earth’s temperature, these advertisements also pose a question – though perhaps unintended – that is worth addressing. Where does life reside? This is not an issue of essentialism, but relates to the claims, materials and technologies through which life as a political object emerges. The danger of entertaining the vested interests of polluting industry in a discussion of climate change and its biopolitics is countered by an imperative to acknowledge the ways in which multiple positions in the climate change debate invoke and appeal to ‘life’ as the bottom line, or inviolable interest, of their political, social or economic work. In doing so, other questions come to the fore that a politics of climate change framed in terms of moral positions or competing values will tend to overlook. These questions concern the manifold practices of life that constitute the contemporary terrain of the political, and the actors and instruments put in this employ. Who speaks for life? And who or what produces it? Climate change as a matter of concern (Latour) has gathered and generated a host of experts, communities, narratives and technical devices all invested in the administration of life. It is, as Malcom Bull argues, “the paradigmatic issue of the new politics,” a politics which “draws people towards the public realm and makes life itself subject to the caprices of state and market” (2). This paper seeks to highlight the politics of life that have emerged around climate change as a public issue. It will argue that these politics appear in incremental and multiple ways that situate an array of actors and interests as active in both contesting and generating the terms of life: what life is and how we come to know it. This way of thinking about climate change debates opposes a prevalent moralistic framework that reads the practices and discourses of debate in terms of oppositional positions alone. While sympathies may flow in varying directions, especially when it comes to such a highly charged and massively consequential issue as climate change, there is little insight to be had from charging the CPE (for example) with manipulating consumers, or misrepresenting well-known facts. Where new and more productive understandings open up is in relation to the fields through which these gathering actors play out their claims to the project of life. These fields, from the state, to the corporation, to the domestic sphere, reveal a complex network of strategies and devices that seek to secure life in constantly renovated terms. Life Politics Biopolitical scholarship in the wake of Foucault has challenged life as a pre-given uncritical category, and sought to highlight the means through which it is put under question and constituted through varying and composing assemblages of practitioners and practices. Such work regards the project of human well-being as highly complex and technical, and has undertaken to document this empirically through close attention to the everyday ecologies in which humans are enmeshed. This is a political and theoretical project in itself, situating political processes in micro, as well as macro, registers, including daily life as a site of (self) management and governance. Rabinow and Rose refer to biopolitical circuits that draw together and inter-relate the multiple sites and scales operative in the administration of life. These involve not just technologies, rationalities and regimes of authority and control, but also politics “from below” in the form of rights claims and community formation and agitation (198). Active in these circuits, too, are corporate and non-state interests for whom the pursuit of maximising life’s qualities and capabilities has become a concern through which “market relations and shareholder value” are negotiated (Rabinow and Rose 211). As many biopolitical scholars argue, biopower—the strategies through which biopolitics are enacted—is characteristic of the “disciplinary neo-liberalism” that has come to define the modern state, and through which the conduct of conduct is practiced (Di Muzio 305). Foucault’s concept of governmentality describes the devolution of state-based disciplinarity and sovereignty to a host of non-state actors, rationalities and strategies of governing, including the self-managing subject, not in opposition to the state, but contributing to its form. According to Bratich, Packer and McCarthy, everyday life is thus “saturated with governmental techniques” (18) in which we are all enrolled. Unlike regimes of biopolitics identified with what Agamben terms “thanopolitics”—the exercise of biopower “which ultimately rests on the power of some to threaten the death of others” (Rabinow and Rose 198), such as the Nazi’s National Socialism and other eugenic campaigns—governmental arts in the service of “vitalist” biopolitics (Rose 1) are increasingly diffused amongst all those with an “interest” in sustaining life, from organisations to individuals. The integration of techniques of self-governance which ask the individual to work on themselves and their own dispositions with State functions has broadened the base by which life is governed, and foregrounded an unsettled terrain of life claims. Rose argues that medical science is at the forefront of these contemporary biopolitics, and to this effect “has […] been fully engaged in the ethical questions of how we should live—of what kinds of creatures we are, of the kinds of obligations that we have to ourselves and to others, of the kinds of techniques we can and should use to improve ourselves” (20). Asking individuals to self-identify through their medical histories and bodily specificities, medical cultures are also shaping new political arrangements, as communities connected by shared genetics or physical conditions, for instance, emerge, evolve and agitate according to the latest medical knowledge. Yet it is not just medicine that provokes ethical work and new political forms. The environment is a key site for life politics that entails a multi-faceted discourse of obligations and entitlements, across fields and scales of engagement. Calculating Environments In line with neo-liberal logic, environmental discourse concerned with ameliorating climate change has increasingly focused upon the individual as an agent of self-monitoring, to both facilitate government agendas at a distance, and to “self-fashion” in the mode of the autonomous subject, securing against external risks (Ong 501). Climate change is commonly represented as such a risk, to both human and non-human life. A recent letter published by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in two leading British medical journals, named climate change as the “biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” (Morton). As I have argued elsewhere (Potter), security is central to dominant cultures of environmental governance in the West; these cultures tie sustainability goals to various and interrelated regimes of monitoring which attach to concepts of what Clark and Stevenson call “the good ecological citizen” (238). Citizenship is thus practiced through strategies of governmentality which call on individuals to invest not just in their own well-being, but in the broader project of life. Calculation is a primary technique through which modern environmental governance is enacted; calculative strategies are seen to mediate risk, according to Foucault, and consequently to “assure living” (Elden 575). Rationalised schemes for self-monitoring are proliferating under climate change and the project of environmentalism more broadly, something which critics of neo-liberalism have identified as symptomatic of the privatisation of politics that liberal governmentality has fostered. As we have seen in Australia, an evolving policy emphasis on individual practices and the domestic sphere as crucial sites of environmental action – for instance, the introduction of domestic water restrictions, and the phasing out of energy-inefficient light bulbs in the home—provides a leading discourse of ethico-political responsibility. The rise of carbon dioxide counting is symptomatic of this culture, and indicates the distributed fields of life management in contemporary governmentality. Carbon dioxide, as the CPE is keen to point out, is crucial to life, but it is also—in too large an amount—a force of destruction. Its management, in vitalist terms, is thus established as an effort to protect life in the face of death. The concept of “carbon footprinting” has been promoted by governments, NGOs, industry and individuals as a way of securing this goal, and a host of calculative techniques and strategies are employed to this end, across a spectrum of activities and contexts all framed in the interests of life. The footprinting measure seeks to secure living via self-policed limits, which also—in classic biopolitical form—shift previously private practices into a public realm of count-ability and accountability. The carbon footprint, like its associates the ecological footprint and the water footprint, has developed as a multi-faceted tool of citizenship beyond the traditional boundaries of the state. Suggesting an ecological conception of territory and of our relationships and responsibilities to this, the footprint, as a measure of resource use and emissions relative to the Earth’s capacities to absorb these, calculates and visualises the “specific qualities” (Elden 575) that, in a spatialised understanding of security, constitute and define this territory. The carbon footprint’s relatively simple remit of measuring carbon emissions per unit of assessment—be that the individual, the corporation, or the nation—belies the ways in which life is formatted and produced through its calculations. A tangled set of devices, practices and discourses is employed to make carbon and thus life calculable and manageable. Treading Lightly The old environmental adage to “tread lightly upon the Earth” has been literalised in the metaphor of the footprint, which attempts both to symbolise environmental practice and to directly translate data in order to meaningfully communicate necessary boundaries for our living. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2008 exemplifies the growing popularity of the footprint as a political and poetic hook: speaking in terms of our “ecological overshoot,” and the move from “ecological credit to ecological deficit”, the report urges an attendance to our “global footprint” which “now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 per cent” (1). Angela Crombie’s A Lighter Footprint, an instruction manual for sustainable living, is one of a host of media through which individuals are educated in modes of footprint calculation and management. She presents a range of techniques, including carbon offsetting, shifting to sustainable modes of transport, eating and buying differently, recycling and conserving water, to mediate our carbon dioxide output, and to “show […] politicians how easy it is” (13). Governments however, need no persuading from citizens that carbon calculation is an exercise to be harnessed. As governments around the world move (slowly) to address climate change, policies that instrumentalise carbon dioxide emission and reduction via an auditing of credits and deficits have come to the fore—for example, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Chicago Climate Exchange. In Australia, we have the currently-under-debate Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a part of which is the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (AETS) that will introduce a system of “carbon credits” and trading in a market-based model of supply and demand. This initiative will put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and cap the amount of emissions any one polluter can produce without purchasing further credits. In readiness for the scheme, business initiatives are forming to take advantage of this new carbon market. Industries in carbon auditing and off-setting services are consolidating; hectares of trees, already active in the carbon sequestration market, are being cultivated as “carbon sinks” and key sites of compliance for polluters under the AETS. Governments are also planning to turn their tracts of forested public land into carbon credits worth billions of dollars (Arup 7). The attachment of emission measures to goods and services requires a range of calculative experts, and the implementation of new marketing and branding strategies, aimed at conveying the carbon “health” of a product. The introduction of “food mile” labelling (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of the food from source to consumer) in certain supermarkets in the United Kingdom is an example of this. Carbon risk analysis and management programs are being introduced across businesses in readiness for the forthcoming “carbon economy”. As one flyer selling “a suite of carbon related services” explains, “early action will give you the edge in understanding and mitigating the risks, and puts you in a prime position to capitalise on the rewards” (MGI Business Solutions Worldwide). In addition, lobby groups are working to ensure exclusions from or the free allocation of permits within the proposed AETS, with degrees of compulsion applied to different industries – the Federal Government, for instance, will provide a $3.9 billion compensation package for the electric power sector when the AETS commences, to enable their “adjustment” to this carbon regime. Performing Life Noortje Mares provides a further means of thinking through the politics of life in the context of climate change by complicating the distinction between public and private interest. Her study of “green living experiments” describes the rise of carbon calculation in the home in recent years, and the implementation of technologies such as the smart electricity meter that provides a constantly updating display of data relating to amounts and cost of energy consumed and the carbon dioxide emitted in the routines of domestic life. Her research tracks the entry of these personal calculative regimes into public life via internet forums such as blogs, where individuals notate or discuss their experiences of pursing low-carbon lifestyles. On the one hand, these calculative practices of living and their public representation can be read as evidencing the pervasive neo-liberal governmentality at work in contemporary environmental practice, where individuals are encouraged to scrupulously monitor their domestic cultures. The rise of auditing as a technology of self, and more broadly as a technique of public accountability, has come under fire for its “immunity-granting role” (Charkiewicz 79), where internal audits become substituted for external compliance and regulation. Mares challenges this reading, however, by demonstrating the ways in which green living experiments “transform everyday material practices into practices of public involvement” that (118) don’t resolve or pin down relations between the individual, the non-human environment, and the social, or reveal a mappable flow of actions and effects between the public realm and the home. The empirical modes of publicity that these individuals employ, “the careful recording of measurements and the reliable descriptions of sensory observation, so as to enable ‘virtual witnessing’ by wider audiences”, open up to much more complex understandings than one of calculative self-discipline at work. As “instrument[s] of public involvement” (120), the experiments that Mares describe locate the politics of life in the embodied socio-material entanglements of the domestic sphere, in arrangements of humans and non-human technologies. Such arrangements, she suggests, are ontologically productive in that they introduce “not only new knowledge, but also new entities […] to society” (119), and as such these experiments and the modes of calculation they employ become active in the composition of reality. Recent work in economic sociology and cultural studies has similarly contended that calculation, far from either a naturalised or thoroughly abstract process, relies upon a host of devices, relations, and techniques: that is, as Gay Hawkins explains, calculative processes “have to be enacted” (108). Environmental governmentality in the service of securing life is a networked practice that draws in a host of actors, not a top-down imposition. The institution of carbon economies and carbon emissions as a new register of public accountability, brings alternative ways to calculate the world into being, and consequently re-calibrates life as it emerges from these heterogeneous arrangements. All That Gathers Latour writes that we come to know a matter of concern by all the things that gather around it (Latour). This includes the human, as well as the non-human actors, policies, practices and technologies that are put to work in the making of our realities. Climate change is routinely represented as a threat to life, with predicted (and occurring) species extinction, growing numbers of climate change refugees, dispossessed from uninhabitable lands, and the rise of diseases and extreme weather scenarios that put human life in peril. There is no doubt, of course, that climate change does mean death for some: indeed, there are thanopolitical overtones in inequitable relations between the fall-out of impacts from major polluting nations on poorer countries, or those much more susceptible to rising sea levels. Biosocial equity, as Bull points out, is a “matter of being equally alive and equally dead” (2). Yet in the biopolitical project of assuring living, life is burgeoning around the problem of climate change. The critique of neo-liberalism as a blanketing system that subjects all aspects of life to market logic, and in which the cynical techniques of industry seek to appropriate ethico-political stances for their own material ends, are insufficient responses to what is actually unfolding in the messy terrain of climate change and its biopolitics. What this paper has attempted to show is that there is no particular purchase on life that can be had by any one actor who gathers around this concern. Varying interests, ambitions, and intentions, without moral hierarchy, stake their claim in life as a constantly constituting site in which they participate, and from this perspective, the ways in which we understand life to be both produced and managed expand. This is to refuse either an opposition or a conflation between the market and nature, or the market and life. It is also to argue that we cannot essentialise human-ness in the climate change debate. For while human relations with animals, plants and weathers may make us what we are, so too do our relations with (in a much less romantic view) non-human things, technologies, schemes, and even markets—from carbon auditing services, to the label on a tin on the supermarket shelf. As these intersect and entangle, the project of life, in the new politics of climate change, is far from straightforward. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Village Roadshow, 2006. Arup, Tom. “Victoria Makes Enormous Carbon Stocktake in Bid for Offset Billions.” The Age 24 Sep. 2009: 7. Bratich, Jack Z., Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy. “Governing the Present.” Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Ed. Bratich, Packer and McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 3-21. Bull, Malcolm. “Globalization and Biopolitics.” New Left Review 45 (2007): 12 May 2009 . < http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2675 >. 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