New governance, green planning and sustainability : Tasmania together and growing Victoria together

Bridgman and Davis(2000:91) have argued that ‘ideally government will have a well developed and widely distributed policy framework, setting out economic, social and environmental objectives’. This article compares and evaluates two such frameworks or plans, Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together, in terms of their potential to promote sustainability. It argues that they are very different exercises in new governance, aimed at reconnecting with community priorities and at redirecting macro-policy setting away from a preoccupation with economic priorities, respectively. Nevertheless, both plans have the capacity to ‘green’ state planning, in Tasmania in terms of more purposeful benchmarks, and in Victoria in terms of enhanced sustainability emphasis in the macro-policy setting. The article encounters tensions in its review of the plans between deliberation and planning, policy empowerment and policy progress, and policy institutionalisation and politicisation as means of achieving policy change. It finds that whilst Tasmania and Victoria are re-engaged states that are reinventing state policy, as yet they are failing to meet the governance challenges of sustainability.

Green roofs in Melbourne - potential and practice

In Melbourne, green roofs are increasingly being included in the new and retrofitted buildings that claim to be ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’. This enthusiasm follows overseas experience where a variety of benefits have been recorded; these include a reduction in heating and cooling loads. This benefit is of particular importance because of the urgent need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with air conditioning. What is the potential for such savings and to what extent are some of the existing green roofs likely to achieve these benefits? This paper begins with a review of the overseas experience to reduce conditioning loads, particularly cooling, in temperate climates. Some observations on the potential and practice of green roofs in Melbourne is then presented. The results of measurements of plant canopy, soil and hard surface temperatures on two green roofs in the Melbourne Central Business District are discussed and future on-going work is outlined.

Wry-necked memory : the matter of Ireland in cutting green hay and memory Ireland, and the poems of the pattern.

This paper examines the matter of Ireland in Buckley’s two memoirs, Cutting Green Hay (1983) and Memory Ireland (1985), and the poems of The Pattern (1979), in order to revisit critically the ways in which he constructs himself as a diasporic Irish-Australian, a participant in the most remote Gaeltacht. It raises questions of victimhood, of similar and different experience of being at the mercy of the land, and of his re-engineering of the place of the political in poetry. It argues that Buckley’s agonized positioning as Ireland’s ‘guest/foreigner/son’ was a project that was doomed by its utopianism, and that, obsessed as he became with Ireland, the angst within had little to do with ‘the Ireland within’ or without. The paper suggests that the poet’s slow and unacknowledged abandonment in his Irish period of a key tenet of modernism, its distrust of propaganda and the political, is in itself a new formation which had some continuity with the radicalism of his thinking during the formative years of the revolutionary catholic apostolate he led both at the University of Melbourne and nationally. It also points to the deployment of an ancient medieval Irish trope, that of the ocean (rather than a landmass) linking a dispersed community, as one of the ways the poetry effects a resolution of the issues of being ‘Irish’ in a remote country.

Greater Green Triangle Risk Factor Study

Very limited data exist for chronic diseases and their risk factors and behaviours in the Greater Green Triangle (GGT) region, or anywhere in rural Australia. To identify health problems and to target interventions and monitor their impact it is necessary to have objective data on chronic disease risk factors. Three cross-sectional surveys were carried out in 2004, 2005 and 2006 in the GGT region in the south east of Australia. In 2004 the survey area was the Limestone Coast in South Australia, 2005 the Corangamite Shire in the south west of Victoria, and in 2006 the Wimmera district in central western Victoria. The data comprises physical measurements and results of blood samples that were taken from patients by specially trained survey nurses. It also comprises data extracted from follow up survey questionnaires that were sent to each patient who returned them through the mail.

Transformative green marketing : impediments and opportunities

Green marketing is not achieving its potential for improving the quality of life of consumers, while improving the natural ecosystem. The failure is the result of the inability of consumers, firms and governments to adopt systems thinking, in which macro-marketing perspectives are integrated into their respective micro-decisions, that is, the anthropocentric view of the natural world is disregarded. The paper discusses why the three groups above have had difficulties in embracing environmental issues, thus impeding real transformative green marketing from occurring. To address the difficulties three proposed actions need to be undertaken: (1) Marketers need to look for new ways of calculating and communicating value that integrates environmental value, thereby moving away from financial measures which have no real environmental meaning. (2) Change the discourse regarding the environment, highlighting the importance of action and inaction, which needs to be based on increased education about the human–environment interface. (3) Marketing needs to refocus its emphasis on want satisfaction, shifting away from the acquisition of goods, thereby enhancing how marketers create value. Making these changes will allow marketers to operationalize transformative green marketing so the human condition and the natural system that humans operate within are both improved and bring about transformative green marketing.

Green pedagogy – guidance and doubt in teaching outdoor and environmental education

This article grapples with my endeavour to guide teacher education students to think critically about environmental issues and action. While students repeatedly claim my efforts helped them to think critically, my interviews with them about environmental issues and practices cause me to doubt their claims of burgeoning critical engagement. This article demonstrates the fraught nature of critical pedagogy and my inability to create a climate in which guidance in the field of Outdoor and Environmental Education might come to be doubted. Drawing from a larger longitudinal study of the formation of environmental ethics among tertiary Outdoor and Environmental Education students, in this article I examine the experience of one student to critique my pedagogical practice and also to consider how this has provoked a revision of my own approach to teaching in this field. In the final section, I highlight the importance in teacher education more broadly of providing space for guidance to be doubted and opportunity for students to self-stylise and create their own responses to current issues.