URBAN GREENING 2023: Dr Michelle Maloney is one of those people who will turn much of what you know on its head.
Such as that if you measure embodied carbon and knock it right back, you can notch up success.
Or if you measure your impact on the earth by how many planets you and your lifestyle take up then you’ve done your bit.
Not so fast, says this lawyer and future-thinker who has engaged passionately for many years on the rights of nature and is co-founder and national convenor of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance.
It’s a new concept. Our world is embedded in extraction economics (or capitalism if you like) but Maloney says we need to look at our Indigenous people to understand the way to really preserve this life support system we inhabit. We need to look at place first.
Maloney shocks with her candid assessment and you just know that’s the tip of the iceberg of what she’s discovered in her extensive investigations into a way to blend people and planet.
When we cite the Indigenous concept of looking after people and looking after Country, she says we need to take step back. The brilliant Indigenous thinkers she works with say you start firmly with Country which give you the basic laws, and it’s after than you can work out your people laws.
In other words, you need to start with the concept of the specific local area that you are on and working with and what it can deal with. No matter the carbon footprint. A bit like what Carolin Leeshaa who’s also speaking at Urban Greening said about water. A drop of water is not equal everywhere on the planet. Consider a drop of water in lush rainforest versus a drop of water in a arid semi-desert (like so much of Australia).
You start with the local patch of earth you inhabit first.
Maloney notes the recent movement to give a kind of legal “personhood” to rivers and mountains is a new concept for the legal system and hugely important.
Her group is working with local governments in the Blue Mountains Council and Mornington Peninsula Shire to develop protective legal systems for nature that can be embedded in their planning frameworks.
There is so much more going on with this group. We’ve invited Maloney to give the Urban Greening 2023 keynote because well… she talks about the really big picture we need to consider before we place one footstep down on the space we want to call home.
As she terms it, the work focuses on “creating systems change across law, economics, education and ethics to shift industrialised societies towards regenerative, Earth-centred governance.”
And we think it’s about time!
Come and hear Michelle Maloney at Urban Greening 2023.