Creative Perspectives on Sustainable Nature–Culture Relationships: Setting the Context

The Anthropocene has become a master narrative of the environmental humanities. The proliferation of a new vocabulary – ‘multispecies’, ‘more-than-human’ – opened up new perspectives, but the ‘nature’/’culture’ binary remains. Beyond the binary, Indigenous scholars have highlighted other issues, leading to calls for indigenisation and decolonisation of the Anthropocene concept. Spiritual connection to the land has been highlighted as crucial for any ecological movement; growing interest in traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) infuses a radical human ecology that has emerged as issues of place and kinship have drawn attention to ‘indigeneity’. People in ‘internal colonies’ of Europe have been stereotyped as socially marginal, geographically peripheral, and culturally primitive. Exploring similarities with reference to the TEK of other indigenous cultural contexts can help the cultivation of new relationships with nature as long as it is carried out in a spirit of responsibility, informed by acute awareness of the complicity with the colonial project many dispossessed indigenous peoples from the margins of Europe have been forced into. Having set the theoretical and practical context of the book, this chapter introduces the different contributions.