First Nations people in Australia and around the world are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change. Rising sea levels, coastal erosion, extreme weather events, bushfires and intensifying resource extraction projects with devastating environmental impacts continue to put First Nations cultural heritage at risk.
Not only does climate change threaten both tangible and intangible cultural heritage, it affects First Nations peoples’ ability to access and care for Country, practice culture, and maintain community ties. Coastal sites like shell middens and burial grounds are at greater risk of being damaged by coastal erosion, and wildfires have damaged areas of cultural significance, including rock art and burial sites.
Alongside this increased vulnerability, First Nations communities possess unique ancient and continuing knowledge and connection to Country, embodied in cultural practices and land management techniques, that can address climate change and point us collectively toward pathways based on reciprocity, respect, custodianship and sustainability. For more than 65,000 years, First Nations people across this continent have lived in harmony and balance with the other-than-human world, adapting quickly to climatic and environmental changes and modifying landscapes when necessary, using natural tools like fire. As Nyikina Warrwa Traditional Custodian and academic Dr Anne Poelina says, “we have solutions for planetary well-being”.
Increasingly, this ancestral and continuing knowledge is being recognised as ‘good science’, gaining mainstream recognition and being woven into climate adaptation strategies and approaches. In 2021, more than 120 Traditional Owners met with scientists to share knowledge and co-design and develop climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, in a five day gathering led by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. Scientists are also recognising the power of First Nations fire knowledge to reduce environmental destruction and greenhouse gas emission, with projects such as the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project integrating First Nations fire knowledge into mainstream practice. In Lutruwita/Tasmania, graziers and scientists are working alongside the local First Nations community on a regenerative grazing project to improve the resilience of the landscape during at-risk drought periods.
The short but devastating history of the settler colonial project in Australia has sought to interrupt or erase many of these traditional practices. Climate change – with its accompanying ecocide, or what is now being called climate colonialism – is a direct legacy of the ongoing settler colonial project, and continues to be exacerbated by it.
Increasingly, environmental justice scholars are centering race and systemic racism in discussions around climate emergency and environmentalism, pointing to the fact that Indigenous and other racialised communities worldwide bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to environmental or ‘slow’ violence, including impacts of toxic pollution, resource extraction and storage and spillage of industrial chemicals. For the first time in its history, The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report included the term ‘colonialism’, recognising the link between colonialism’s logics of dispossession and extraction and current global warming.
Indeed, it is not difficult to trace the linkage between attitudes of early colonists – who saw ‘new’ natural resource-rich territories as terra nullius, places to conquer and exploit – and current widespread practices of large-scale development and resource extraction driven largely by governments in the Global North and industry creating ‘commodity frontiers’ on stolen land. For many First Nations peoples, the devastation of climate change is nothing new. Potawatomi philosopher and environmental justice scholar Kyle Powys Whyte argues that climate injustice should be understood as a ‘recent episode’ of a cyclical history of colonialism that inflicts anthropogenic (human-caused) environmental change on First Nations and Indigenous peoples – what he calls ‘colonial déjà vu’.
Going back several centuries it was Indigenous peoples’ lands that were first sacrificed to make way for mining and other industries that we now know are responsible for human-caused climate change.
Kyle Powys WhyteRising seas are threatening our homes, swamping burial grounds and washing away sacred cultural sites. If the government fails to take enough action, we could be removed from these islands we have called home for thousands of years. Removing a race of people from our islands is like colonisation all over again for us. You can’t put a price on the connection we have to the land and the sea.
Kabay Tamu, Warraber man from the Kulkalgal Nation
Many First Nations communities, including young people, are at the forefront of a just energy transition, and the work of building new, sustainable economies, or what Anne Poelina calls ‘forever economies’. At the heart of the transition is place-based governance, with First Nations people and local communities taking active roles in decision-making to ensure that development, where and when it happens, is driven by the greater good, and protects land, living waters, diverse cultural landscapes and non-human species.
What we want to show the world is how using ancient wisdom we can create a whole range of economies. How we can transition away from just ‘dig it up, ship it out’ ways of doing business… We need to be shifting from the ‘me’ to the ‘we’ – from individualism to what we are framing as ‘community-ism’, where all of us Indigenous, non-Indigenous, new visitors to this land, and ancient ones can come together and right-size the planet through a different deal, which looks at how we start to do things differently.
Dr Anne Poelina
First Nations-led climate justice organisation Seed Mob are a collective of First Nations young people fighting against fracking and other extractive industries and for a just energy transition, documenting stories of climate catastrophe in First Nations communities, along with the incredible resistance and resilience of First Nations people fighting to protect their Country.
Similarly, the First Nations Clean Energy Network is a First Nations-led network of First Nations people, community organisations, land councils, unions, academics, industry groups, technical advisors, legal experts, renewables companies and others, working in partnership to ensure that First Nations communities are part of the renewable energy revolution. Their work includes improving First Nations household access to solar, driving community-owned clean energy projects and securing equitable arrangements for large scale renewable projects on Country.
