Skip to Main Content
Skip Nav Destination

In using the term ‘dark age’ to reflect on the kind of cultural world we find ourselves in at this time, I am invoking analogies with various times and places when old certainties are moving into a state of collapse, but a new culture has not yet emerged to offer moral and social cohesion. Our current moment - when modernity has reached and surpassed its limits - is such a time. In spite of a solid history of insightful analyses of the problems with western conceptions of humanity, and numerous calls for a revisioning of the human, our societies go on as if business as usual were justifiable. The absence of the humanities within wider discourses of ecological degradation, including extinctions, is part of our current problem. I conclude with some thoughts on how the status of flying-foxes in Queensland reveals discursive and physical violence, and offers a glimmer of some solutions. At stake is our struggle to revision ourselves as participatory, complementary members of a wider earth community.

Altman, Jon, and Sean Kerins, (eds). 2012. People on Country, Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures. Sydney: Federation Press.
Anon. 2009. Hendra virus link to bat breeding season. The Australian, October 14
Anon 2012. Queensland returns to cruelty on national Threatened species day 2012 [cited 21-12-12. Available from http://www.hsi.org.au/?catID=1208.
Anon. n.d. Flying-foxes and Hendra virus. edited by Q. Conservation.
Apffel-Marglin, Frederique, and Stephen Marglin. 1996. Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1992 [1963]. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bateson, Gregory. 1973 [1972]. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Granada Publishing Limited (Paladin Books).
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and The Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt.2004. Wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts. Oxford: Polity Press.
Berkes, Fikret. 2012. Sacred Ecology. Third ed. New York: Routledge.
Bienen, Leslie. 2004. Bats Suspected in Disease Outbreak. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2 (3):117.
Booth, Carol, Karryn Parry-Jones, Nicola Beynon, Nancy Pallin, and Bob James. 2008. Why N.S.W. should ban the shooting of flying foxes. Sydney: Humane Society International.
Calisher, Charles, James Childs, Hume E. Field, Kathryn Holmes, and Tony Schountz. 2006. Bats: Important Reservoir Hosts of Emerging Viruses. Clinical Microbiology Reviews 19 (3):531-545.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter):197-222.
Cherry, Conrad. 1998. God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Dibley, Ben. 2012. ‘The shape of things to come’: Seven theses on the Anthropocene and attachment. Australian Humanities Review (52).
Didion, Joan. 1990. The White Album New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Everdell, William. 1997. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought Chiacago: University of Chicago Press.
Fischer, J., A.D. Manning, W. Steffen, D.B. Rose, K. Daniell, A. Felton, S. Garnett, B. Gilna, R. Heinsohn, D. Lindenmayer, B. MacDonald, F. Mills, B. Newell, J. Reid, L. Robin, K. Sherren, and A. Wade. 2007. Mind the Sustainability Gap. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 22 (12).
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kaplan, Raina, Patrick Foley, Hume Field, Andy Dobson, Janet Foley, Peggy Eby, and Peter Dryszak. 2011. Urban habituation, ecological connectivity and epidemic dampening: the emergence of Hendra virus from flying foxes ( Pteropus spp.). Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology 10 (1098):1-10.
Kohak, Erazim. 1984. The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. London: Oxford University Press.
Luban, David. 1983. Explaining Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Theory of Theory. Social Research 50 (1):215-248.
Lunney, Daniel, and Chris Moon. 2011. Blind to bats: Traditional prejudices and today's bad press render bats invisible to public consciousness. Pp 44-63 In The Biology and Conservation of Australasian Bats, edited by B. Law, P. Eby, D. Lunney and L. Lumsden. Mosman NSW: Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales.
Mansfield, Nick. 2008. ‘There is a Spectre Haunting … ‘: Ghosts, Their Bodies, Some Philosophers, a Novel and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change. borderlands e-journal 7 (1).
Mathews, Freya. 2005. Reinhabiting Reality: Toward a Recovery of Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Merchant, Carolyn. 2004. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge.
Muecke, Stephen. 2004. Ancient and modern: Time, culture and Indigenous philosophy. Sydney: University of New South Wales.
Nandy, Ashis. 2008. The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics. Oxford: Oxford University press.
Plowright, Raina, Hume Field, Craig Smith, Anja Divijan, Carol Palmer, Gary Tabor, and Peter Daszak. 2008. Reproduction and nutritional stress are risk factors for Hendra virus infection in little red flying foxes (Pteropus scapulatus). Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology 275 (1636):861-869.
Plowright, Raina, Patrick Foley, Hume E. Field, Andy Dobson, Janet Foley, Peggy Eby, and Peter Daszak. 2011. Urban habituation, ecological connectivity and epidemic dampening: the emergence of Hendra virus from flying foxes (Pteropus spp.). Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology 278 (1725):3703-3712.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 2007. Review of Deborah Bird Rose's Reports from a Wild Country.Australian Humanities Review (42).
Plumwood, Val. 2009. Nature in the Active Voice. Australian Humanities Review 46:113-129.
Quamman, David. 2012. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. London: The Bodley Head.
Rose, D., T. van Dooren, M. Chrulew, S. Cooke, M. Kearnes, and E. O'Gorman. 2012. Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities. Environmental Humanities 1:1-5.
Rose, Deborah. 2003. Decolonising the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies. In Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, edited by G. Hawkins and S. Muecke. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Rose, Deborah. 2005. An Indigenous Philosophical Ecology: Situating the Human. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 16 (3):294-305.
Rose, Deborah, and Libby Robin. 2004. The Ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation. Australian Humanities Review 31-32.
Ryan, Frank. 1997. Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plague. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Scott, Colin. 1996. Science for the West, Myth for the Rest? The Case of James Bay Cree Knowledge Construction. In Naked Science, Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power and Knowledge, edited by L. Nader. New York: Routledge.
Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shepard, Paul. 1998 [1973]. The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Shiva, Vandana. 2007. Democratizing Biology: Reinventing Biology from a Feminist, Ecological and Third World Perspective. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Bloomington: University of Illinois Press.
Welbergen, Justin, Stefan Klose, Nicola Markus, and Peggy Eby. 2008. Climate change and the effects of temperature extremes on Australian flying-foxes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology 275 (1633):419-425.
This content is PDF only. Please click on the PDF icon to access.

Contents

Data & Figures

References

Altman, Jon, and Sean Kerins, (eds). 2012. People on Country, Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures. Sydney: Federation Press.
Anon. 2009. Hendra virus link to bat breeding season. The Australian, October 14
Anon 2012. Queensland returns to cruelty on national Threatened species day 2012 [cited 21-12-12. Available from http://www.hsi.org.au/?catID=1208.
Anon. n.d. Flying-foxes and Hendra virus. edited by Q. Conservation.
Apffel-Marglin, Frederique, and Stephen Marglin. 1996. Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1992 [1963]. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bateson, Gregory. 1973 [1972]. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Granada Publishing Limited (Paladin Books).
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and The Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt.2004. Wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts. Oxford: Polity Press.
Berkes, Fikret. 2012. Sacred Ecology. Third ed. New York: Routledge.
Bienen, Leslie. 2004. Bats Suspected in Disease Outbreak. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2 (3):117.
Booth, Carol, Karryn Parry-Jones, Nicola Beynon, Nancy Pallin, and Bob James. 2008. Why N.S.W. should ban the shooting of flying foxes. Sydney: Humane Society International.
Calisher, Charles, James Childs, Hume E. Field, Kathryn Holmes, and Tony Schountz. 2006. Bats: Important Reservoir Hosts of Emerging Viruses. Clinical Microbiology Reviews 19 (3):531-545.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter):197-222.
Cherry, Conrad. 1998. God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Dibley, Ben. 2012. ‘The shape of things to come’: Seven theses on the Anthropocene and attachment. Australian Humanities Review (52).
Didion, Joan. 1990. The White Album New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Everdell, William. 1997. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought Chiacago: University of Chicago Press.
Fischer, J., A.D. Manning, W. Steffen, D.B. Rose, K. Daniell, A. Felton, S. Garnett, B. Gilna, R. Heinsohn, D. Lindenmayer, B. MacDonald, F. Mills, B. Newell, J. Reid, L. Robin, K. Sherren, and A. Wade. 2007. Mind the Sustainability Gap. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 22 (12).
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kaplan, Raina, Patrick Foley, Hume Field, Andy Dobson, Janet Foley, Peggy Eby, and Peter Dryszak. 2011. Urban habituation, ecological connectivity and epidemic dampening: the emergence of Hendra virus from flying foxes ( Pteropus spp.). Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology 10 (1098):1-10.
Kohak, Erazim. 1984. The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. London: Oxford University Press.
Luban, David. 1983. Explaining Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Theory of Theory. Social Research 50 (1):215-248.
Lunney, Daniel, and Chris Moon. 2011. Blind to bats: Traditional prejudices and today's bad press render bats invisible to public consciousness. Pp 44-63 In The Biology and Conservation of Australasian Bats, edited by B. Law, P. Eby, D. Lunney and L. Lumsden. Mosman NSW: Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales.
Mansfield, Nick. 2008. ‘There is a Spectre Haunting … ‘: Ghosts, Their Bodies, Some Philosophers, a Novel and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change. borderlands e-journal 7 (1).
Mathews, Freya. 2005. Reinhabiting Reality: Toward a Recovery of Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Merchant, Carolyn. 2004. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge.
Muecke, Stephen. 2004. Ancient and modern: Time, culture and Indigenous philosophy. Sydney: University of New South Wales.
Nandy, Ashis. 2008. The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics. Oxford: Oxford University press.
Plowright, Raina, Hume Field, Craig Smith, Anja Divijan, Carol Palmer, Gary Tabor, and Peter Daszak. 2008. Reproduction and nutritional stress are risk factors for Hendra virus infection in little red flying foxes (Pteropus scapulatus). Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology 275 (1636):861-869.
Plowright, Raina, Patrick Foley, Hume E. Field, Andy Dobson, Janet Foley, Peggy Eby, and Peter Daszak. 2011. Urban habituation, ecological connectivity and epidemic dampening: the emergence of Hendra virus from flying foxes (Pteropus spp.). Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology 278 (1725):3703-3712.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 2007. Review of Deborah Bird Rose's Reports from a Wild Country.Australian Humanities Review (42).
Plumwood, Val. 2009. Nature in the Active Voice. Australian Humanities Review 46:113-129.
Quamman, David. 2012. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. London: The Bodley Head.
Rose, D., T. van Dooren, M. Chrulew, S. Cooke, M. Kearnes, and E. O'Gorman. 2012. Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities. Environmental Humanities 1:1-5.
Rose, Deborah. 2003. Decolonising the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies. In Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, edited by G. Hawkins and S. Muecke. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Rose, Deborah. 2005. An Indigenous Philosophical Ecology: Situating the Human. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 16 (3):294-305.
Rose, Deborah, and Libby Robin. 2004. The Ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation. Australian Humanities Review 31-32.
Ryan, Frank. 1997. Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plague. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Scott, Colin. 1996. Science for the West, Myth for the Rest? The Case of James Bay Cree Knowledge Construction. In Naked Science, Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power and Knowledge, edited by L. Nader. New York: Routledge.
Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shepard, Paul. 1998 [1973]. The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Shiva, Vandana. 2007. Democratizing Biology: Reinventing Biology from a Feminist, Ecological and Third World Perspective. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Bloomington: University of Illinois Press.
Welbergen, Justin, Stefan Klose, Nicola Markus, and Peggy Eby. 2008. Climate change and the effects of temperature extremes on Australian flying-foxes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology 275 (1633):419-425.
Close Modal

or Create an Account

Close Modal
Close Modal