Learning about the emotional lives of kangaroos, cognitive justice and environmental sustainability

Abstract

This paper reports on research into wildlife emotion, interpretation and usefulness as a means for broad-scale learning about environmental sustainability. Part of the Australian landscape for 16 million years, the iconic kangaroo has characteristics that make them suited, as wild animals, for humans to learn about environmental integrity. A ‘new way of knowing’ about sustainability is proposed that seeks to learn directly from wildlife through their emotional states using a ‘being-for’ (Bauman 1995), relational (Derrida 2002), ethic of care (Donovan 1996, Noddings 1984, Kheel 2008). Within the context of cognitive justice we propose wildlife knowledge systems that need to be respected. We incorporate recent research on affective neuroscience in mammals (Panksepp 1998 and 2004) into our own work in rehabilitating large numbers of seriously injured kangaroos prior to their release/return to the wild (Garlick and Austen 2010). This work enables identifying and interpreting emotion markers in various environmental contexts and their consequent sustainability. Progressing from a case example of learning through a particular transformational animal encounter, to where an entire community might be similarly transformed to address sustainability questions is possible to conceptualise through the ‘ecoversity’.