Introduction - Ecology

In order to explore sustainable futures, artists and scientists alike are turning to the environment and the impact that we have had on nature and the world around us. Understanding our dependency upon the world is key to how we relate to our environment and how we preserve its diversity.

In this session we would look to range across the insights of both scientists and artists to ecology and how ecology may guide society in exploring sustainable futures. We'd like to look at the environmental impacts. The impacts that our Society's having on our natural ecosystems. To view the understandings that we have, the dependencies of Humanities on natural ecosystems. And to relate as Society on how we think in terms of how that determines our relationships to natural systems and how it impacts upon them. And perhaps look at how we may preserve the natural systems.

In South Australia's thinking about the issues involved in science and the arts, what we can learn from ecology, we also need to ground what's actually happening in South Australia right now. With South Australia facing, for instance, an expansion of the nuclear industry, the first acid leached uranium mines at Beverly Honeymoon that have operated in the Western World. And key issues about what our environmental standards are going to be. Because the standards we choose today will determine the environmental impacts of tomorrow. And the case at present is that General Atomics in the USA, the Beverly Mine can discharge all the liquid waste from their Uranium mine, big heavy metal and uranium waste can go into our ground water reserved without them having any liability to rehabilitate the impacts of their mining on our environment. So Australians have to think about the things that are going on just up the road now and see these issues in the context of what we need to do today as well as the broader reforms we need for Society in the longer term. I'd next like to introduce Martin Walch who's an artist and a photographer who will speak today about two key projects. 'Overwritten and Underwrited' and the 'Mount Lyall Project' where Martin has been combining art, photography and industry and their different views on the world. And much of his focus in the last five years have been, in his words, a preoccupation with visual perception. And the so called objective systems of measurement that we are so reliant on in some conventional aspects of Society. And his work is about the inability of imperial systems to provide descriptions of reality that go beyond the rational. And he's perused a process of investigation that focuses on visual descriptions of landscape particularly as the subject and he has making essentially land accessible in the common experiential space. And this is because he has his focus and interest in complex and culturally dependant definitions. Martin.