Centring Toolangi State Forest: a situated approach to environmental justice
Creators: name: De Kleyn, Lisa
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330404
subject: Land use and environmental planning
classificationCode: 440610
subject: Social geography
classificationCode: 440704
subject: Environment policy

description: Toolangi State Forest is a montane ash forest in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia, primarily in Taungurung Country and bordering Wurundjeri Country in the south. The native forest adjoins the neighbouring town of Toolangi and is just 60 kilometres from Melbourne, Victoria's capital city. Mountain Ash trees, the tallest flowering trees in the world and the endemic, critically endangered Leadbeater's possum are iconic species in the forest, which is subject to a range of uses, including scientific, recreational and state-based native forest logging. In 2009, the Black Saturday fires and subsequent logging exacerbated concerns for the forest and species, and were the catalyst for a high profile, sustained conflict over the forest, inviting analysis from a new perspective.
The term 'environmental justice' is increasingly used in Victoria by activists and policy makers, with the state Labor government including an environmental justice frame in its 2014 pre-election policy platform. Environmental justice is an approach that analyses the intersection between environmental issues and social justice. In scholarship, the approach is analysed theoretically as a normative framework and used to explore and advance claims of injustice from marginalised, disadvantaged and vulnerable groups. From the perspective of groups, environmental justice is about the experience of injustice in particular situations and contexts that influence the production of power, understanding of injustice and visions of just outcomes. The rising interest in environmental justice; the sustained conflict over Toolangi State Forest, involving diverse interests; activism towards state government; and the potential of environmental justice for transformation, all inspired this research.
This research critically explores the conflict over Toolangi State Forest through a local environmental justice lens, to highlight possibilities for reframing environmental justice as a situated, transformative approach. The research focuses on how people's relationships with Toolangi State Forest are constructed, enabled and constrained in entry points and pathways with respect to state-based decision-making over native forest management and use. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were held to encourage diverse subjectivities to emerge, supported by feminist research principles of acknowledging people as knowers and researching people's standpoints as a tool for change. The interviews were analysed through an iterative development of broad themes to maintain people's stories and presented as a story from the 2009 Black Saturday fires to the 2014 state election. Storytelling was selected as a method consistent with feminist and environmental justice scholarship.
The research contributes a rich, empirical Australian case to environmental justice scholarship. People's stories revealed intimate, embodied relationships with the forest including 'informal' spaces, diverse entities and private moments. People's situated knowledge manifested multiple ways of knowing, including experience and emotion, across time. Situated relationships were deeply felt, contributed to people's identity and gave them a sense of integrity regarding their justice claims and actions. These claims were not open to trade-offs. Many people experienced decision-making processes as unjust, including the ways that the state government and its agencies treated them, denied and limited access to decision-making processes, and undermined their relationships with the forest. Governance institutions advanced a limited conception of the forest and gave primacy to social structures and the native forest logging industry over forest and species protection.
Grounded in people's claims and experiences, the research centres a native forest, and intimate, responsible relationships with the forest as a crucial, living system and a home, at the heart of environmental justice. In this approach, intimate, affective relationships become an element of justice. Through these relationships, a range of scales and multiple entities are recognised. The approach prioritises situated knowing in relationship with the forest, which manifests multiple ways of knowing, emphasises the particular and centres the local scale for understanding. Together, intimate embodied relationships and situated knowing centre the forest in environmental justice, as the site of identity, understanding, responsibility, practice, and fundamentally, a relational approach. Storytelling presents a relational method of developing and sharing knowledge and a perspective that, with a critical approach to the production of knowledge, has the potential to be inclusive, responsive and situated, with the forest. As such, the research reframes environmental justice in contested forest decision-making processes as a situated, affective and relational approach that centres the forest and associated intimate and responsible relationships for transformation.