Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia

by Mardi Reardon-Smith

Overview

Cape York is a remote and biodiverse peninsula in northeastern Australia that has been inhabited by Aboriginal communities for thousands of years. Since colonization, much of the peninsula has been used for large scale cattle farming. It is also a place of global significance as the site of multiple environmentally protected bioregions, with ongoing efforts to recognize them as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Despite the very human role in shaping the landscape of Cape York, the region remains widely thought of as a "wilderness" to be conserved and protected. In this context, what counts as natural and native matters crucially—as does who gets to decide how species and people are categorized and, accordingly, how they are controlled.

Based on long-term field research with Aboriginal traditional owners, settler-descended cattle herders, and park rangers, Making Do investigates complex ways in which people form, maintain, and transform relationships to changing environments. How do we know the places in which we live, and how do we care for them among the ruptures created by forces like climate change, settler colonialism, and structural inequalities? To address these questions, Mardi Reardon-Smith traces issues such as the history of land tenure changes, the identification and control of weeds and feral pigs, and wildfires and Aboriginal cultural burning. Mardi Reardon-Smith argues that caring for land, a sprawling, messy, and sometimes violent process, is not just about repair, restoration, or maintenance—rather, it is about bringing into being workable landscapes, livable worlds, and possible futures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503643635
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	10/21/2025
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Mardi Reardon-Smith is an environmental anthropologist and research fellow at Monash University.

Editorial Reviews

"In Making Do, Mardi Reardon-Smith offers a truly gripping account of care and its complexities across place, people, animals, plants, elements, and ancestors. Complicity and culpability in environmental injustices come to life in this ethnographically rich and conceptually innovative work, making it essential reading for scholars and students in environmental anthropology, the environmental humanities, and conservation science." —Sophie Chao, The University of Sydney

"Mardi Reardon-Smith offers a clear-eyed account of the contradictions that care for other species entails—from feral pigs to endangered parrots—as practiced by Aboriginal and settlers in northeastern Australia's Cape York peninsula. 'Making Do' troubles easy distinctions between wilderness and working lands, while maintaining a steadfast insistence that even violent forms of care are shaped by enduring obligations to land, life, and livelihoods." —Laura A. Ogden, Dartmouth College

From the Publisher