Reflections on Environmental History and the Work of Deborah Bird Rose

Abstract

I have been engaging with Deborah Bird Rose’s work in a project that aims to bring together environmental history and the broader environmental humanities to examine the past and possible futures of wetlands in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. I have particularly been engaging with two concepts she developed in conversation with others: ‘will-to-destruction’ and ‘deep colonising’ (‘Angel’ 67-78; ‘Land’ 6-13). These concepts are connected through histories of British colonisation and are relevant to environmental historians more widely, in Australia and other places.