Rediscovering Australia's remnant ecosystems

Remnant – noun: a part or quantity that is left after the greater part has been used, removed, or destroyed.

Imagine the places you have lived and visited in Australia. What did these bioregions look like 250 years ago? What animal and plant species remain from the vast stretch of time before colonisation? … and what comes to mind when you hear the term ‘remnant vegetation’?

Remnant vegetation is that which hangs on in landscapes profoundly at risk of erasure; pockets rich with life and of significance to cultures and contemporary science. Australian native grass species are often classed as “remnant vegetation”. A misnomer when you consider how profoundly well-adapted they are to the harsh, climatic conditions and soils of Australia. They provide/d home and food for thousands of other species and were integral to the lives and culture of Indigenous Australians pre-colonisation. However, most stood little chance under the pressures of imported animals, weeds and the voracious growth habits of the thousands of foreign grasses Europeans have introduced.

Somehow grasslands and grasses don’t stir emotions or imagination in the same ways as other landscapes do, despite their critical importance to ecosystem balance. Carbon Dating focuses upon the native grasses that still hang on in the remnant native grasslands of eastern Australia; signature species such as Kangaroo Grass (Themeda Triandra) or Barbed Wire Grass (Cymbopogon Refractus) with their complex, but often under-appreciated values. Native grasslands containing grasses like these have been disappearing from Australia since first contact, to the extent that today only a tiny fraction of the original sites remain, and often only in tiny remnant patches. These grassland patches are often found along railway lines, in travelling stock reserves, in cemeteries and in 'back paddocks' - surviving mostly by default, rather than deliberate protection.

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Thought experiments offer a way to explore how changes to ecosystems can, or should, affect us, transcending impoverished, bureaucratic terms like “remnant vegetation”. Terse, technical language does not help to imagine lost species. It is not designed for that: ‘The clearing rate of remnant regional ecosystem vegetation in the 2017-2019 period was 54,357 hectares per year’. Statements like this can be hard to register. The numerous plants and animals summarily removed or destroyed over a two year period are not alive in these words. But it is worth considering how each of their end-of-worlds scenarios arrived, even if it is difficult to picture so many unique entities, gone forever; to make way for us. What capacity, if any, did they have to escape their fate?

‍While words can’t themselves physically clear trees or bulldoze grassland plains, they often profoundly shape attitudes and influence ways of living, which in turn lead us to alter the physical and material world. The languages of science and policy have a formidable world-making force. They speak, often in dry technical, terms of unspeakable tragedies, i.e.  “the remnant regional ecosystem vegetation” of Queensland - a category which includes  richly diverse landscapes spread across the Wet Tropics; Mulga Lands; Mitchell Grass Downs; Desert Uplands; Woodlands; Brigalow and more; and the frightening clearing rates of these remnant vegetation areas continues to be coolly tracked and measured year by year. Public language is formulated in ways that structure and inform understanding, revealing sense-making processes and priorities at work in our society. The sheer scale of the loss (4.2 million hectares in 22 years) is not insignificant (note the neat but impotent bureaucratic phrasing). The language of governmental and scientific reports does little to speak to the significance of what we are losing.

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In a time of mass extinction, proposals that offer alternative ways to relate to/with other species are heartening. In her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes practices of reciprocity between humans and plants that are life sustaining, informed by the science of ecology and her cultural inheritance as a member of the Potawatomi First Nation. She writes of the sacred place of sweetgrass in her culture, its use in fire ceremonies and as a tool to bind generations and remind individuals of their commitments to larger stories and collective obligations: ‘Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus, the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations’. Her words speak of intimate relationships, and offer a critique of contemporary transactional culture with a vision of how human beings might integrate traditional cultural knowledge to support co-existence with plants and other nonhumans.

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Global biodiversity initiatives are now madly attempting to rescue diverse species from the brink. Rewilding networks are buying up land to restore habitats and replant forests in Europe. Progressive landowners in the UK are allowing their properties to return to wild grasses and meadows, welcoming a less manicured and more biodiverse version of the private estate. Regenerative urban projects are striving to create biodiversity hotspots within cities and urban sprawl, incorporating wild meadows and corridors for pollinators. Specific to native grassland restoration, in Australia, Flora Victoria has initiated several large scale grassland reconstructions.

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The regeneration of urban, suburban and peri-urban areas is clearly an important task with the global population gravitating towards cities and further sensing their stray from organic living systems. In the built environment, creative projects can encourage human connections with wild and cultivated grasslands, and more broadly the intrinsic value of species diversity and nonhuman life. Building on Agnes Denes’ seminal Wheatfield – A Confrontation, (1982) on Battery Park Landfill in New York, Piet Oudolf’s work at the New York High Line and Chicago’s Lurie Garden at Millennium Park, or Linda Tegg’s work Grasslands (2014) at the State Library of Victoria, involve richly diverse plantings of grasses textured with flowering biennials.                                                                                                                                                                                         

‍Carbon Dating seeks to heighten our collective relationship with plants, specifically native grasses. Through processes of growth, care, restoration, reciprocation, recording and communication, six guardians in six connected locations build an appreciation of the unique characteristics of different species. As each guardian begins their own journey of building understanding with their local, particular species of native grass, online audiences, and later a gallery audience, follow along with their discoveries. The project draws particular inspiration from Tegg’s work, which involved horticulturist John Delpratt and landscape architect Anthony Magen, attempting to recreate the pre-European settlement grasslands that were once on the site of the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. In addition, the use of monitoring and networked connections as a vehicle of care in Carbon Dating references early telepresent works such as Ken Goldberg’s network garden tending work Telegarden (1998) or the Interactive Plant Growing explorations of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. Building upon such legacies, Carbon Dating is an ecological project tailored for our networked times.

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As global recognition of the connections between climate breakdown and biodiversity loss grow, and living as we do in a window of time that the UN has named the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2031), drawing attention to both the remnant beauty and extraordinary importance of our collective (wild) life-worlds couldn’t be more important.

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