Caring Enough to Counter Extinction: The Work of Volunteer Bat Carers and Educators in Tropical Queensland, Australia
Whitehouse, Hilary (2024) Caring Enough to Counter Extinction: The Work of Volunteer Bat Carers and Educators in Tropical Queensland, Australia. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 40 (2). pp. 359-370.
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Abstract
In the state of Queensland, volunteers perform much of the work needed to prevent the extinction of threatened species who are native and unique to this continent. Acting from an understanding of interspecies justice, caring people rescue and rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of wild animals every year. Many of these same people conduct informal environmental education to bring to community attention the problematics of extinction by seeking the material expression of an ethics of conviviality. Using a document case study approach, this paper narrates aspects of the kindship work of a network of carers and educators of flying foxes who undertake informal environmental education as part of their care practices. Volunteering to care and educate for Australian flying mammals is a form of activism in a nation with a mammalian extinction crisis that still fails to meet its obligations under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15. This paper describes how volunteer run informal environmental education in far north Queensland is driven by a strong sense of multispecies care.
| Item ID: | 85965 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2049-775X |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Australian Association for Environmental Education. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jun 2025 00:40 |
| FoR Codes: | 39 EDUCATION > 3999 Other Education > 399999 Other education not elsewhere classified @ 50% 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4199 Other environmental sciences > 419999 Other environmental sciences not elsewhere classified @ 50% |
| SEO Codes: | 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1303 Ethics > 130303 Environmental ethics @ 50% 16 EDUCATION AND TRAINING > 1699 Other education and training > 169999 Other education and training not elsewhere classified @ 50% |
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