Paper short abstract:

As a critical reflexive ethnography, this paper seeks to develop how we might repractice practices of environmental (land)care, enabling us to move from the era of the Anthropocene and towards a multispecies being-and-becoming-with as part of Haraway's (2016) the Chthulucene.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting on my time volunteering on bush regeneration projects in and around the Greater Sydney area in Australia, this paper asks how are dominant ontologies embedded in embodied practices of care for the environment? And how, as a result of changing our being-in to a being-with-and-becoming-with the world, might we begin to re-imagine, re-practice, and re-late with one another 'beyond the human'?

Critically engaging with bush regeneration projects currently being carried out by a government run environmental conservation organization as part of a wider, national decolonizing land project, I believe these practices reflect not only a reflexive desire to address ecological destruction and loss but they also illustrate how identity and land are deeply entwined.

I argue that current practices do not effectively decolonize, but merely act in attempt to uncolonized. I suggest that in order to decolonize our landcare practices we need to work in collaboration with Others, ultimately decentring the human. Offering a way of being-and-becoming-with in Haraway's era of the Chthulucene, how can effectively and affectively decolonizing our landcare practices help in developing more empathetic and more eco-considered relations of care? How, by engaging in deep practices of (ecological) listening, may we address the impending concerns brought on by the Anthropocene and develop a deeper being-in-togetherness which will enhance not only our livability but our very survival?