Climb: Restorative Justice,
Environmental Heritage, and the Moral
Terrains of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National
Park
Robert Melehior Figueroa
Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University of North Texas,
1155 Union Circle #310920, Dentón, TX 76203-5017;
Robert.Figueroa@unt. edu
Gordon Waitt
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong,
NorthfieldAve., Wollongong NSW2522, Australia; gwaitt@uow.edu.au
Recent decades have brought environmental justice studies to a much
broader analysis and new areas of concern. We take this increased
depth and breadth of environmental justice further by considering
restorative justice, with a particular emphasis on reconciliation efforts
between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens. Our focus is on the
reconciliation efforts taken by the indigenous/non-indigenous joint-
management structure of Uluru-Kata Tjula National Park. Using
a framework of restorative justice within a bivalent environmental
justice approach, we consider the current management policies at the
Park, particularly as it pertains to the controversial climb of the rock,
Uluni. Our exploration of restorative environmental justice depends
upon narrative analysis of embodied ecotourism affects in order to
determine the capacity and obstacles of reconciliation efforts in the
current management policy. Interviews with tourists from the Greater
Sydney Metropolitan Area supply us with cases that provide affective
experiences and a postcolonial narrative analysis of touring practices
that we argue are imbued with nationalism and colonial naturalism
that must be transformed in order to meet the requests of the Park's
traditional indigenous owners. We argue that restorative justice, within
a bivalent environmental justice framework that already emphasizes
other distributive and recognition measures, is vital for over-coming
these obstacles for Australian environmental heritage.
Environmental Philosophy 7 (2). 13S~163.
Copyright © 2010 by The International Association for Environmental Philosophy.
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.