Communication on Common Ground: An Alternative Paradigm

This chapter outlines this book’s key focus, the questions it holds close, and the approach it takes. Specifically, it considers whether an ecofeminist approach to environmental communication, specifically one focused on what Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood terms a “deep acquaintance with place” (Environmental culture: The ecological crisis of reason. Routledge, 2002, p. 231) has the potential to affect the way storytellers be and become more sensitive to the world around them. It centres the home garden as that place of deep acquaintance and considers three online case studies that emerge from this place—a written garden; a spoken garden and a pictured garden—to consider the way Australian women are telling stories of environmental importance. It also explains the way this book uses ecofeminist philosophy, and writing, specifically creative methods, as a method of inquiry. This writing also helps to illustrate the colonial history of the garden in an Australian context. It is this history that emphasizes the complexities of the garden, and the importance of illuminating absences and silences that remain buried in the soil. It also notes that ecofeminist communication requires updating—nourishing perhaps—from other important contemporary philosophies.