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roundtable meeting I have referred to. Culture also gains a transactional reality across popular

domains, and within environmental NGOs (movements such as Deep Ecology and Slow

Food) and popular literature on ecology there is an appropriation of general ideas about

indigenous cosmologies (Bruun & Kalland eds. 1995, p. 2). While we see clear hierarchies of

concern in environmental movements (among the four pillars), the association of cultural

diversity with indigenous and non-Western “others” continues in their rhetoric. As I have so

far outlined, in the early years of the new millennium this eventuated in both a widening of

the discursive space of sustainability as well as a delimitation of that space. Although it was

in many ways constructive in forwarding a culture agenda, in doing so it also reified culture

along with the other pillars – society, economy and environment – or what Bennett (2013,

p.12) might call the other universal concepts, which are part of forming the concept of

culture. Bennett (2013, p. 13) argues that this is an:

...assumption of the Anglophone tradition of cultural studies in which culture is
defined as the realm of meaning-making practices to be considered in terms of
their conditioning by, and consequences for, the conduct of economic and social
[for the purposes of this thesis we can add environmental] practices.

He continues to argue that this is the logic underlying the cultural turn to propose an active

role in the construction of social and economic life (Bennett 2013, p. 13), and we can add, the

management of ecological life. For example, Hawkes articulates in his four-pillar proposal

that culture extends across ‘every aspect of human intercourse: the family, the education,

legal, political and transport systems, the mass media, work practices, welfare programs,

leisure pursuits, religion, the built environment…’ (2001, p. 3). In relation to this chapter the

cultural turn manifests as a turn to cultural diversity – understood as a generalised notion of

indigenous or other than Western. However, the logic of the cultural turn remains: culture

extends across socio-economic and environmental worlds and should play a more active role

in governing conduct. Such a project can be summarised as a turn to cultural diversity within

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