Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver is a proud Aboriginal woman with connections to communities in southwestern New South Wales, South Australia, and beyond. She is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Indigenous Strategy and Services for the University of Sydney and leads the institution's strategy to advance Indigenous participation, engagement, education, and research, including the university's One Sydney, Many People 2021-2024 strategy. She is a recognized expert and tireless advocate for health and education. Her research focuses on capacity building for healthcare workers and improved health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. She serves her country in the Royal Australian Air Force Specialist Reserve as a Group Captain and is a member of the Australian Statistical Advisory Committee, the Australian Medical Council, and the Health Performance Council of South Australia.

LISA JACKSON PULVER

So, I'll go back to One Sydney, Many People, because one of the four pillars is about Pemulian, the environment. And it is critical that for our mob, we come from the land. And when we go, we go back to the land. The land is so important. It has never been ceded or sold. It is such a precious resource. And it's fascinating. I work with a classical historian, and we've had many a conversation. And back in antiquity, people recognized the value of land. They recognized that if you damage the land, you won't be able to grow your crops. If you pollute the waters, you won't be able to drink or bathe and be refreshed, healthy, and clean. And somehow the industrial world kind of lost sight of that, right? Really, really lost sight of that. And the diversity of the ecology has evolved over billions of years to provide this beautiful thing called balance. And what we are now is a world profoundly out of balance in every part of it. And the pillaging and absolute mass slaughter of anything that is of the land or comes out of the land, in the modern parlance, is something that I know we will not be remembered well for in history.

We are currently sitting in a very pointed part of history where, at the moment, we have got koalas crossing the roads in rather urbanized environments because we've completely broken their link to be able to eat, and they're starving. They're the ones that survived the fires. You know, we are at the moment on the pointed end of extinction of so many species in Australia that it just makes your heart break, if you think about it too closely, that biodiversity was part of the unique balance in our world.

And you look at your continents where you live as well, and you see exactly the same thing. Yet at the same time, we are getting pressured strongly to dig up more pristine land and pollute water sources for this thing called gas, or this thing called coal. These fossil fuels that are going out of favor and won't be around in 30, 40, 50 years.

Because we would've grown a brain by then and done something quite different to resource our hungry needs of energy. But when you look at the cost of that, our world is going to take millennia to regenerate again. and it's going to take a real concerted effort for us to be careful about feral species, to be careful about weeds, about monocultures, to recognize that if we don't have diversity in our biosphere, we have got absolutely no chance of surviving.

I'll put it in a slightly different way. Aboriginal people have been on this land for at least 60,000 years, through some will say it's the oldest continuing culture on the planet. People have been here in the most the driest continent on Earth, in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth through all that time and have survived. And not just survived, but thrived. And over the last 230 years, the most catastrophic events have occurred to this land because people didn't listen to ancient Aboriginal cultures and languages and knowledge. And I don't mean ancient in that they were practiced only a millennia ago. They're practiced all the way up to now. And because people haven't been listening to that, these catastrophes have been happening. And I would bet that there is all of that knowledge where you live as well, and where all of your listeners are living as well. So my question is, if people were able to look after this place for 60,000 years and thrive, what have we done to ensure that we do have a healthy fit world for the next 60,000 years?

And I don't think we can see beyond a hundred, to be honest. And I think we should really get on with getting it right. And my job as an educator, I'm doing my bit and I know lots of others are doing their bit, but how do we really stand in history as being the generation, no matter what our brains, no matter what our education, no matter what our resources and our embeddedness is, that we couldn't deal with what we have faced now, and that's our own extinction.

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So I think for me, there is an agency in having control over your own learning and really crappy things can happen to you, but it's really about what you can do with those. It's really about recognizing that, you know, there is an opportunity in everything. And for me, that opportunity was to escape at 14, and whilst on the streets, I thought, well, I can either live on the streets and do lots of drugs or become a sex worker...Neither of those things were what I wanted to do. What I really wanted to do was to become a social worker or become a nurse, or become someone who could help others out of this. But first I had to lift myself out of this. So, when I look back at my 14-year-old self and my 15-year-old self and 16 and 17-year-old self, I just cannot believe the wisdom I had then. And sometimes I think about things, and I wonder. I know I'm still not as wise now as I was then in some things. So, yeah, it's pretty interesting.

This interview was conducted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk. Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).