Bruny Island launch: CEO Phill Pullinger on the Kuno concept
Bruny Island
This is an amazing and exciting project that has been brewing for a little while, between the Bruny Island Environment Network, Inala Nature Tours and a new Nature platform called Kuno.
I’d like to acknowledge that the land that we’re meeting on here today has had continuous presence of people here for more than 40 thousand years. I’d like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of this land on which we meet today, who’ve held that continuous relationship with the land for that extraordinarily long period of time and I pay respect to their elders, past and present.
What we’d like to do today is talk you through this idea, talk you through where we’re up to with this project, introduce you to some of the extraordinary people who have been contributing to this project so far, and then extend an invitation to those people who have a love, an interest or a knowledge of the landscape’s ecology and natural history of Bruny and the relationship between the people of those landscapes. We’ll explain how you can get involved.
To start off with what I wanted to touch on was the big idea, or the philosophy really underpinning this project, is that people, human, need connection with Nature and the Natural world. This is fundamental to our health, our wellbeing and our happiness, as people who have a short life on this planet. This need for connection to the natural world – it’s hard-wired into all of us.
It’s part of where we come from through our evolutionary history.
There’s a concept that seeks to explain this, which is called biophilia. It literally translates to love of Nature. The theory is that as humans, we evolved in and came from the Natural world, that we developed a reliance on the Natural world to sustain us. It’s where we got our water, our air, our food, our shelter – everything that we depend upon to live as creatures on this planet.
So we developed as part of our evolution this innate need to connect with all life, because life supported our own health and survival. And it is the case that this love and connection with the Natural world is the foundation stone to the protection of Nature.
The more connected people are with a deep, intimate understanding of and love for the Natural world, the more they’re aware of the consequences of their own actions and be concerned for all living things.
So that’s a broad sweep of where this project has come from as an idea.
Bringing it into a more practical reality, is the belief that – and I’m sure this is a belief that all people here share – that this little corner of the planet that we live on, Bruny Island is just an exquisite place. It’s an exquisite extraordinary part of the world in which we live, and there’s nowhere else in the entirety of the universe that holds the beauty, the wildlife, the landscapes and the ecology that this corner of our planet has.
If we’re going to ensure that this extraordinary corner of the planet that we’re a part of and the beauty of this place is maintained and enriched into the long term, then to do that its entirely reliant on the collective impact of the individual impacts of the people that live here and the people that visit this place.
We want to foster a community of stewards for this place, we need to foster that understanding, love for connection to this place.
How do you do that?
In the olden days, if you look back at the efforts to conserve nature - whether it be the Yosemite Valley in the United States or the Franklin River and the efforts to save Lake Pedder in Tasmania, to Kakadu, to any corner of the planet that has had a strong and effective effort to protect it, one of things that people would do is share their knowledge and understanding and love of that place.
In the olden days, we did that through books and slide presentations and field guides, where ecologists, naturalists, historians, archaeologists, locals – people who had a knowledge and love to share – would translate that into something you could pick up and buy and really immerse yourself in the depths and contours of that particular place.
In today’s world, most people get their information through mobile phones and through websites and through that technology.
At the moment, the way that Nature is presented online is a bit of a mess. It’s a mishmash of Instagram and superficial tourism promotion websites, and a lot of good information that’s scattered everywhere.
So the idea to this online field guide to the Natural history and ecology and stories of Bruny, is to provide a mechanism to bring together a collective love, wisdom, experience and knowledge of the amazing community of people that know and love and are committed to Bruny, to bring that together in a place where we provide a rich public resource for locals, and for people who visit Bruny, to give them depth and context and understanding and respect for the place.
We’ve been chipping away at this for quite a while – between Inala and Bruny Environment Network and Kuno – and you can now see where we’ve got to, which is to provide a mechanism for people to be able to share their knowledge and stories.
You can explore this yourself in more detail, but this is housed at kuno.earth/bruny . We’ve laid out a way that there’s an ever-expanding ability to share stories and the efforts and projects to conserve the natural history of Bruny.
There’s a species list that we’re building out, galleries, links to the people and groups that are working to protect Bruny and then the practical information to the walks you could do, hiking, camping and the different ways you can connect to the Natural history of Bruny.
That’s the field guide, as it is now. I’ll now introduce you to the amazing people who have helped build this guide and got it to the critical next step, where we’re now opening it up to the broader community.
We also have a short film that gives you a taste of what makes Bruny Island so special. It has been put together by Dan Broun:
Phill Pullinger
This is an amazing and exciting project that has been brewing for a little while, between the Bruny Island Environment Network, Inala Nature Tours and a new Nature platform called Kuno.
I’d like to acknowledge that the land that we’re meeting on here today has had continuous presence of people here for more than 40 thousand years. I’d like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of this land on which we meet today, who’ve held that continuous relationship with the land for that extraordinarily long period of time and I pay respect to their elders, past and present.
What we’d like to do today is talk you through this idea, talk you through where we’re up to with this project, introduce you to some of the extraordinary people who have been contributing to this project so far, and then extend an invitation to those people who have a love, an interest or a knowledge of the landscape’s ecology and natural history of Bruny and the relationship between the people of those landscapes. We’ll explain how you can get involved.
To start off with what I wanted to touch on was the big idea, or the philosophy really underpinning this project, is that people, human, need connection with Nature and the Natural world. This is fundamental to our health, our wellbeing and our happiness, as people who have a short life on this planet. This need for connection to the natural world – it’s hard-wired into all of us.
It’s part of where we come from through our evolutionary history.
There’s a concept that seeks to explain this, which is called biophilia. It literally translates to love of Nature. The theory is that as humans, we evolved in and came from the Natural world, that we developed a reliance on the Natural world to sustain us. It’s where we got our water, our air, our food, our shelter – everything that we depend upon to live as creatures on this planet.
So we developed as part of our evolution this innate need to connect with all life, because life supported our own health and survival. And it is the case that this love and connection with the Natural world is the foundation stone to the protection of Nature.
The more connected people are with a deep, intimate understanding of and love for the Natural world, the more they’re aware of the consequences of their own actions and be concerned for all living things.
So that’s a broad sweep of where this project has come from as an idea.
Bringing it into a more practical reality, is the belief that – and I’m sure this is a belief that all people here share – that this little corner of the planet that we live on, Bruny Island is just an exquisite place. It’s an exquisite extraordinary part of the world in which we live, and there’s nowhere else in the entirety of the universe that holds the beauty, the wildlife, the landscapes and the ecology that this corner of our planet has.
If we’re going to ensure that this extraordinary corner of the planet that we’re a part of and the beauty of this place is maintained and enriched into the long term, then to do that its entirely reliant on the collective impact of the individual impacts of the people that live here and the people that visit this place.
We want to foster a community of stewards for this place, we need to foster that understanding, love for connection to this place.
How do you do that?
In the olden days, if you look back at the efforts to conserve nature - whether it be the Yosemite Valley in the United States or the Franklin River and the efforts to save Lake Pedder in Tasmania, to Kakadu, to any corner of the planet that has had a strong and effective effort to protect it, one of things that people would do is share their knowledge and understanding and love of that place.
In the olden days, we did that through books and slide presentations and field guides, where ecologists, naturalists, historians, archaeologists, locals – people who had a knowledge and love to share – would translate that into something you could pick up and buy and really immerse yourself in the depths and contours of that particular place.
In today’s world, most people get their information through mobile phones and through websites and through that technology.
At the moment, the way that Nature is presented online is a bit of a mess. It’s a mishmash of Instagram and superficial tourism promotion websites, and a lot of good information that’s scattered everywhere.
So the idea to this online field guide to the Natural history and ecology and stories of Bruny, is to provide a mechanism to bring together a collective love, wisdom, experience and knowledge of the amazing community of people that know and love and are committed to Bruny, to bring that together in a place where we provide a rich public resource for locals, and for people who visit Bruny, to give them depth and context and understanding and respect for the place.
We’ve been chipping away at this for quite a while – between Inala and Bruny Environment Network and Kuno – and you can now see where we’ve got to, which is to provide a mechanism for people to be able to share their knowledge and stories.
You can explore this yourself in more detail, but this is housed at kuno.earth/bruny . We’ve laid out a way that there’s an ever-expanding ability to share stories and the efforts and projects to conserve the natural history of Bruny.
There’s a species list that we’re building out, galleries, links to the people and groups that are working to protect Bruny and then the practical information to the walks you could do, hiking, camping and the different ways you can connect to the Natural history of Bruny.
That’s the field guide, as it is now. I’ll now introduce you to the amazing people who have helped build this guide and got it to the critical next step, where we’re now opening it up to the broader community.
We also have a short film that gives you a taste of what makes Bruny Island so special. It has been put together by Dan Broun:
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