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Science,
Social Science and the Dig Tree
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Roger Bradbury Think of the region between science and social science as unexplored terrain.
Think of how we traverse such a landscape: excursions from base camps and depots
into the unknown. Just like Burke and Wills who had a depot at the Dig Tree
on Cooper Creek, to which they returned in 1861, exhausted, only to perish.
Not because of the depot, but because of its alien setting: they were unable
to sustain themselves because they had failed to learn about the land through
which they were travelling, a land which sustained a local population even as
they themselves perished. In this talk I will examine both the Dig Trees that
provide false security in the wilderness between social science and science,
as well as the nature of the terrain itself. This will provide a context for
a discussion of the ideas emerging from the theory of complex adaptive systems
and the socioeconomic and biophysical problems of regional sustainability.
Chief Research Scientist
Bureau of Resource Sciences
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