The Enlivenment Network—Tarik Cutuk

Through my role as a Board Director of the New Economy Network Australia (NENA) and interest in the arts and culture more generally, I became involved with Barbara Lepani and Catherine van Hilgenburg’s efforts, after the 2023 NENA national conference in Canberra, to reboot NENA’s Arts & Culture Hub. This reboot effort eventually resulted in the formation of the independent Enlivenment Network, which now acts as an organisational anchor for the NENA Arts & Culture Hub. Our first event will be an Eco-Arts webinar organised by Catherine, which is being co-hosted with NENA on the 31st of March.

Through my post graduate studies at the University of Queensland’s School of History and Philosophical Inquiry and connection with NENA, I have become deeply interested in the cultural challenges posed by coloniality and modernity in the context of ecological crises and the increasing complexity of geo-political conflict and unrest.

These crises have deep implications for Australia’s national security, as evidenced by Karen Barlow’s 15 March 2025 article in The Saturday Paper exploring the ‘secret’ briefings of the still-unpublished Government’s Climate Risk Assessment Report. Such reports are laying bare the extensive nature of the polycrisis already lapping at our feet.

Only by understanding the relationship between modernity and coloniality can we truly grasp the extent to which we have to challenge our previously taken for granted ways of thinking and being in the hopes of finding some pathway forward for our culture and nation that could serve as a genuine alternative to an increasingly militarised, authoritarian, and uncertain future—a way to come back into harmony with both nature and our own selves for the good of all life. This is what informs the work of both The Enlivenment Network, and NENA.

The Polycrisis

Australia, and our entire contemporary global society, are facing a fundamental existential crisis. As Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti suggests, modernity itself and the project of civilisation it represents, could even be said to be sick, or dying. Many are beginning to observe that what seems to have worked in the past no longer works, and we find ourselves arriving at a place where we do not know what to do.

Lähde claims that this historical epoch, when humanity has created a world… combining vast material wealth with radical inequality and teetering on the threshold of ecological collapse, is a truly novel phase of history, different from anything in the track record of our species.

However, this polycrisis has not been engendered by an amorphous “humanity”, but rather represents the culmination of a specific, historically contingent cultural expression of our species originating in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment^.

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, p.1).

In most places around the world, the proliferation of this way of life has occurred as the direct result of European colonial expansion and imperialism over preceding centuries, and an insistence on exporting these burgeoning industrial and extractive ways of life, typically by force. As such, the polycrisis, and indeed modernity itself, are inextricably entwined with histories of colonialism, imperialism, and the dispossession of Indigenous cultures.

Confronting Modernity

To truly confront the polycrisis then, requires more than technological innovation, social reform, or decarbonisation. Rather, the crisis calls us to experience, observe, and relate to manifestations of modernity, Australia as a ‘nation state’, and ourselves, differently—with greater accountability, maturity, sobriety, and discernment.

I agree with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti that our only viable way forward, if we truly desire to repair relations with the natural world, is to make better-informed and more responsible decisions in both the personal and political spheres, as well as to weather the storms of the polycrisis with humour, humility, honesty, and self-reflexivity

Incorporating Indigenous Knowledges

Therefore, there is an urgent need for contemporary Australian society to incorporate Indigenous knowledges into the mainstream, with a particular emphasis on the integration of alternative epistemologies, ontologies, metaphysics, and cosmologies. In so doing, we may prepare the ground for catalysing radically new ways of sensing, feeling, knowing, and relating to country and reality. This is crucial because, if the polycrisis has emerged from out of the modern project, it is not likely that solutions emerging from the same ways of knowing inculcated by it will be able to successfully address these problems.

As emphasised by Andreotti, Hospicing Modernity (2021), we cannot expect the state, capitalism, or Enlightenment humanism to fix the issues they themselves have produced: instead, we must learn to exist otherwise. This places all of us in a very difficult position. While in the short term, we must appreciate and understand that contemporary problems can be mitigated in key ways by minor and major adjustments to our existing social modes and ways of life (including through the strategic implementation of Indigenous methodologies in appropriate contexts), in the long term, the polycrisis cannot be overcome until the foundations of this system itself expire.

As such, as Andreotti insists, we all must aspire to learn from the current system’s mistakes, mourn its decline, and assist in its passing with integrity, so that we may best position ourselves to create alternative possibilities and futures for our country, and to facilitate the capacities and capabilities of the communities and people around us to do the same.

The Pathology of Modernity

To understand the pathology of modernity, we have to understand that it is intrinsically paired with coloniality. Hence Andreotti insists on the conjoined term, modernity/coloniality. The benefits we associate with modernity are created, maintained, and subsidised by historical, systemic, and ongoing processes that are unsustainable and violent by their very nature. Extractivism, dispossession, ecocide, and exploitation are not the collateral damage of modernity, but the preconditions for its existence.

In the words of Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk (2019):

There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance… But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilising control over what some see as chaos. The Sumerians started it. The Romans perfected it. The Anglosphere inherited it. The world is now mired in it.

To Indigenous legal scholar Irene Watson, these viral destructive traditions, which underpin modernity/coloniality, can be personified as quasi-demoniacal in essence. She uses the term ‘Muldarbi’ to describe the phenomenon of the European colonial project and the impact it has had upon Indigenous Peoples’ territories, laws, and lives worldwide. The word translates loosely to ‘demon spirit’, the name of an Aboriginal ancestor being who failed to uphold the best interests of the collective in relation to the natural world (Watson, 1999).

A New Definition of Human Identity

Indigenous philosopher Mary Graham perceives that the contemporary global sociopolitical and ecological crises constitutive of late modernity are responsible for initiating a new search in the Western world for a truer definition of human identity, summoning forth once again all the kinds of questions which many people thought had been answered or explained away: “why are we here? why am I doing this job? where am I going? what does this global crisis mean? what can I do about anything?”

In this search, there is a radical grappling with the nature of contemporary global culture and modern existence itself. As Graham says, “while the developments of the last decade with regard to Aboriginal land rights/Native Title have highlighted the ambivalent relationship Australians have with land in this country, and their uncomfortable relationship with Aboriginal people” many Australians by contrast have experienced the period as a chance to reflect upon themselves and their nation, what kind of society they live in, and what kind of society they want to live in (p.111).

If this is the case, Andreotti suggests, we may be fortunate enough to soon witness the coming of a new generation of non-predatory human beings. Those who will be able to cultivate, nurse, and balance spiritual and natural forces and flows; stewards and custodians with an intimate knowledge of the truth that any harm done to the land is also ultimately done to oneself.