SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | RESEARCH ARTICLE Indigenous environmental values as human values

The claim that in natural resource management (NRM) a change from anthropocentric values and ethics to eco-centric ones is necessary to achieve sustainability leads to the search for eco-centric models of relationship with the environment. Indigenous cultures can provide such models; hence, there is the need for multicultural societies to further include their values in NRM. In this article, we investigate the environmental values placed on a freshwater environment of the Wet Tropics by a community of indigenous Australians. We discuss their environ- mental values as human values, and so as beliefs that guide communities' under- standing of how the natural world should be viewed and treated by humans. This perspective represents a step forward in our understanding of indigenous envir onmental values, and a way to overcome the paradigm of indigenous values as valued biophysical attributes of the environment or processes happening in land- scapes. Our results show that the participant community holds biospheric values. Restoring these values in the NRM of the Wet Tropics could contribute to sustainabil- ity and environmental justice in the area.