Tess Lea is an anthropologist who specialises in the ethnography of settler colonial policy and bureaucratic cultures. Her research queries the assumption that the liberal democratic state works but for aberrant examples where it is misaligned with what is truly needed. This matters for environmental advocates and researchers, who can share a faith in the rationalities of policy and thus avoid the hard work of yielding the underpinnings of their/our/my extractivist good life, as is necessary for multiple lives to flourish. Lea’s latest book, Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention (2020, Stanford UP) expands some of these concepts. She is Dean of Social Sciences at Macquarie University and respectfully acknowledges that the Macquarie campus is on the unceded territories of the Wallumattagal clan of the Dharug Nation.