Huon conservationist and novellist, Jane Rawson’s new non-fiction work, Human / Nature deserves to be much more widely read than I suspect it will be. A slim volume of articulate and incisive essays, it’s set deep in the post-colonial wilderness of Tasmanian culture, and provides critical insights that go beyond the usual Tasmanian dichotomy – ‘economy’ versus ‘environment’.
Human / Nature leans on science and a return to first principles, asking fundamental questions. Which things are nature and which things are not? What do we care about and why? What do we kill and what do we save?
What even is ‘wilderness’?
Human / Nature is about understanding our love of our world, our fear we’re about to lose it, and searching for hope. As Rawson says, “The future feels overwhelming.”
Caught up in the flow of events, we all too rapidly approach the falls of global civilisational collapse. Are we even capable of choosing between drowning or building a raft?
Rawson chooses her essays’ themes with care and nuance. On evolution and extinction, she reminds us that human culture struggles with the science. Many still believe some races are ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’, that extinctions are merely evolution at play – survival of the fittest – and that “evolution is working toward something” when the science is clear that evolution has no direction. We devolve as readily as evolve; there is no ‘balance of nature’.
She calls out our hubris about our ‘intelligence’ which we say makes us superior to other animals. It’s hard to reconcile that ‘superiority’ with our collective destruction of the planet, and the creatures we share it with.
Rawson points out that we frame ‘wilderness’ as ‘pure’ and thereby worth saving as a moral imperative, but the definitions of both terms are shaky.
The colonial world has transformed almost all of our planet, and the wild bits still left to ‘immerse oneself in nature’ are mostly only available to those wealthy enough to holiday in them.
Tasmania has monetised ‘wilderness’, branding it for commercial and political gain, while deforesting our state at an accelerating rate. We aggressively pollute rivers and coastlines for ‘jobs n growth’ while extolling our ‘natural assets’ to ourselves and tourists for ‘jobs n growth’. As Rawson points out:
“Wilderness makes capitalism easier to bear, and faith in wilderness makes all of us less likely to rise up and demand change.”
Do we focus on saving a species, or the ecosystem it depends on? We keep voting for political parties who barely pay lip service to either, so are we to blame, or are they?
If we choose to save an endangered frog, we have to kill an awful lot of magnificent horses. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek declares ‘war on feral cats’ to protect our wild environment, but the same government also wages war on humans who protest government inaction on protecting our environment.
Rawson, and anyone who thinks and cares about ‘nature’ or our planet’s future, is scared and guilty. We grieve our species’ destruction of what many of us feel intimately connected to. But most of us aren’t connected, and have little sympathy for those who are – isn’t a national park or a few zoos enough? Green tape is stifling innovation and investment!
We are, collectively, still immersed in a colonial mindset, and it’s this that infuses an elegiac subtext to all Rawson’s thinking; also the rage. We’re either indifferent or furious at the end-stage capitalist regime that steals from us and denies nature’s relevance – unless it makes someone some cold, hard cash.
If you live in a beautiful part of Tasmania, you’re either resigned to its destruction or you’re fighting to save it. There’s no middle ground. Rawson laudably wants to extend the concept of wilderness beyond the few dark green bits left on Tasmanian maps. They aren’t the only wilderness. We inhabit our own wild bodies, controlled as they are by ecosystems of competing and cooperating bacteria. We cohabit our outside world with myriads of seen and unseen creatures. Rawson asks:
“What if we saw ourselves as a community of beings…. What if their stories were part of my story and my story part of theirs?”
In writing Human / Nature, Rawson hopes she has ‘become kinder, more open-minded, more compassionate to other people and the rest of life…. I thought discovering more about the natural world would break my heart, but instead I keep finding myself in a state of transcendent joy.’ That said, she’s also ‘overwhelmed with a fierce rage’ that ‘the idea of nature doesn’t much serve the needs of the creatures we share the planet with or even the needs of most humans, but has been largely constructed to serve a powerful few.’
Human / Nature is engaging, erudite, articulate and full of surprises and challenges. I commend it to anyone who thinks and cares enough to fear, hope, find joy – and rage at the machine.
Human / Nature, by Jane Rawson ISBN: 9781761170010 / April 2025 / Paperback / 224pp / RRP $34.99
B.P. Marshall is a scriptwriter and author.
