Human/Nature
by Jane Rawson
ISBN 9781761170010
Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY
To encounter the natural world with certainty is to remove yourself from the expansive potential of its indeterminacy. As we move through this period of reckoning with humanity’s impact on the planet, answers feel like everything—like a necessity—but throughout Human/Nature, Jane Rawson reminds us that questioning remains vital to the continued negotiation of our relationship with the world around us. Because, fundamentally, Rawson’s latest offering is not about answers. It is about asking questions.
Human/Nature continues Rawson’s work of attempting to understand her place in the world. Formerly an editor of The Conversation’s environment and energy section, and co-author of The Handbook: Surviving & Living with Climate Change, Rawson has spent her career ruminating on humanity’s overwhelming influence on the planet. Yet, despite her many years writing on the environment, Rawson opens this book with the admission, “I have towncraft … I do not have bushcraft” (1); that to encounter those spaces outside the city requires “hypervigilance” (1).
What Rawson offers here is an alternative entrance into critical writing about the environment. Rather than the tried-and-true nature writer, immersed in nature, giving themselves over in the search of some grand insight, Rawson is avoidant of nature—she is running away.
Human/Nature was conceived out of this running away. As Rawson explains, she “joined a wave of climate-change-postponing, cost-of-living-minimising, local-artisan-loving gentrifiers from the mainland who took advantage of a new-look Tasmania” (17). She arrived in Tasmania in hopes of finding some “version of our past” (17); a place unaffected by the impacts of humans, globally. Sadly, she found a Tasmania quite like the rest of the world. In Tasmania, Rawson took a job at a nature conservancy. Here, she explains, she felt a friction between “how activists thought about nature, how regular people thought about nature and how scientists thought about nature” (5). Rawson brings these incongruities to Human/Nature, teasing them out across the collection’s essays.
In the chapter, ‘Innocence Lost: On Belonging and Purity’, Rawson questions the ways in which humanity views the natural world—or, more specifically, she questions the narrow lens through which humanity allows nature to be understood. Nature is widely held as being pure; it is those limited pockets of wilderness that remain unaffected by human influence; it is native, not invasive, and it lives in the past. We’re all affected by this idealistic view. Even many of us that feel we know better are working against this internalised sense of how the natural world is—Rawson’s motivations for her move to Tasmania tell us as much. But this is no way to view a nature that is messy with interspecies entanglements.
Rawson works against the notions that the natural world is pure or that it exists within the bounds of what humanity is willing to define it as. She says, “Animals don’t have the emotional attachment to ‘unspoiled’ places that humans have. … they make decisions about where they want to live and choose the place that suits them best. More and more often, these are not the places we think they should be” (117). Animal life, in all its forms, functions in accordance with what best suits. As long as we hold on to these ideas of purity, we fail to account for a varied and multifaceted web of relations.
But how do we best read a lack of purity? And what does it mean to be impure? Anna Tsing, in her seminal work The Mushroom at the End of the World, utilises “contamination,” explaining “we are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are” (27). Becoming contaminated is not just a neutral result of existing in the world though. Rather, contamination allows us to exist and thrive as the world changes. This becomes particularly useful as global environments rapidly change. Tsing adds, “staying alive—for all species—requires liveable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die” (28). In this sense, to be impure—to be contaminated—is a means through which to best live on in this time of human impact.
The natural world is full of contaminations that have cultivated alternative ways of living. Rawson identifies this contaminated manner of living among animals that act in ways that humans feel are perhaps not best for them. These creatures are contaminated by their interactions with humans, and yet persist through interspecies collaborations. Rawson first details easy examples, such as Peregrine falcons. She explains that these falcons “like a perpendicular surface with ledges where they can rest; a good spot to take off and hunt for prey.” Typically, these falcons would use cliffs to roost, but peregrine falcons have become contaminated by humanity. Now, they use skyscrapers in Melbourne’s CBD, like 367 Collins Street, where they’ve been “nesting … since 1991” (117).
But contamination can be more complex, because as Rawson continually reminds us, there is no homogenous way to understand what nature is or should be; rather than seeking one single clarifying answer, we should be permeable to indeterminacy.
At its most complex, the natural world is tangled and unwilling to bend itself to limited truths. This is as evident within Australia as it is across the globe. To illustrate the potential complexity of contamination between species, Rawson draws on the relationship between parasitic mites and young hatchling birds. She explains that “Forty-spotted pardalotes, tiny birds endemic to Tasmania, are under threat from parasitic mites.” This is not an uncommon problem among bird species, and it is usually combatted by birds lining their nests with insect repellent leaves. In the case of the forty-spotted pardalote, they are aided by the installation of “dispensers full of insecticide-soaked feathers in the areas where they live.” But, as Rawson questions, “what about birds who have moved to the city where insect-repellent vegetation is sparse and who aren’t beloved enough to have scientists feathering their nests for them?” (118).
Here, Rawson moves to sparrows in Mexico City, who “have solved this problem by collecting cigarette butts off the ground to line their nests” (118). At first glance, it seems repulsive that the waste and litter of humanity is being used in the nests of wildlife—it looks, as Rawson says, “like a disgusting and depressing signifier of a world gone horribly wrong” (119)—but ultimately, the decision remains with the sparrows. If they were to reject the cigarette butts out of some sense of purity, they would be faced with the death of their young. Rawson explains, “there is no doubt that the butts are also unhealthy for the birds, but whether the benefits for the birds outweigh the risks is still unknown” (119). This begs the question: how do we negotiate what we feel is bad for creatures and wildlife, and what they do to survive? Consistently, Human/Nature is unwilling to answer questions such as these for us; rather we are asked to sit with the unease.
Throughout these essays, Rawson negotiates with the impact of humanity on the Earth, and our willingness as a species to distinguish ourselves from the life around us. She asks:
“You probably know, intellectually, that you are an animal, but to what extent to do you feel it? Do you feel like you have more in common with the animals that live where you live, or more in common with a human living in a whole different landscape on the other side of the world? Do you feel more a part of your eco-system or more a part of your species?” (76)
There is no doubt that we participate in the ecosystems around us, yet often we seem to feel ourselves distinct from them, as worldly creatures rather than local ones. We are contaminated, just as we contaminate.
Encountering Human/Nature, I was struck by its title. That forward slash—separating a phrase used so often to enable humanity’s worst impulses. Lauren Elkin writes on the slash, “The mark itself is the hieroglyphic equivalent of the verb to cleave, which simultaneously means one thing and its opposite.” Elkin goes on to explain, “The slash conjuncts, and and or, or or and … The slash creates a space of simultaneity, a zone of ambiguity … The slash joins genres, genders, blurs, blends, invites, marks … The slash is the first person tipped over … Across the slash we can find each other (xiii)”. The slash of Human/Nature functions in just this way. Rawson attends to the divisions that we ourselves draw between humanity and the natural world. She also pulls us together, highlighting contamination and interspecies collaboration, describing a world humanity is not distinct from.
Works Cited
Elkin, Lauren. Art Monsters. Vintage, 2024.
Rawson, Jane. Human/Nature. NewSouth Publishing, 2025.
Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton UP, 2015.
JAMES GOBBEY (he/him) is a writer living on the unceded land of the Palawa people of Lutruwita/Tasmania. He has a strong interest in the relationship between people and the natural world, and the manner in which this is represented in contemporary writing. His work has previously been published with Mascara Literary Review, Aniko Press, and others.