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https://theconversation.com/jane-rawson-moved-to-unspoiled-tasmania-to-outrun-climate-change-but-the-fearful-questions-followed-247556>
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Review: Human/Nature – Jane Rawson (NewSouth)
This is a ridiculous book. That’s not my opinion or choice of words. It is how
Jane Rawson, the author, describes
Human/Nature within its own pages. It’s a
throwaway comment, perhaps one an editor would have questioned – the type of
loose thread that could easily have been snipped with nobody the wiser.
The danger of self-deprecation is that it can be thrown back in your face. I
don’t mean to do that, so much as to ask: what is it about this heartfelt book
that moves its author to dismiss it, even in passing, as ridiculous? What does
it mean? What is it a sign of?
In 2015, Rawson published a book with James Whitmore called
The Handbook:
Surviving and Living with Climate Change. That was back in those (slightly)
less ridiculous times in the lead-up to the signing of the Paris Agreement, in
which 174 nations and the European Union aimed to reduce global carbon
emissions in order to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial
levels.
The Handbook set out, as handbooks do, to be a practical (“intelligent”)
guide for everyday people. Written in a warm and approachable style, it aimed
to “give you stories and advice from individuals who are already quietly doing
amazing things”.
Ten years later, the stuttering movement towards reducing fossil-fuel pollution
continues to come up against resistance from vested interests. With evidence
the threshold of 1.5 degrees warming may have been exceeded, it is hard not to
feel paralysed in the face of the many assaults on reality, including
bait-and-switch nuclear fantasies.
Since facts often prove incapable of changing minds or behaviour, many artists
and writers are exploring ways to confront and break through the old stories
and power structures that seem to have us, collectively, in their thrall. Among
these old stories is the one that says that humans are separate from, and
superior to, all other living (and non-living) beings.
This is a story with particular traction in the lineage of European thought, in
which Aristotle begat Descartes begat Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace and
Carl Linnaeus. The able-bodied European male human was inscribed – by himself,
no less – as at the natural pinnacle of the hierarchy of beings: the most
intelligent, the most rational, and therefore deserving of the spoils.
In her new book, Rawson pulls at the threads of this story and watches it
unravel. Her attention dwells in the subtlety and complexity of the
forward-slash that cuts between Human and Nature in her title, and the
typographic slippage of Nature onto a line below. Each chapter in this book,
which reads like a chain of interlinked essays, invites a new slide, down and
across, into a playfully serious unsettling of assumptions.
“Having abandoned the hope of changing other people’s minds”, Rawson is “still
itchy to dig about for some ways to change my own”."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
