Several years ago, Jane Rawson packed up her beloved inner-city home and moved to the bush. Scared about what climate change would do to the big city, and keen to meet more animals, she found a new home in a cottage in the Huon Valley. But in a place where nature never really leaves you alone, she had to confront her uncomfortable relationship with the outdoors.
A lyrical work of creative nonfiction, Human/Nature is an exploration of how and why we think about the natural world the way we do. If you've ever asked yourself whether humans are ruining nature, whether there's a better way for us to belong, or whether it's possible to love both the environment and your cat, you're not alone. This exquisite, contemplative book is for anyone who has ever wondered where they fit in the natural world.
'In this funny, provocative and profoundly moving book, Jane Rawson brilliantly unravels the myths about the boundaries of the human and the non-human, the natural and the unnatural, and love and death that shape our thinking about not just the environment, but our history and the future that is already overtaking us. Read it: it's utterly marvellous.' James Bradley, author of Deep Water
'Idiosyncratic and wily, big-hearted and brave, Human/Nature is an exhilarating deep dive into what is deemed "nature", what is worth saving, and who gets to decide. Part confessional, part philosophical inquiry, part lament, this book takes us on a rollicking ride.' Jessie Cole, author of Desire and Staying
'A sense of possibility and connection can be elusive in these challenging days yet Jane Rawson offers them to us, using language that is beautiful, wise, clear and true.' Sophie Cunningham, author of City of Trees
'I love this book. I love this writer her brilliance, wit, tenderness, and keen eyes (and ears and mind). The pages of Human/Nature are threaded with delight and grief, wonder and questions, joy and love. Read this beautiful book and remember your nature.' Sarah Sentilles, author of Stranger Care
'Human/Nature could well inspire its readers to help bring about worthwhile change. It is a significant contribution towards a better world.' Erich Mayer, ArtsHub
'This engaging and ultimately optimistic book sympathetically blends personal experience and thoughtful enquiry to challenge the way we see ourselves and the world around us. It deserves to be high on the reading list of all committed conservationists.' Ted Lefroy, The Skeptic
'[Rawson's] 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.' David Carlin, The Conversation
'With levity, beauty and deep contemplation Human/Nature interrogates how our own ideas of purity, intelligence, care (for starters) affect how we impact, ignore, undermine and protect all the wild things which are not human.' Celina Ribeiro, The Guardian
'This is a book full of wisdom, fascination and wonder for the world we live in, even as it acknowledges the sadness and desperation in our situation.' Jess Gately, The AU Review
'Jane Rawson regards much of our thinking about nature as tangled in a thicket of misconceptions and false binaries. Human/Nature: On life in a wild world is the machete she sharpens to chop us free.' Geordie Williamson, The Saturday Paper
'[Rawson] comes to no neat conclusions, but her informed and probing questions about why we lament the extinction of some species but not others, or how we justify killing for conservation, are like the ripples from a stone tossed into the water. They unsettle, but in a good way, inspiring unexpected hopefulness.' Sydney Morning Herald / The Age
'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.' James Gobbey, Mascara Literary Review
