Human/Nature: On Life in a Wild World

by Jane Rawson

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’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

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Nature, Memoir, Australia, Environment

240 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2025

About the author

Jane grew up in Canberra and travelled via San Francisco and Melbourne to Tasmania, where she works as a writer for a conservation organisation. Her first novel, A Wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, won the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award and her second novel, From the Wreck, won the Aurealis Award and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She is also the author of a non-fiction guide to surviving and living with climate change called The Handbook and a novella, Formaldehyde, which won the 2015 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize. You can read her essays in Living with the Anthropocene; Fire, Flood, Plague; and Reading like an Australian Writer.

Reviews

[Hannah St John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me genuinely want to be buried straight in the ground… in a good way.

[James Whitmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the heart of human existence is a paradox. These days, I reckon (hope?) at least a few of us understand that we are part of nature (the result of evolution, with a particular evolutionary history, embedded in an extraordinarily tangled web of life, matter and energy). At the same time, we are also separate from it. We understand that separation in different ways. For some, it is culture that marks us as different, or intelligence. For others, it is our impact on the world, such as the rather terrifyingly named "novel entities" that we are layering into the rocks of the planet, to the extent that they define a new geological epoch. For some (many of Australia's political and business folk, for instance) nature is "a burden or an annoyance", as Jane Rawson writes in this brilliant collection of personal essays. Read more on my blog.

[Sarah Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rawson put so many of my feelings, as someone working in conservation and restoration, into words. I can’t remember the last time I read a book and had such a violent internal voice saying “Yes!!!! EXACTLY, why can’t we all see that?” If we view the only nature worth protecting as the rugged and pristine, then we’ve already lost the battle.

Beyond that, she challenged things I thought I knew. I felt the slap on the wrist for speaking eulogistically about the natural world. Instead, Rawson reintroduces something often forgotten when discussing the environment: optimism.

[Kirra · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I was reading this, I annoyed (probably) everyone I know by making them listen to me recite passages, texting them excerpts, and insisting they all read it themselves (they maybe all think they're borrowing my copy now that I'm done).

This book asks so many questions and offers up so many challenges to long held beliefs I have (had?) about nature, conservation, people, and what we think deserves saving. I feel like maybe this challenge should have been confronting but honestly it just felt like a relief (which is 100% the opposite of how I normally feel when I'm questioned in any way).

Also, this book is funny. Not often, but when the funny showed up it was always unexpected and always a delight.

[Jacqueline Knirnschild · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for a bookclub I’ll be attending next week in the Melbourne, Australia suburb that is to be my new home. At first the book, which was comprised of chapters that read like personal essays, was a bit slow and depressing to me, but then the author really hit her stride and I was awestruck by her fascinating ecological knowledge, thought-provoking lines of inquiry and poignant prose. This book will make you feel better about death and humanity’s place in “nature.” I also now definitely want my body to be naturally cremated and poured into a river or over a growing tree.

[Kate Plaschke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, I devoured this book in 2.5 days, it challenged me, unsettled my ever held assumptions, shook my beliefs, and opened up a sense of wonder and peace. I love that this book turned my brain upside down and then let it settle in a place not of resolve but an understanding that questions are ok to ask, to feel uncertain whilst finding a peace in the discomfort of nature and life

[Cass Moriarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve always enjoyed Jane Rawson’s eclectic and quirky fiction and while I know she writes a lot in the non-fiction conservation space, I had not read any lengthy work until this latest book HUMAN/NATURE On Life in a Wild World (New South Books 2025). I attended the launch, I listened to her speak, but until I began reading, I did not appreciate how special this book is, and how much of what she writes would stay with me.

The book consists of Rawson’s musings, ramblings, explorations and investigations into humans vs nature. She pares this back to the very beginnings: what constitutes human? (and are we distinguishable from animals? In what ways?) What is nature? Is it the same as wilderness? Are all native plants and animals equal? Are all introduced species bad? What even is a species? (Yes, there’s some debate about that). This book is full of questions and positing; there are not many answers. And that’s what makes it such compulsive reading. Rawson is like so many of us – we think we love nature and want to save threatened species, we want a natural environment and clean living, but we also like our lattes and online shopping, our air con and electricity, all the creature comforts that our ever-growing carbon footprint requires.

She has divided the book into interestingly titled chapters, including ‘Not a Eulogy: On Resurrection and Nostalgia; Body Count: On Care and Killing; Common Catastrophes: On Evolution and Extinction. She approaches each chapter with the repeated proviso that although she has been a conservationist all her life, she is not a bush walker and does not like camping. Her anxiety and hypervigilance preclude her from feeling safe in the outdoors. The unpredictability and tenuousness of ‘outside’ makes her nervous. She likes wine bars and art exhibitions. She enjoys ‘towncraft’ rather than ‘bushcraft’.

Several coalescing reasons, including her anxiety, lead her to move from Melbourne to regional Tasmania, where she loves cohabitating with the many birds and animals (especially the pademelons). The relocation makes her think even more deeply about her environment and her place in it, colonialism and invasion (of both people, fauna and flora), and everything from the universe to the tiny bits of microplastics that float in our oceans. She muses about death, her own mortality, her aging father’s Alzheimer’s, the natural and unnatural deaths of animals. She ponders why the death of a particular animal, say a whale, disturbs us much more than the death of an ant. Why the extinction of a species of introduced tree worries us less than the extinction of a kind of beetle, which in turn worries us less than the extinction of a mammal. She speaks of the thylacine, its history, its mythical meaning, the science of bringing it back.

Rawson dazzles with numbers and quantities and figures, but not in an overwhelming way. Her research is worn lightly and used only to qualify and magnify the questions she asks. She talks about the past and the present and the future, and asks how it is possible to live at all if you are the kind of person (like her) who worries so much about the fate of the earth? She explores the inherent value humans give one species over another, and why we feel so much more protective over some than others. Is it a numbers game? The rare are more important? Or is it related to the animals and plants that aid our survival? Are they more valuable than native species that do not appear to provide humans with anything other than pleasure? She speaks of names, the names (white) humans and scientists and First Nations people have given to various animals and plants, and what they mean, and why they are sometimes very different. She discusses extinction and catastrophe, threatened species and ethical dilemmas, survival of the fittest and survival of those we decide we most want or need. She explores senses and how humans and animals (and plants) have developed different senses to varying abilities. Rawson talks a lot about the ethical dilemma of owning a cat, and whether that is worse than private jets or oil fields.

Tasmania is highlighted – because she lives there and because it is frequently held up as a jewel of natural beauty and often the last place to be affected by climate change (it won’t be).

I loved this simple discourse on a spider and a bee: ‘I notice a bee struggling in one of the webs. Should I go outside and free the bee? It’s painful to watch it try to unstick itself. But the bee – it’s a honeybee – is an introduced species in Tasmania. Does that mean I can ethically watch it die? ….. Or should I think about honeybees on a global scale? Insect populations are plummeting … we need to save the bees. And the bee is (I assume) suffering. But what about the spider? The spider is native (isn’t it?): it’s meant to be here. And the spider will suffer if it doesn’t get a meal. I should care more about the spider than the bee. Either way, bees and spiders have had this relationship for millions of years without human interference: I should respect their sovereignty … while I was thinking about it, the bee got itself free. Bad news for the spider … bad news too for other creatures who have to compete with the bee for nectar and for tree hollows, all of whom feel far more hypothetical than the [individual] bee did. Good news for me: I didn’t have to move from my chair.’

This veers into a discussion about hunger, habitat loss, suffering and death. How is it possible to care about everything all the time?

Moral expansiveness, biological diversity crisis, ecological thinking, conservation, compassion, fear, irrationality, sustainability, decomposition, decay, bacteria, water, fungi, food security, the apocalypse, values and decisions and choices. Rawson ruminates on them all, in a way that is both easy to read and exciting to contemplate. Her down-to-earth voice – littered with humour and truisms – makes for compelling reading. I found HUMAN/NATURE to be engrossing, fascinating and thought-provoking.

[B.P. Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Reviewed in Tasmanian Times]

Huon conservationist and novelist, 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.

[Alex Chadwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really enjoyed this book for the most part.

Rawson's writing style was well executed and made for an accessible book about complex issues that the average person (e.g. silly me) wouldn't dare dream of understanding through their own attempts at research. She synthesises an enormous amount of knowledge into digestible segments that tackle issues ranging from the strong bias of protecting certain species over others to the ethics of eradicating non-native species. I loved how she humbly approached these topics from her point of view as a human, not necessarily as an established writer / environmentalist. It made for a very relatable exploration of topics ranging from evolution to non-human intelligence (an area I feel she could have dived deeper into) to settler belonging to the (tr)icky Western idea of nature.

I liked that this book didn't really try to communicate a certain point (I feel the author's ). Rather, Rawson wanted to complicate the various issues of environmental politics (which obviously effect, and are affected by, broader areas of life / culture). This is not necessarily a simple task because people are inclined to pick a side and tell everyone that its the best one. I feel like I could really get behind her intentions. Though it's indecision / uncertainty around the 'right' solutions would frustrate some people (especially those who feel uncomfortable in the 'grey'), I found it comforting. I'm one of those people who always sees 'both sides', and Rawson fully embraces that, of course, really important issues are never simple.

at times, I felt a little bored by the lack of momentum / overarching narrative. but that's purely a me-problem because I usually read fiction. overall, very good stuff. could reread again and again, picking up at any point in the book.

[Kloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this felt like what I imagine being tossed into a woodchipper or trampled by wildebeest would feel like (as someone involved in conservation. I'm not sure how it would read outside of that context). It highlights cutting truths about issues within the discipline, and thoroughly flays them.

I value how much this book challenged and unsettled my convictions - I think the author is right about a lot! - but it made me feel utterly hopeless and stripped me of my confidence that I can do anything constructive (harmless) to address the crippling grief that comes with caring about "nature".

I'm not a nihilist. Even though I understand that humans are bad at applying meaning in unbiased ways, I believe the assemblage of life around us is precious and meaningful in itself. The challenge this book leaves me with is reconciling the action that belief calls for with the author's necessary commentary, and carrying them both forward.

[Dani Ringrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's so few non-fiction piece of writing that make me reconsider how I understand concepts and even definitions to to do with fundamentally important things as nature.

And then this landed in my lap, having attended its book launch as one of the event staff. And I was so transfixed by what Jane was arguing that I felt like I was having my brain rewired in a good way. Once I realised that my personal and social understanding of what the term Wilderness implied - an untouched place where humans don't tread - was a term so dense with colonisation that the very word erases how indigenous people used land. That there is no separation between nature and human, and should never be.

It's a tome philosophical in nature and writing style, and I would genuinely love to spend so many conversations with Jane unpacking everything further with her, in an expansive, explorative way rather than combative (mainly because I agree with so many points she raises, or don't have black and white answers for the prickly questions she raises). This is also because she captures observations about herself, and her own relationship with nature, that speak so closely to my own.

I devoured this fairly quickly, to supplement writing my debut novel where the destruction of bushland by fire is a central concern and major plot point. By the time I'd finished, I'd marked up what felt like nearly 50% of the book. It is one that I will press heartily into friends' hands when they need to rewire their brain in a positive way and still come out loving the world around them.

"All I want from life, really, is to stay at home with people and cats who already know what a mess I am and won't be disturbed by it. But also, all I want from life is to be swept up in transcendent experience, in an incandescent joy that takes me outside this body and brain and all the stupid little feelings it afflicts me with."

"'There is an irresistible tendency, writes Tom Griffiths, 'to use language that describes bushfire almost wholly in terms of tragedy and destruction.'"

"Since then the thylacine has appeared on tea towels, stickers, street-side transformer boxes, tourism marketing and car number plates, and since 1996 a stylised drawing of one has been the Tasmanian Government logo. Of everything that could represent the state of Tasmania (Cradle Mountain, a Tasmanian devil, apples, Salamanca Place, Kunanyi), the government chose an animal it deliberately wiped out... Tasmania ties its identity to the corpse of a creature murdered by the state's very existence."

"What world do we think that reanimated thylacine would return to?... For those of us who would love to see the thylacine return, what are we hoping for?"

"Not all of us, but most of us, think of nature and think: places without people. Nature is the place where we cn get away from all this and breathe. It is the way the world really is, the way it was before we arrived. It is something eternal, existing forever backwards in time, existing without us now and into the future when we're gone."

"I am, emotionally, a child. I I see animals like pademelons the way a child sees them, as furry people with personalities and lives and hopes and joys. I love their cuteness. I love their babies, who are absurdly miniature and who fall over sideways while learning to hop and who punch each other repeatedly in the face when they get a little bit bigger. To me, pademelons feel like individials; it is a privilege to have them living along side me."

"If you zoom closer in, it's harder to be circumspect. Rhinos have existed for millions of years and now they won't exist at all? Awful!...
Zoom back out again, and maybe it means nothing at all.
Zoom out far enough and who cares that my dad is dying."

"Numbers are pure, unbiased. Numbers are authoritative. Numbers let us stack unrelated things up against one another and make decisions based on the height of the pile... A white rhino is worth US$6522. A toy white rhino is worth US$14."

"We're turning the world into a giant quarry, turning things that were underground into things above ground and then, and often not much later, turning them into waste that we try to put back underground.
If we take sand from a beach and turn it into concrete, and then the building it's used for is demolished and put on a rip and most of it ends up back in the ocean, is that nature? I honestly don't know where to draw the line."

"It wasn't everyone, but it was a lot of people (or maybe just the kinds of people I associate with): the early 1980s did something weird to our brains."

"Why would this mind think this body is welcome here? Why would this mind think this body has any right to be here? What does this mind even think here is?"

"This perception has made it even easier than it is on the mainland for white settlers to ignore the human component of Tasmania's 'wilderness'... the general vibe is still of a place that is for people to visit, to 'touch lightly'. This is not seen as a place where people live, not seen as a place that people collaborated in making."

"Wilderness is a word we usually use when we're trying to describe the purest kind of nature, the kind of nature you're meant to be in when you're being in nature. At its bluntest, it means 'no humans'. It's a word that Tasmania has leant on heavily over the past 50 years."

"'There is an irresistible tendency, writes Tom Griffiths, 'to use language that describes bushfire almost wholly in terms of tragedy and destruction.'
Fire in the public imagination - okay, in my imagination - destroys everything we love. It is savage and remorseless. It will vaporise all that makes us ourselves.
Or maybe it will set us free."

"The fire that was burning 4 kilometres away from our house last week - wasn't trying to kill me."

[ola gubkina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps we miss a world we felt more fully part of, a world where we could pretend we mattered. Age creeps over us; our sense of irrelevancy grows; everything seems less promising. It is easier to think about recreating a lost world than to imagine a new one, especially when the current one has so little in common with the ideal of nature we hold in our heads.

Compared to most animals, we have very few attributes that can help us survive life on Earth. We are soft, slow, clumsy, very easy to spot and immensely edible by creatures of all sizes. We're embarrassing. No wonder we can't shut up about the very impressive size of our brains, and the importance of the trait we call intelligence.

And thanks to that ability, no cricket has ever had to give up its perfectly good life in inner-city Melbourne and move to Tasmania just because its neighbours wouldn't shut up.

[Karina · Rating 5 out of 5]

As soon as I finished devouring this book, I started to read it again. It is so full of insight, carefully considered ideas, astute observations, sound research, lyrical prose, awkward questions, but above all else raw honesty. As an ecologist, many of the views I agreed with and found reaffirming, others I didn't, some startled me, but all made me stop and ponder my own views more carefully. An absolute gem of a book. I am so glad I stumbled upon it.

[Sammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful exploration of the complex relationship between humans and other living organisms. This book has left me feeling less alone in my often contradictory thoughts and feelings on the value of individual life, nature and conservation.

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

An honest laying out of the myriad questions, contradictions, fears and self-doubt involved in our relationship with nature and conservation. Brave, funny, wonderful.

[Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enthralling and unsettling meditation. Incredible.