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Winner of the NIB Waverley Award for Literature.Forget about wilderness, Tim Low says, nature lives in our cities and gardens, exploiting everything we do. Many endangered species now live in industrial zones and cities. In our forests, native creatures have become pests. Fifteen years on, The New Nature continues to challenge the way we view the interactions between human beings and nature, and pushes us to review our relationship with Australia's wilderness.
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First published June 4, 2002
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About the author
Tim Low
9 books37 followersTim Low is an Australian biologist and author of articles and books on nature and conservation.
For twenty years Low wrote a column in Nature Australia, Australia's leading nature magazine. He contributes to Australian Geographic and other magazines.
Low became very interested in reptiles as a teenager and discovered several new species of lizard. He named the chain-backed dtella (Gehyra catenata) and had the dwarf litter-skink (Menetia timlowi) named after him.
He works as an environmental consultant, writer and photographer, serves on government committees, and does public speaking. He has written many reports about climate change. He is the patron of Rainforest Rescue. Low lives in Brisbane.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Low)
For twenty years Low wrote a column in Nature Australia, Australia's leading nature magazine. He contributes to Australian Geographic and other magazines.
Low became very interested in reptiles as a teenager and discovered several new species of lizard. He named the chain-backed dtella (Gehyra catenata) and had the dwarf litter-skink (Menetia timlowi) named after him.
He works as an environmental consultant, writer and photographer, serves on government committees, and does public speaking. He has written many reports about climate change. He is the patron of Rainforest Rescue. Low lives in Brisbane.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Low)
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 14, 2011
If I could give it 6 stars I would. Reading Low creates a paradigm shift in your thoughts about Nature, the environment, and the whole she-bang of animal life on Earth and our (human) place in it. No matter what side of the ecology fence you are on - conservative or radical greenie this book will fundamentally alter your perceptions.
(I sat up all night to finish this and typing in the pre-dawn with no lights. A review down the track.)
(I sat up all night to finish this and typing in the pre-dawn with no lights. A review down the track.)
January 5, 2026
The New Nature, like Tim Low’s other work, sits in the finest tier of environmental non-fiction.
Many books about modern nature can be devastating, but New Nature is more confusing than anything else. It upends a moral philosophy around nature that leaves the reader in support of killing koalas and protecting foreign weeds. The kind of disruption to my perspective on the environment left me grappling for a coherent idea of how to carry my love and respect for the living world. It is honest and unrelenting, while still appealing to my love for Australia’s wildlife. In its wake I feel like I hold a more honest and nuanced appreciation of all the animals and plants around me.
Low explains how much of our modern nature is new. Far more than the obvious exceptions in the landscape. It’s not just the English starlings and escaped house cats. The parrots, redbacka and pigeons that have inhabited Australia for millennium, have only very recently expanded far beyond outback pockets to dominate the entire continent. The very idea of ‘native’ and ‘natural’ are put to question. Low strips me of any illogical or flawed criteria I can muster to decide what truly ‘belongs’ in Australia, leaving only my empathy for life to guide me.
Low’s opening salvos predictably strike at disastrous and abominable land and fisheries management practices across Australia. This attack is less predictably followed by strikes on much celebrated actions in support of wildlife both historical and present. The huge damage that can be done by well-intentioned actions like planting natives in the garden, building bird houses and frog ponds, and removing weeds is surprising. Low’s arguments seem strange when brought out of context, but it’s hard to disagree with his conclusions as he makes them (thoroughly citing sources and experts along the way). In short, attempts we make to support wildlife that aren’t backed by scientific rigour often serve only to assist the animals already doing well, reinforcing their dominance over other animals that grow scarcer and scarcer as a consequence.
Despite operating with the unstated goal of confounding any existing relationship the reader has with nature, Tim Low clearly writes out of appreciation for the entirety of the natural world. He shows an obvious appreciation of the small, and the not so grandiose. Low takes the time to demonstrate a passion for the minute diversity in a flat grass field, or disused farm, rather than ogling only at forested mountains and rugged coastlines.
After abruptly deconstructing what we think of as natural, Low does not leave us to wallow in despair that there can be no clear good that can be done for wildlife. He asks us to be realistic. To consider what we want out of conservation. For this he has a beautiful answer: Conservation should not be the practice of preserving the past, or relenting to a future, nor celebrating any specific ecological arrangement. What we should preserve is the process of change. The continuity between past and future.
“I love the old nature, the Australia that prevailed before Europeans came. But I also salute the new - the animals and plants carving out new careers in new milieux”
We should not let the difficult problems that face us in conservation to cause us to falter, or fall back to a hands-off neglect. Conservation is intervention and intervention isn’t easy.
I will end my review with two passages that capture the essence of this book that I cannot summarise better than Low has already done himself.
“Animals shouldn’t be treated kindly or cruelly according to lines on a map. It can’t be right to kill thousands of flying foxes in an orchard (or botanic garden) but wrong to kill a starving koala in a national park. (Nor can it be right to treat animals kindly or cruelly according to their status as ‘native’ or ‘introduced’. Keeping wombats in pens is deemed wrong, yet hens can be crowded together in cruel battery farms.) Some killing of wildlife is unavoidable, for all sorts of reasons; let’s accept that. But we shouldn’t tie our moral code to land tenures. Nature isn’t bound to national parks. It’s all around us.”
“In the future, many more animals will be living in our cities. For the most part, we should take some pleasure from this, from knowing that animals like to live among us, that we are not simply a destructive force, but also an ecosystem engineer opening opportunities for others… We can’t accept wildlife into cities on our terms. We can’t welcome in birds and butterflies and keep out bats and snakes. That’s neither realistic nor fair. What we can do instead is find fairer ways of resolving conflicts. … at home I’m doing my bit… to experience wildness so close to home is to live more fully and understand more deeply. The wilderness, after all, begins here.”
Many books about modern nature can be devastating, but New Nature is more confusing than anything else. It upends a moral philosophy around nature that leaves the reader in support of killing koalas and protecting foreign weeds. The kind of disruption to my perspective on the environment left me grappling for a coherent idea of how to carry my love and respect for the living world. It is honest and unrelenting, while still appealing to my love for Australia’s wildlife. In its wake I feel like I hold a more honest and nuanced appreciation of all the animals and plants around me.
Low explains how much of our modern nature is new. Far more than the obvious exceptions in the landscape. It’s not just the English starlings and escaped house cats. The parrots, redbacka and pigeons that have inhabited Australia for millennium, have only very recently expanded far beyond outback pockets to dominate the entire continent. The very idea of ‘native’ and ‘natural’ are put to question. Low strips me of any illogical or flawed criteria I can muster to decide what truly ‘belongs’ in Australia, leaving only my empathy for life to guide me.
Low’s opening salvos predictably strike at disastrous and abominable land and fisheries management practices across Australia. This attack is less predictably followed by strikes on much celebrated actions in support of wildlife both historical and present. The huge damage that can be done by well-intentioned actions like planting natives in the garden, building bird houses and frog ponds, and removing weeds is surprising. Low’s arguments seem strange when brought out of context, but it’s hard to disagree with his conclusions as he makes them (thoroughly citing sources and experts along the way). In short, attempts we make to support wildlife that aren’t backed by scientific rigour often serve only to assist the animals already doing well, reinforcing their dominance over other animals that grow scarcer and scarcer as a consequence.
Despite operating with the unstated goal of confounding any existing relationship the reader has with nature, Tim Low clearly writes out of appreciation for the entirety of the natural world. He shows an obvious appreciation of the small, and the not so grandiose. Low takes the time to demonstrate a passion for the minute diversity in a flat grass field, or disused farm, rather than ogling only at forested mountains and rugged coastlines.
After abruptly deconstructing what we think of as natural, Low does not leave us to wallow in despair that there can be no clear good that can be done for wildlife. He asks us to be realistic. To consider what we want out of conservation. For this he has a beautiful answer: Conservation should not be the practice of preserving the past, or relenting to a future, nor celebrating any specific ecological arrangement. What we should preserve is the process of change. The continuity between past and future.
“I love the old nature, the Australia that prevailed before Europeans came. But I also salute the new - the animals and plants carving out new careers in new milieux”
We should not let the difficult problems that face us in conservation to cause us to falter, or fall back to a hands-off neglect. Conservation is intervention and intervention isn’t easy.
I will end my review with two passages that capture the essence of this book that I cannot summarise better than Low has already done himself.
“Animals shouldn’t be treated kindly or cruelly according to lines on a map. It can’t be right to kill thousands of flying foxes in an orchard (or botanic garden) but wrong to kill a starving koala in a national park. (Nor can it be right to treat animals kindly or cruelly according to their status as ‘native’ or ‘introduced’. Keeping wombats in pens is deemed wrong, yet hens can be crowded together in cruel battery farms.) Some killing of wildlife is unavoidable, for all sorts of reasons; let’s accept that. But we shouldn’t tie our moral code to land tenures. Nature isn’t bound to national parks. It’s all around us.”
“In the future, many more animals will be living in our cities. For the most part, we should take some pleasure from this, from knowing that animals like to live among us, that we are not simply a destructive force, but also an ecosystem engineer opening opportunities for others… We can’t accept wildlife into cities on our terms. We can’t welcome in birds and butterflies and keep out bats and snakes. That’s neither realistic nor fair. What we can do instead is find fairer ways of resolving conflicts. … at home I’m doing my bit… to experience wildness so close to home is to live more fully and understand more deeply. The wilderness, after all, begins here.”
December 27, 2011
well written, full of facts, not too pedantic, but a bit dated now (i would be interested to see his thoughts on global warning now, a decade after he wrote this) book about "nature" and "humans" and how we are nature, yeah but sure, we shit BIG in our and our animal and plant neighbors nests, but in certain cases animals and plants are THRIVING because of the messes and disruptions we create through land clearing, fire, fire suppression, water manipulation, etc... almost exclusively Australian, Tasmanian and new Zealand examples, but perfectly valid for universal truths about life on earth. There are niches to exploit and good exploiters thrive while non-competitive life generally declines, to the point of disappearance (more extinctions now than reasonably expected because of human's exploitations and messes). So, though rather elementary in it's premise that we are all connected, humans are life on earth just like the billions of nematodes you walk on every day, and what we do affects that life in myriad ways, lots of bad yes, but lots of good too, shoot, we are feeding more humans now than ever before (though granted, not well, or fairly). But basically this book points out what indians and aborigines have known for 10,000's of years, pay attention, think ahead a least 490 years when you make decisions, especially those that affect other lives, plants, air, water, about exploiting or changing things, and know that you are no more important than the blade of grass you chew on while contemplating these truths. :) [note, this book is EXTREMELY hard to find in usa, so library of congress may be your best bet, or go to Tasmania!]
July 1, 2014
I got about half way through this book and had to give up. It's a long rant using many native Australian examples. Don't get me wrong, it's very interesting, but probably more so for an Australian native ecologist. I may give it another try once I'm not doing ecology during the day as well... Goodreads definitely needs a way to add "books I gave up on".
January 19, 2018
An amazing book, particularly because its focus is primarily on Australian ecology, even though Low's approach could be applied to any environment. I also liked the focus on Australia because this continent has had such a long history of human occupation, and as such this book forms another key work amongst many I've read lately (The Biggest Estate on Earth comes to mind first and foremost) that questions just how 'wild' and 'natural' the Australian environment is.
May 21, 2025
Tim Low avoids all the usual cliches often associated with conservation, and which rely on black and white answers to complex issues. The New Nature delves deeply into the history and changing philosophies in conservation which have led to the current challenges in Australia. A wonderful, and inspiring book, where every reader can feel empowered to act to the advantage of nature.
June 29, 2020
Explores the fascinating, unexpected & complex ways species have adapted to humanity's disruption. There is no 'pure state of nature', and rarely simple good or bad outcomes. Wish I'd read this 20 years ago.
January 15, 2018
A very thought-provoking book, challenging our ideas about 'nature', the natural environment and conservation.
December 19, 2022
Thanks Tim, now I can't not notice how many birds are in the, probably not quite native, trees outside my house. Shocked to hear about bin chickens in QLD though
March 5, 2017
Not an easy book to read if you are one of those peace-love-mungbeans types. A very honest, down to earth discourse on the state of our country. And some hard, cold facts which we need to face, acknowledge and either fix or otherwise learn to live with. Great book, highly recommended for those who genuinely care about the future of our various environments.
March 19, 2021
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Dense forests made of paperbarks and hybrid she-oak. Yellow crazy ants devouring red crabs. Cats-claw creeper choking forests."
April 6, 2020
So many complex issues that I had never thought of. Book really enlightened me to how little I know about these issues and I will think twice before voicing my opinion about things like culling and fire management and preserving natives etc in future. Far more complex than I could have ever imagined. Really grateful to have read this and have learnt how “nature” is evolving with us.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews