What is the point of writing about nature?
A talk I did, with too many photos: sorry if it breaks your email
Last week I did a short talk for the City of Hobart’s Creative Hobart forum on Art & the Environment. The organisers asked each of seven presenters to talk about our creative practice and how it might affect environmental awareness. The other artists were amazing; have a look at the line-up, then search out their work.
We each presented in a format of 20 slides - images only - 20 seconds per slide. Below is my talk, with some of the egregiously copyright-breaching images removed.
My name is Jane Rawson. I write stories, essays and novels that try to rethink how we humans relate to nature, whatever that is, and that try to influence how we think about climate change. I acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people on whose land I am standing today, and your millennia-long, sophisticated relationship with nature.
My history of thinking about nature is a lot shorter. In my professional life I have been writing about extinction, climate change, and energy issues only since the 1990s. This is still what I do for money: writing for the Tasmanian Land Conservancy. There is creativity in this writing, and even a little imagination, so I’ll cover it briefly before I get onto my novels.
I launched into adulthood thinking words could change the world. I studied journalism because I believed that, if people were given the facts about nature, injustice, poverty, most of them would behave differently and the world would become a better place.
I eventually worked as environment editor at The Conversation, helping scientists turn their research into readable news stories. Back then, in 2010, I believed – along with many environmentalists – that if people understood more about climate change, the world would cut its emissions. All we had to do was raise awareness and things would get better.
Communications research has shown it’s not true. Facts don’t change minds. Quite the opposite: They often entrench opinions. If as writers we don’t understand and speak to the values and opinions of readers, even those we disagree with, we can’t make much difference.
Raising awareness is all very well, but knowing climate change is happening and we need to reduce emissions doesn’t help much when you’re facing the resistance of selfishly bloody-minded fossil fuel companies, right-wing media empires, and the politicians and economists who are in their thrall.
So, my paid work is still mostly about facts and raising awareness, because I’m writing for people who already know and care about nature, and want to help. But what has what I’ve learnt meant for my work as a novelist and essayist? What is it I’m trying to do when I write creatively and with imagination about nature and about climate change?
I’ve written three novels and a non-fiction book on these themes. A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, a novel published ten years ago, is set in Melbourne in 2030. It’s hot too often. The rivers flood, transport infrastructure is flaky; so is power and water. Everything’s a bit tougher, but not dramatically so.
I wanted to help people imagine a possible climate changed future but in a familiar place. But I also created a world where imagined things have begun seeping into the real world – I wanted to talk about how powerful our minds can be in creating a future or getting fruitlessly lost in the past.
In 2014 I co-wrote The Handbook, a guide to surviving climate change. It included info on living through fires and floods, and dealing with panic and grief about the way the world is. Back then, most people didn’t think climate change would affect them. I wanted them to imagine how it would, and feel motivated to struggle for change.
In 2017’s From the Wreck, a shipwreck survivor meets an alien in 1860s Port Adelaide, and everyone gets hurt. It’s about how humans make aliens out of other animals and punish them for their strangeness. It talks about how we might be less lonely and angry if we could see the personhood of other creatures.
And last year’s A History of Dreams is about a group of young women in 1930s Adelaide using very mild witchcraft to fight a rising Nazi government. Really it is about years of caring about the environment, and how to keep caring and fighting when the cause seems lost. It is about how friendship, joy and imagination can help give us strength and new ideas.
Australian literary novels can hope to sell around 2,000 copies. Do I believe my creative writing has helped nature, has slowed climate change? With those numbers, not really. And as far as I can tell, novels aren’t like environmental fundraising emails. When they set out to change behaviour, they rarely succeed.
But novels can broaden and shift readers’ conception of the world and their place (and responsibilities) in it. And they point out how weird things are, how unsettled, and how open to change. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, a novel can open our eyes to the cracks in the world, and those cracks are how the light gets in.
Writing is how I sort out my ideas and feelings about my role in climate change and ecocide. It helps me figure out where to direct my energy. It reminds me of my love of and duty to the world. Leonard Cohen again says, ‘the future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities towards yourself and your work and your love.’ Ring the bells that still will ring.
Reading rarely changes minds, I think, but it can change feelings. It can make you more tender, more open. I’d like to share a poem by Lucille Clifton, ‘mother tongue.’
True, this isn’t paradise
but we come at last to love it
for the sweet hay and the flowers rising,
for the corn lining up row on row
for the mourning doves who open the darkness with song,
for warm rains
and forgiving fields,
and for how, each day,
something that loves us
tries to save us
With my writing I’m striving towards something like this.
There are feelings I hope to leave my readers with. To stop for a moment and see the beautiful, perfect world we live in, that we’ve evolved to flourish in and with. To want to fix what’s broken so that we can keep having that world and these lives. To not feel powerless but to know we can change the structures of society, that we can make repairs.
To feel the strength that comes from seeing how things really are and imagining how things could be different. Nature writer Barry Lopez talks about that imaginative leap, of ‘stepping into the treacherous void between oneself and the confounding world, to be staggered by the breadth, the intricacy, the possibilities’.
Our social structures, our economy and most importantly our attitude to nature – all of these are things humans dreamed up between ourselves. We can imagine them differently. In a small way, that’s why I write and what I hope my writing will do – show us this world is full of cracks and that like water, our imaginations can wear away the rocks of what we take for granted.
Thank you
Cooking
While I’m using way more photos than substack is comfortable with, how about this quince jelly? I have been a slave to fruit the past few weeks, weighed down with gifts of apples (stewed and frozen; a pie; apple and blackberry jelly that didn’t set), pears (pear and ginger cake; bottled) and quinces (poached, and quince jelly). I have not finished the last ten rows of the second sleeve of my jumper, in case you wondered.
Oh and chutney from pears! I am very lucky to have kind friends, neighbors and family provisioning me with fruit. I will survive the end times on a diet of jam.