Environment

On the surface, this encyclopedic work offers a gloriously lyrical exploration of the sea. It could be part of a recent shoal of books about the more-than-human world, limning the wondrous and astonishing. In Deep Water: The world in the ocean, whales learn rhyme-like patterns to remember their songs, a ‘babel of strange, eerie sounds: skittering blips, long cries, whoops and basso moans’. A loggerhead turtle travels more than 37,000 kilometres to return to her birthplace. Sharks’ chemo-receptors prove acute enough to detect blood ‘in amounts as low as one part in a million’. Port Jackson sharks socialise with their peers, and evidence emerges that some fish species use tools.

Recently, mining giant Rio Tinto disturbed another ancient rock shelter in Australia’s Pilbara during a routine blast designed to ‘mimic’ the natural environment. This time, the company announced its transgression before it hit the headlines, presumably to avoid the kind of public outrage it faced after the Juukan Gorge incident in May 2020. What compelled Rio Tinto to admit wrongdoing, and to what effect? Does this pre-emptive mea culpa signal a new corporate sensitivity to Aboriginal culture and heritage, or is it a strategy to placate the Australian public so mining can continue? Analysing the factors that both enable and constrain mining on Indigenous peoples’ lands is the focus of Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh’s book Indigenous Peoples and Mining: A global perspective.

In Peter Wohlleben’s newest book, trees are characters, not commodities. In making his compelling case for a fresh approach to forestry, which values old-growth forests for their climate-cooling capacities, the acclaimed German forester treats trees as individuals with feelings, abilities, memories, and families. We are sometimes left to wonder what it means to say a tree feels emotions such as worry, surprise, and consideration for others, but this unapologetic anthropomorphism nevertheless invites empathy on the part of readers. It is easy to feel an affectionate second-hand embarrassment for the chestnut tree which ‘panicked’ in response to sudden rain by unfurling its blossoms too soon, or indignant on behalf of multi-centenarian beeches threatened by encroaching excavators. Seeing trees as sensate characters also provides a contrast with the unfeeling utilitarianism attributed to mainstream foresters; their industry comes off badly bruised.

Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? focuses on the unsolved disappearance of the eponymous figure. Hean was an environmental activist who vanished in 1972 while flying to Canberra to campaign against the destruction of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder, which was to be flooded for a hydro-electric scheme. The text is written by documentary film-maker Scott Millwood, who ‘offered a $100,000 reward for information that would lead to an answer to the mystery’.

To earn some money as a student in the late 1980s, I did a short stint at CSIRO Marine Laboratories in Perth, identifying deep-sea fish. I spent a couple of weeks up to my armpits in pale, preserved and squashed fish, which were extremely hard to identify, partly because of their misshapen form and lack of colour, but also because many of the species were entirely new to science. Some looked like old, flattened doughnuts and clearly lived on the seabed. Others were compressed sideways and had light-emitting organs on their sides, strange plate-like structures or razor-sharp serrations along their bellies, and were clearly more adapted to a mid-water mode of existence. But without exception, these fish were drab and dead as dead can be. I can only imagine what they must have been like when alive in their natural environment.

Ecopoetics is tricky terrain which, in these poems of ‘forest and water’, Louise Crisp encounters sometimes with agility, sometimes faltering. Perhaps that’s intended.

The cumulative effect of this collection is one of an overland trek, gradually ascending from ‘poisonous lowlands’ to the harsher, restorative air of ‘uplands’.

Val Plumwood, the author of a highly praised defence of eco-feminism, Feminism and Mastery of Nature, presents in this book a critique of ‘rationalist culture’ and explains why it harms nature as well as so many people. Plumwood’s criticism of rationalism centres on the thesis she advanced in her earlier book. From Plato onward, it has been regarded as rational to divide the world into polarised and homogeneous conceptual categories (reason/emotion, culture/nature, spirit/matter, masculine/feminine) and to regard things falling under the first term of these dichotomies as superior to those belonging to the second. This way of thinking, Plumwood argues, has given rationalists a licence to ignore the needs of beings deemed to be inferior – to dominate and exploit them for the sake of their ‘superiors’. In particular, it has been used to justify the domination of nature and of women.

We demand difference and variety in our lives – in the food we eat, in our friends, in our distractions and aversions. And we know that diversity is desperately needed in the biological world. There is debate, however, on how much is enough, and where the balance lies, and it’s hard to judge because we remain ignorant about natural processes.