#BlackLivesMatter in nature
Racism and the outdoors, plus a review of Angela Rockel's Rogue Intensities
Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I review nature books, and think about nature-related topics out loud. Thanks for reading!
News
There’s only one thing that most of us have been thinking about for the past couple of weeks. The #BlackLivesMatter protests have swept the world with a welcome tide of change. I see it coming and I’m glad of it.
All my life, I’ve benefited from our current system in ways I’ll never even know. So I have a lot of learning to do about all this, and am in no position to lecture anyone. But I’m including some links in the spirit of sharing resources. Feel free to let me know if you’ve read anything particularly good, too!
One thing that’s struck me in the past few weeks (and I’m aware of my privilege in only noticing it recently) is that racism is really, truly, everywhere, from publishing to fashion to gardening. So of course it has a bearing on how we experience nature, too. That was made abundantly clear by the story of Christian Cooper, the Black birdwatcher who filmed a white woman calling 911 and reporting that he was threatening her after he asked her to leash her dog.
And this week I learned that racial justice and climate justice are inextricably intertwined.
We know that there is no climate justice without racial justice. The exploitation of black people is the greatest extractive system of production of all time and in order to heal the planet, we must have black and indigenous liberation.
That’s Alexandria Villaseñor, co-founder of the US Youth Climate Strike and founder of Earth Uprising (all at only 15 years old), quoted by Inside Climate News.
Police violence is an aspect of a broader pattern of structural violence, which the climate crisis is a manifestation of.
That’s Sam Grant, executive director of MN350.org, part of international climate activist group 350.org, quoted in The New York Times. Racial justice is implicated in climate justice because it’s never rich white people who suffer first from climate change, and because if we want a better world, we need to eliminate racism.
This is a great explainer if the links between climate justice and racial justice are hard to wrap your head around (they were for me!).
The above articles focus on the US, but all this of course applies here too. Racism and nature coalesce in a particularly ugly way in Australia, where Indigenous people never ceded sovereignty over their land. And none of this is safely in the past: mining company Rio Tinto just destroyed a sacred Aboriginal site that was 46,000 years old, and BHP was, until this week, planning to pulverise 40 more sacred sites. An Indigenous child was just assaulted by a police officer whose boss excused the attack by saying he had “had a bad day”. (Check out the hair-raising history of the Australian police force here.) Our own Prime Minister just denied the documented history of slavery in Australia. I haven’t had to dig deep to find these examples: they all occurred within the past few days.
If you haven’t watched this, please do:
So we know the problems. What do we do? Donations are always great (recurring donations are best). Learning is good too. I’ve found this course very enlightening: it’s a MOOC (massive online open course) from the University of Sydney about Aboriginal Sydney. It’s absolutely packed with resources.
And brilliant books to read on the topic of Indigenous people in Australia include Bill Gammage’s The Greatest Estate on Earth, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (I reviewed his book Salt here), and Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, edited by Anita Heiss. Other incredible Indigenous authors to read: Melissa Lucashenko, Claire G. Coleman, Tara June Winch, Alexis Wright, Tyson Yunkaporta. And more!
In other news, the June-July issue of ELLE Australia is now on sale - the last before we take a publishing break (returning with our October issue). In this one, I spoke to Jenna Leo, co-founder of Home Care Heroes, about loneliness; wrote a finance special addressing the COVID crisis; and ran an extract of Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s brilliant memoir Something That May Shock and Discredit You, a funny, painful exploration of his coming to terms with being trans. (Another topic in the news right now.) I’m proud of this issue (particularly as we produced it remotely), so if any of that appeals, check it out!
What I’m reading
Thanks to a recommendation by Instagram/Twitter friend and turbo reader Michael (check out @wtb_michael on your fave social media platform for other great book recs and bird photos), I’m reading Angela Rockel’s Rogue Intensities.
Rockel is a Kiwi who’s been living in Tasmania for 40 years, and has written a rare and beautiful book that celebrates and explores the landscape she’s embedded herself in. “This place moves through me; it shapes me as I attend to it,” she writes.
The book is structured as a journal covering five years, with each month getting its own chapter in the form of a brief essay encompassing all kinds of natural history, weather, wildlife, etymology, empire… the scope of her knowledge is broad and deep. The chapter titled Steam, for example, which covers October of the first year, begins with a description of the outdoor, wood-fire-heated bath she and her husband T have set up near their house, and describes the birds and plants she can see from that blissful vantage point. The bath’s elemental makeup of metal, water and fire prompts a reflection on the earth’s geothermic processes, the history of iron production and the Taoist theory of the elements. Rockel has Irish ancestry, which she explores throughout the book, and so then the chapter tells of the Great Hunger of the 19th century and the consequent Irish diaspora, which led to her own ancestors moving to Aotearoa New Zealand. Back in the bath, there are more nature observations, before she elegantly ties together the disparate elements of her thoughts:
Spat out like lava, each human wave burns, cools, weathers to earth and ore, part of a new community, a new life. Here we are.
At the end of each short chapter, I’m amazed by the web of connections she has woven between each topic, and have to go back to the start to piece together how she’s done it. Interestingly, Rockel is entirely conscious of her process of creation:
I notice what brings itself to my attention, what leaps forward and stays with me. I let sensations connect, walk myself into rhythm until a beat begins - a word and a word and a word from the world. Attention and event - warp and weft of the text-cloth as a phrase begins to form.
And her process is rooted in place:
“Just to make space for myself was the reason I wrote at first; now I do it to wake myself up, my tongue stumbling on the edge of freedom, here with the ghosts in the deep-scuffed circle under the tree in this place that keeps speaking itself again, again.”
In its extraordinary breadth of knowledge, intricate structure and beautiful writing, Rogue Intensities reminds me of The Morville Hours, which I reviewed here. It’s another book that will reward repeated reads, I know. Can’t recommend it enough.
This was book #54 for 2020. I’ve also been reading:
Brigid Delaney’s Wellmania
Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, edited by Anita Heiss
Angela Rockel’s Rogue Intensities
James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare
Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Living on Stolen Land
See you in two weeks!