Beyond Green: The Social Life of Australian Nature

(Paperback)

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How are we to think about nature and the environment

The idea of nature as it relates to culture, society and humans has always been in constant flux and highly contested.

Lesley Head interrogates the ways the cultures of nature have operated in Australia across time, and how these ways of thinking and being limit our capacity to deal with the challenges of the climate change and biodiversity crises. Drawing on her lifes work and lessons she has picked up along the way, Head suggests that it is up to us to attentively listen, the better to destabilise and subvert dominant narratives, and to imagine new possibilities. She believes we have the nous, resources and lessons from Indigenous, settler-descendant and immigrant cultures to reduce risk in the face of the unexpected and the unimaginable.

In Beyond Green, the story of nature and people weaves research and personal experience through many different times and spaces, offering new ways of understanding. It is a richly creative engagement with the abundant possibilities and pleasure of nature as a place of regeneration that is as warned by the rawk of the crow as it is accompanied by the carolling of magpies.

Author Bio

Lesley Head has been professor of Geography at the University of Wollongong and the University of Melbourne. Her research has shaped international debates about relationships between humans and nature from the deep past to the present. Her recent work focuses on the cultural dimensions of environmental issues including climate change. She has been King Carl XVI Gustaf Visiting Professor in Environmental Sciences, Sweden, and President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Heads recent books include Plants: Past, Present and Future (with Zena Cumpston and Michael-Shawn Fletcher) and Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene. Her work was shortlisted for The Nature Conservancys 2023 Nature Writing Prize.