Crimes Against Nature

capitalism and global heating
Jeff Sparrow

‘Sparrow tells these stories with the lucidity and animation of a true crime podcast. He dissects the reactionary nature of placing mankind in opposition to nature: it not only erases millennia of Indigenous peoples’ relative harmony with the natural world, but seeks to preserve nature for the select few destroying it for everyone else. He is fearless too in his criticism of progressives who write off their fellow citizens as uncaring and complicit in global warming. That corporations invested in such sophisticated public relations campaigns shows they “understand something about ordinary peoples that escapes many environmentalists”: that ordinary people are not “innately greedy or selfish” … Amid the doom and gloom of so much contemporary environmentalism, this is worthy of applause.’

Conrad Landin, The Saturday Paper

‘Sparrow is one of Australia's leading public intellectuals, and Crimes Against Nature is both provocative and deeply considered … Get ready for a myth-shattering call to arms.’

SALife

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‘The common narrative that pits humanity against nature assumes that our “innate greed” implicates us all in climate change. The environmental movement, too, buys into this myth with its longing for pristine wilderness unspoiled by humankind, argues Jeff Sparrow. This urgent, incisive work resoundingly refutes this arbitrary divide by showing how industrialisation, in the hands of the wealthy and powerful, drove a wedge between ordinary people and the natural world. Hence, the simplistic “jobs versus environment” binary that stymies our current climate-change debate. The alternative, however, is right under our noses. “In pre-capitalist Australia, humans did not despoil the land.” They worked in harmony with it, enhancing nature rather than plundering it. And it was a collective endeavour. It is in this understanding of human nature that Sparrow finds hope.’

Cameron Woodhead & Fiona Capp, The Sydney Morning Herald

A polemic about global warming and the environmental crisis, which argues that ordinary people have consistently opposed the destruction of nature and so provide an untapped constituency for climate action.

Crimes Against Nature uses fresh material to offer a very different take on the most important issue of our times. It takes the familiar narrative about global warming — the one in which we are all to blame — and inverts it, to show how, again and again, pollution and ecological devastation have been imposed on the population without our consent and (often) against our will. From histories of destruction, it distils stories of hope, highlighting the repeated yearning for a more sustainable world.

In the era of climate strikes, viral outbreaks, and Extinction Rebellion, Crimes Against Nature moves from ancient Australia to the ‘corpse economy’ of Georgian Britain to the ‘Kitchen Debate’ of the Cold War, to present an unexpected and optimistic environmental history — one that identifies ordinary people not as a collective problem but as a powerful force for change.

Conrad Landin, The Saturday Paper

‘Sparrow is one of Australia's leading public intellectuals, and Crimes Against Nature is both provocative and deeply considered … Get ready for a myth-shattering call to arms.’

SALife

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Details

Format:Paperback

Size: 234mm × 153mm

Extent:240pp

ISBN (13):9781922310705

RRP:$32.99

Pub date:2 Nov 2021

Rights Held: World

High-res cover:Download Image

AWARDS

2023 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction - Short-listed

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AUTHOR

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and Walkley Award–winning journalist. He is a columnist for The Guardian Australia, a former Breakfaster at Melbourne’s 3RRR, and a past editor of Overland literary journal. His most recent books are Fascists Among Us: online hate and the Christchurch massacre; Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right; and No Way But This: in search of Paul Robeson. He lectures at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at The University of Melbourne.