Nature in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Abstract This thesis is comprised of two parts—a work of nonfiction, Six Capitals, and a scholarly dissertation, Country Manifest—which investigate the vital contemporary relationship between western economics and the natural world. Six Capitals charts the breakdown of economic measures of wealth and conceptions of nature in the face of ecological crises and the advent of the networked computer. It argues that the measures that underpin industrial capitalism and today govern the global economy are inadequate for an age of climate change. This has brought attempts to measure previously unmeasured realms of wealth, figured as ‘capital’, such as ‘natural capital’ and ‘social capital’. Six Capitals argues that this proposed new system of measurement is not enough to address the contemporary crises in nature. Instead, a new corporation and a new conception of nature in western law are required. Country Manifest examines five novels by Alexis Wright and Kim Scott published after the 1992 Mabo Decision which overturned the legal concept of terra nullius in Australia. The novels are Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013); and Scott’s Benang: From the heart (1999) and That Deadman Dance (2010). Drawing on ecocriticism, it examines their portrayal of two conflicting conceptions of land: Aboriginal conceptions of land as ‘Country’, a vibrant ecological system with agency to which humans belong; and western constructions of land as inert property owned by humans to be developed for profit. It argues that the novels privilege the former over the latter understanding of land and in so doing rewrite the continent as ‘black land’. Through its focus on ‘black land’ this thesis reintroduces ‘landscape’ to Australian literary criticism and shows it to be of new significance in the twenty-first century, and argues this has implications for a planet faced with climate change and other ecological crises. Six Capitals and Country Manifest are related by their mutual engagement with questions about the value of the natural world and human conceptions of it. In both economic constructions of nature are shown to be damaging to the natural world and complicit in contemporary ecological crises.