A couple of years later there was no water, and cotton went bust.

What does it mean when a place is considered so degraded or lacking that it doesn’t matter? We saw the consequences of this kind of thinking in 2014, when the federal government tried to strip 74,000 hectares of Tasmania’s forests from the World Heritage register. It justified its claim by declaring parts of this tract had been ‘disturbed’ by human activity. You can see it in the infamous New South Wales native vegetation laws. The restrictions on clearing do not cover anything that has grown since 1983: those trees are considered ‘regrowth’. According to this thinking, broken places can never be loved, never cared for. They are permanently open to exploitation – they don’t matter, they are spoiled, damaged, they don’t count.

American writer Barbara Kingsolver says iconic places such as the Amazon rainforests or the Arctic tundra ‘have a power that speaks for itself, that seems to throw its own grandeur as a curse on the defiler’. She wonders who would complain if someone muddied her own Horse Lick Creek in Jackson County, a place that is ‘nobody’s idea of wilderness’. What do we do with the broken places – with the polluted, the weedy, the cleared, the eroded – with the places not regarded as beautiful, romantic, or inspiring? Do we seek refuge in privileged places such as national parks and carefully tended gardens? Do we just adapt, move on, put the uncomfortable behind us – throw all our efforts into what’s left or what might be?

In his book The River (1974), Eric Rolls shared a story about introducing his first wife, Joan, to the Namoi River. It was the middle of summer and the river was losing an inch of water a day. Joan wasn’t impressed with the sight before her. Rolls said, ‘If Joan thought it was a toad, it was no use me trying to argue the warts off it. She had to see it differently for herself.’ I have long admired Rolls’s understated approach. He doesn’t try to sell it, doesn’t try to dress it up; he just asks for time and consideration.

Maria Tumarkin

In a recent issue of Griffith Review, Maria Tumarkin argued that society’s cult of ‘telling your story’, from reality television, to branding, to artsy ‘story slams’, risks emptying narrative of all power. When we smooth out the wrinkles, when we leave people feeling comfortable, when we strive for the transcendental, we risk losing the ‘friction-and-silence-laden spaces’ created by telling and listening. ‘Narrative, when fetishized,’ warned Tumarkin, ‘can become an evolved and brilliantly disguised way of shutting our ears to what hurts and scares us the most.’ Writing in Aeon, Julian Baggini coined ‘Generation TED’: a culture, he said, that ‘takes serious ideas and turns them into play, packages big subjects into small parcels, and makes negativity the deadliest of sins’. The broken has no place here. Against the expectation to end every narrative with neat and comfortable hope, might there be some value in considering the broken?

It was my affection for the river I grew up on in western New South Wales that forced me to consider the broken. It is a river that suffers thermal pollution for 300 kilometres down its course. It was too toxic to swim in some summers. One day it might be too salinised to drink from. It feeds a wetlands that once teemed with different species of fish and birdlife, but when I first visited these marshes the reed beds had shrunk and so much soil had blown away that the ancient camp ovens of the Wailwan had begun to emerge from the ground – dark, accusing mounds of ash and fossilised fat. I am drawn to this place, though; it has taught me in its gritty way about hardship and livelihoods, about violence and identity, and about nature on this continent.

Oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill approaches the coast of Mobile, Ala., 2010

What if we gaze into the broken? I don’t mean the nostalgia of ‘ruin porn’: rather, I mean spend time with the broken, with what makes us uncomfortable, to think long about the places we’d prefer to turn away from, to allow these places, in the words of Trebbe Johnson, to ‘disarrange’ us. During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Johnson noticed her friends switching channels whenever images of dying animals flashed up on television. Johnson decided to delve into the broken, camping in a clear-cut forest. She and her companions, rather than feeling helpless and disgusted at the destruction, began to see it as a place worth caring about. ‘You don’t abandon a friend when he gets sick’, wrote Johnson in Orion.

We are all implicated in broken country. I can still hear that businessman’s words, ‘Everyone needs cotton, mate.’ Rural heartlands provide for our material demands and biological nourishment, yet few of us know much about them or give much thought to them. Sites of agricultural production are the world’s main ‘shadow places’. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood drew attention to a flaw in the way many environmental writers were advocating love and connection to one’s place as a way of preserving ecological integrity. Rather than celebrating special places, or striving for self-sufficiency, Plumwood argued, we should start from the ‘materialist end’, taking responsibility for the places we ‘don’t know about, don’t want to know about, and in a commodity regime don’t ever need to know about’. The enjoyment of homes and places of recreation, such as Central Park in New York or the nature reserves at Sydney’s edges, has been made possible by ‘sacrificing’ rural lands to the disorder of industrial agriculture. Shadow places are out of sight, out of mind, and thus easier to discount.

Gazing at the broken compels us to cast light on the ‘shadow places’, to dramatise the ‘slow violence’ of grinding ecological damage. This does not mean that we should set about fixing broken country, or restoring it to some idealised Eden, or making useless land work for industry. It is about finding a way to live with the broken, rather than discarding it. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand Country Almanac (1949) was part elegy, part devotion, for the broken. He was determined to find a way of working, of thinking, that would produce mutually beneficial relationships between humans and the rest of nature. Leopold wrote, ‘The individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts’ including soils, waters, plants, and animals, ‘or collectively: the land’. Long-term economic prosperity for landholders required a land ethic that engendered ‘respect’ for fellow members and the integrity of the community itself. Fractured social relationships, divided communities, and inequality can be causes as much as products of impoverished environments – how we treat each other is connected to how we treat the land.

I imagine a community of the broken. Terry Tempest Williams used the metaphor of the mosaic as ‘a conversation between what is broken’. It could, for example, unite the rural and urban. The toxic contamination at the DuPont and Orica factories in Sydney is a point of connection to the Pilliga Forest, where produced water from coal seam gas extraction mobilised radioactive material. It could stretch across borders, linking the Macquarie Marshes in New South Wales to the devastated Aral Sea in Central Asia. Could the broken meet across class, gender, and race? Could the conversation include all of us who are implicated in the creation of broken country, who are responsible for the shadow places?

What if we treated the broken not as something to fear, or to feel threatened by, but as places, people, and relationships that need understanding – not as symbols of defeat, but sites from which we can learn, that have much to tell us about ourselves and the rest of the living world?

As we enter the Anthropocene, it is perhaps broken country that is most in need of attention and care.