All this talk about the fate of Earth has nothing to do with the planet’s tolerance for higher temperatures and everything to do with our species’ tolerance for self-delusion.
Nathaniel Rich

Our garden was lost: the self-sustaining environment where lions and lambs lay together, where blame and shame did not exist. RatKind’s garden exists in a surreal place beyond our inevitable ecological collapse: it portrays an unlikely, utopian/dystopian future of Boschian delights where all forms of intelligence, animal and vegetable, exist naked, accepted, nurtured and nurturing, hopeful. Rats, surviving on our garbage, have evolved with us, in vice and virtue: able to giggle, able to act with empathy or altruism, they grimace with fear, turn pink with pleasure, regret bad choices, suffer from anxiety, and strike out in anger. We loathe them as our stygian mirror. We fear them as carriers of disease even as we rely on them for 95% of our laboratory experiments. Developed from my para-autobiographical Jane series, ‘the rat’ is a manifestation of our subconscious, a totemic persona representing repressed knowledge that forms a barrier of willful self-delusion. Can we see beyond the face of a thing to the heart of a being? Can we take back the garden?