Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Edited by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner and Jenny Newell, NewSouth, $34.99.
Some of Australia’s best-known writers reflect on their own personal journeys grappling with climate change, disappearing species, soil exhaustion, air pollution and other challenges of the Anthropocene.
More than 40 stories and reflections are on the subject of the Anthropocene, a label of the current era of enormous, human-driven ecological change. The essays bear witness to how diverse Australians are experiencing the current ‘storm of our own making’. These range from grieving environmental declines to long-form contributions employing a number of circumstances to think about our role in these falloffs, and how we might act to diminish them.
The editors say that in creating this book, they are trying to build a small shelter at the heart of this maelstrom. A place for pausing and sitting quietly, sharing our stories, and finding space and fellow travellers with whom we might make plans.
Living with the Anthropocene is not so much a guidebook as a companion to help see us through these dark times. It’s a modest contribution to the work of fostering a national community empowered and enabled to help us adapt to the changes that are occurring and are to come, to prevent worse from happening, and to imagine and strike towards positive futures.
We all see the Anthropocene happening – the turmoil, grief and disruption, the worst of it — but we should also find ways to keep coming together around our shared predicament, tell our stories, gather strength from company, draw resolve from grief and create acts of care.
In the first essay, Tony Birch observes how we traverse this Anthropocene “will determine the life and death of human and non-human species.”
