Environment and climate

All three books help characterize how and in what ways digital solutions are featuring in environmentalism and to what end. More data about environmental systems and models are certainly useful, but asking how the data animates new forms of collective action is critical.

I’m tramping along a railway embankment in the wake of a Bankstown train, clinging to a cyclone fence for dear life.

I can’t quite recall why I stepped off the path on that particular day and headed towards the rocky southern end of Newcastle Beach, where nobody goes.

It’s definitely possible never to notice the wondrous activity of plants beneath bark, beneath soil. Maybe the same could be said for turning a blind eye to images of plants, right under our noses.

That summer seems long ago now. At the time I couldn’t write it down. I read accounts by people who experienced the fires and those in cities affected by poor air quality and had a writer’s guilt that I should be part of the conversation.

We are edging unsteadily out of the pandemic, into the rainstorm, into a world in which we might, finally, be able to hug with abandon. Fire, Flood, Plague, and others like it, have magnified voices that speak to the inequities of Australian society.

But Latour’s version of politics means not treating non-human agents as mere externalities, as in, we used to think that the weather had nothing to do with politics. But now the changing weather, reacting to what we have done with carbon, is a revolutionary agent. It is arguably the most important political actor of the last few decades, in that we can’t afford not to calculate its effects: bringing down national leaders, changing voting patterns, defunding scientific expertise and the arts, everything.

Reading the losses arrayed in this anthology to write this review – even as they were tempered by expressions of joy or hope at ecological resilience, or calls for action – I felt somewhat overwhelmed. In that state, I recalled the classic Freudian account of melancholy as a mourning of loss that becomes pathological, because it is perpetual.

There is no single solution to the climate crisis. But neither is there an inevitable outcome. Both assumptions are forms of magical thinking that obscure much more complicated realities. Coming decades are going to be unimaginably difficult, and as societies and cultures struggle to transform themselves some will succeed better than others. There is no question there will be loss, and pain, and fear, or that there will be mistakes and defeats as well as successes. But fixating on collapse, and assuming the story can have only one ending elides not just the possibility of future change, but also the change that is already taking place. We need libraries and lifeboats, but we also need to recognise that history keeps happening, and that in the middle of transformative change and upheaval it is often difficult to see what lies on the other side.

Nonfiction-as-speculation feels oxymoronic. The two words tug against each other, ‘nonfiction’ leaning toward documentation, ‘speculation’ toward imagining. A strange hybrid genre results that strives to offset the bloodless abstraction of scientific projections and the future’s unreality.