Most of us are now frighteningly familiar with the genres of writing devoted to the topic of climate change and ecological collapse: any number of excellent, intelligent and well-researched books from the last decade back to Silent Spring [by Rachel Carson, published in 1962]. They told us what we needed to do, then what we should have done, then what we actually did, and now what we must do, if we wish to have any hope at all of survival. I suspect many of us stopped reading them years ago, not because we do not care and not because we do not recognize the problem, but because we simply can no longer cope with this collapse that seems so far beyond our individual power to change.
Petrified. Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth, by Joshua Wodak, a lecturer on ecology at several Australian universities, is not one of those books. It summarily bypasses the idea that we can now somehow salvage what we have put in motion and also assumes that our future desperate attempts to save ourselves will not engender any fundamental changes to the anthropocentric attitudes that got us here in the first place. Instead, it asks us a simple question: How, as sentient humans, do we want to live here at the end of life on earth as we know it? How can we come to terms with both our collective guilt and our individual remorse? How can we face down the imminent collapse of the ecosystems that support us and every other lifeform on the planet and remain humane, sane, optimistic and kind? What useful, compassionate posture can any human being adopt now that we are already this deep into the rupture? And why, in fact, does our posture matter?
Culture pop
Petrified is a highly unusual meditation, part science, part philosophy, part pop-culture acid trip, on how we as humans might choose to live during the current rupture. It almost entirely ignores both the academic and popular vocabularies we have become accustomed to when discussing the Anthropocene, rather taking the reader on a sometimes disorienting and sometimes exhilarating rollercoaster ride that swerves from traditional and pop-cultural foreshadowing of this and other ends-of-the-world to hard science and philosophy and back again to our real, lived experience of the rupture as it unfolds.
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