Living with the Anthropocene

You’re not alone.

Climate change is happening. Australia – and the world – is changing. On the Great Barrier Reef corals bleach white, across the inland farmers struggle with declining rainfall, in Tasmania forests that have never burned before are ablaze. Young and old alike are rightly anxious. Human activity is transforming the places we live in and love. In this extraordinarily powerful and moving book, leading Australian writers come together to reflect on what it is like to be alive during an ecological crisis as the physical world changes all around us. How do we hold onto hope?

In this moving and powerful book, some of Australia’s best-known writers and thinkers including Tony Birch, James Bradley, Sophie Cunningham, Delia Falconer, Ashley Hay, Iain McCalman, Ellen van Neerven, Jane Rawson and David Ritter reflect on how we might resist, protect, grieve, adapt and unite. These personal stories – many of them centred around objects - are more than individual responses. They build a picture of a collective endeavour towards cultures of care, respect, and attention – values and actions that we yearn be reflected in the institutions that have power to act on a scale that matches the complexity and enormity of the challenge.

Personal and urgent, this is a literary anthology for our age, the age of humans.