Tag Archive for: civilisation

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The Deluge | Stephen Markley

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while an ecological crisis looms. America is battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington DC, their stories unfold against a backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon up courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find hope in the face of staggering odds. Each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance of a future?

 

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

The Shaking City | Cath Drake

The shaking city of Australian poet Cath Drake’s debut poetry collection is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency, and the unease of the narrator who is far from home. Tall tales combine with a conversational style, playful humour and a lyrical assurance.​ The poet is able to work a wide set of diverse spells upon the reader through her adept use of tone, technique, plot and form. She is a welcome new voice for contemporary poetry.

“Cath Drake wants to grasp the world whole. When she looks at the past, it’s with a big rambunctious energy that has implications for the present. These are restless and generous poems, full of the vivid reality of people’s lives. Read them as a guide to staying clear-eyed, combative and caring in unsettled times.” ~ Philip Gross

“Cath Drake’s poems deftly explore conflict and the future of our changing, imperilled planet – in a poem about climate emergency, the narrator muses wryly “sometimes I hold world in one hand, my life / in the other”. This is a collection alive to dilemmas. Her writing is searching, witty and full of compassion, helping us navigate a shifting world.” ~ Helen Mort

“This joyful, exuberant, wildly imaginative collection exhorts us all to unmoor our minds, to “live among the strange and shining.” “ ~ Kate Potts

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Entropia | Samuel Alexander

When industrial civilisation collapsed in the third decade of the 21st century, a community living on a small island in the South Pacific Ocean found itself permanently isolated from the rest of the world. With no option but to build a self-sufficient economy with very limited energy supplies, this community set about creating a simpler way of life that could flourish into the deep future.

Determined above all else to transcend the materialistic values of the Old World, they made a commitment to live materially simple lives, convinced that this was the surest path to genuine freedom, peace, and sustainable prosperity. Seven decades later, in the year 2099, this book describes the results of their remarkable living experiment.

 

Read more about degrowth at May 2022’s Rebel Library Recommends: A Degrowth Special

Purchase Entropia at Hive online bookshop

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After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time | Charlotte Du Cann

What happens when the heroes disappear, when the battle for the city is over, when you return to the island and find a box in your hands? There was an instruction once that told us why the box should never be opened. But you don’t believe those stories anymore. You always open the box.

After Ithaca is a non-fiction work – part memoir, part essay, part travelogue – that follows a real life journey of descent in a world on the tip of crisis. It is set in the Peruvian rainforest, in the backrooms of Suffolk towns, in Japan, in France, Australia, in the desert borderlands, in borrowed houses and Occupy tents, in kitchens and burial chambers, underneath a lemon tree on an abandoned terrace…

The book revolves around the four initiatory tasks of Psyche, set by Venus, the goddess of love and justice: four territories that map this search for meaning and coherence in a time of fall. Each chapter starts with a memory of place as a clue to the investigation: the recovery of a relationship with wild nature, with being human, a kind of archaeology for the pieces of self that lie missing beneath a broken storyline, like the shards of a pot.

It is a personal story and also a social story, about the relinquishment of a certain world, that looks at writing as an existential practice: showing how myth can be a technique for finding our lost voice, our medicine of how to put a crooked thing straight.

How to pull ourselves out of the wreckage, and start again.

 

Purchase After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time at Dark Mountain Books

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Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World | Tyson Yunkaporta

This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrodinger’s cat. Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.

‘As consequences of civilisation squeeze modernity in a death grip, connecting with the ancestral world, breaking out of our box of time, is perhaps the most radical act any of us can do.

In his startling manual Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Tyson Yunkaporta describes five ways of seeing from an Aboriginal perspective – kinship mind, storytelling mind, dreaming mind, ancestor mind and pattern mind. All five help perceive the land and ourselves within it, kin with creatures, rivers, rocks and sky. This knowledge is embedded in ritual, storytelling and practice that hold communities and cultures together, so human beings can be ‘custodial’ for places and living beings. We have a thousand-year clean up ahead of us, Yunkaporta tells us, and generously hands us the imaginative tools to begin the work.’ – Charlotte Du Cann, guest contributor to May 2022’s Rebel Library Recommends

 

Purchase Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World from Hive online bookshop

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The Wall | Marlen Haushofer

‘The air trembled, gold and green and clear, at the edges of the forest.’ A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.

This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one’s name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.

‘Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling.’ Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love

 

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The Last Quarter of the Moon | Chi Zijian

‘A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.’

At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel.

Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it.

‘An atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia – nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries… This is a fitting tribute to the Evenki by a writer of rare talent’ Financial Times

 

See more from Penguin Vintage Earth