There has to be a novel in this somewhere. A writer awarded a large sum of money for a book which among many things touches on nature in crisis learns that that part of the prize is profit from fossil fuel investments. At the same time fossil fuel interests are wrecking a global summit set up to lessen their impact on nature.
With humanity struggling to get its collective head around the Anthropocene, the present man-made geological epoch marked by the double-headed climate and extinction crisis, some of the best insights are coming from contemporary fiction writers including our own Richard Flanagan.
A couple of weeks ago Flanagan’s book Question 7 was awarded the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, worth nearly $100,000. In his words, Flanagan delayed taking receipt of the prize money until the sponsor, Scottish investment company Baillie Gifford, put forward “a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuels and increase investment in renewable energy.”
I had not read Question 7, published last May, but the fuss around the prize pushed me into it, and once in I couldn’t escape. Wondrously conceived and crafted, it’s an engaging and deeply moving meditation on connected daisy chains of historical events and personal and family memories.
Question 7 is not fiction, but Flanagan has said it was written “in the spirit of a novel”. Questions about the meaning of love and life are teased out in vivid glimpses of his parents’ lives, in the effect on those lives of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and in the shaping of the bomb’s history by a love affair between the futurist HG Wells and an emerging feminist writer, Rebecca West.
Woven through the narrative is what is happening to the natural world that nurtured us. Industrial activity has seen what were perpetually wet Gondwana-remnant rainforests surrounding Flanagan’s childhood home in Rosebery transformed in recent decades into yet another fire-prone landscape.
At the heart of the book is the question of the title, from a story by the 19th century Russian writer Anton Chekhov, in which a puzzle about train timetables, apparently an exercise in rational thinking, ends with the startlingly incongruous question, “Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” Or as Flanagan reinterpreted, why do we do what we do to each other?
Rationality defeated by what we do, by life. There is no answer. There are just questions, one after the other after the other.
Questions like: Knowing what we know about environmental degradation, why do Tasmanian leaders keep blocking proper regulation of industries endangering our seas and aquifers and forests?
Why, facing a crisis that threatens to engulf humanity along with its natural life supports, are we going backwards while pretending to go forwards? Why are we unable to take the essential step to save us and leave fossil carbon where nature put it, in the ground?
Why did delegates at the recently-ended Baku climate summit, in Julian Cribb’s memorable words, vote “to cook their children and grandchildren alive”? Why has this rational UN process to save the natural world become hijacked by petro-states, with the apparent collusion of Australia, still claiming to be a leader in conservation diplomacy?
Given all that science has told us, why is Australia a leading coal and gas exporter? Why did the WA government lock in billions of tonnes of emissions by approving Woodside’s 50-year North West Shelf gas plan?
And in the dying days of this parliamentary year, why did the Albanese government effectively sanction native forest logging and Woodside’s 50-year licence by setting aside plans years in the making to strengthen weak, long-neglected environmental laws?
There is nothing rational in any of this. If the house is burning down you don’t quibble over family disagreements or neighbours’ attitudes or what might happen to the property’s value – and you certainly don’t keep adding fuel. You put the fire out. It’s what we call common sense.
Putting out the global fire demands above all that having delayed hard decisions for decades we stop using fossil fuels, now. But governments refuse even to declare this as policy, while colluding with corporate greenwashers and diverting attention with talk about targets.
As the archetype company leader put it to shareholders in a classic New Yorker cartoon by Bob Mankoff, “While the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.”
Using an ancient doctrine that God gave us the right to dominate nature, leaders are signing up to a suicide pact. Can God save us? That’s another question.