A young counter assistant – at a guess she was around 30 – was processing my personal details last week when she told me that she wished she was in her sixties.
Her casual comment startled me, bringing into sharp focus the anxiety of young people about the state of the world and their prospects for a good life. I could have tried to reassure her about the future, but in that moment could think of nothing that didn’t seem trite and empty.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. The macro- and micro-worries swirling around us add up to great pressure on individuals and on the institutions we expect to keep us safe. And over all our futures looms the biggest, darkest cloud of all, a destabilised climate.
When I first realised that humans were driving climate change, ignorance and scepticism seemed the biggest obstacles to success. Now the great challenge is fatigue born of anxiety – personally, in family and friends, and in the wider public. Young people are in the vanguard of this huge public health issue.
Whether or not it’s well-founded, anxiety is never solved by saying simply that all will be well. As then-schoolgirl Greta Thunberg once told the world’s rich and famous at Davos, Switzerland, “We don’t want your hope… we want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”
To have hope, we need things to be happening around us along with personal agency and a keen sense of our standing in the natural world – pretty much what humans experienced when they first descended from the trees. Another young woman, Lauren Fuge, has taken this theme and run with it – literally, to far corners of her Australian homeland (including Tasmania’s tall forests) and beyond.
In her outstanding new book, Voyagers, Fuge is concerned with what her different experiences in different places teach her about Earth, its species and the future as we navigate the Holocene, the new man-made geological epoch in which we now find ourselves.
Her book shares its name with two legendary NASA spacecraft. Voyagers 1 and 2 are now in interstellar space, over 20 billion kilometres from the rocky planet – Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” – which they left 47 years ago.
Writes Fuge: “Sometimes, travelling across the world feels like launching myself into space, tipping over the edge to seek where the solar winds end. The Voyagers will never return from their missions, and there will be no true return for me, just as there was none for our wandering ancestors.
“On voyages we change in ways we can’t anticipate. We fracture and mend, again and again, until we no longer fit the space we left behind. My pursuits have upended me and shown me the world upended, throwing me towards the ever-changing horizon of the future…”
“As we decide our collective legacy on this planet,” asks Fuge, “can we avoid haunting the generations to come?” That is the question of our age, and while Fuge doesn’t exactly answer it in the book (who can?), she offers reasons aplenty not to despair. Her twin inspirations are science and indigenous culture, making and re-making “the life-giving connections between people and place.”
We are now, writes Fuge, “at the edge of all that we know, gathering our courage and compassion as we head unstoppably towards the glittering horizon that influences us and is being influenced by us across the permeable barriers of space and time.
“Stepping into that future is an act of exploration. We’ll never reach the horizon, but we’re not going in order to find out what’s where – we’re on an eternal journey of making, in which we actively create the world we’re walking into.”
“Those who walked this Earth before you,” writes Fuge, never definitively solved problems, but continually responded to predicaments. You’ve always faced them with grit, bravery and the will to survive… You can learn from the choices and adaptations of your ancestors and their beyond-human kin, and apply the best tools to the current moment, and the next, and the next.”
Reasons for hope are hard to find these days, but I’m curiously comforted by these and many more profound insights in Fuge’s extraordinary book, written by a person barely three decades old.
I referred earlier to the gifted scientist and communicator Carl Sagan, who in 1977 led the team that compiled digital recordings representing our planet’s life and human culture, placed on both Voyager spacecraft in case an extra-terrestrial being found them. Lauren Fuge was a baby when Sagan died in 1996, but his spirit lives on in her.