FIRE: A Message from the Edge of Climate Catastrophe

Across the world people are demanding urgent climate action They rightly have high expectations of their governments. The media and politicians often shorthand this action to 'net zero' but limiting action to emissions alone fatally misses what people want. Yes, people, from across the world and from all walks of life, need a resilient future secured for our children's children, but they also want their communities to be safe from disaster right now. Net zero does not provide that present-tense safety. Net zero is only about preventing things from getting exponentially worse.

In 2019 and 2020 fires ripped across Kangaroo Island's iconic landscape in the catastrophic continent-wide event known as Black Summer. In that fatal season, wildfire destroyed a globally unprecedented percentage of continental forest biome. Across Australia 190,000 square kilometres were decimated, the lives of 33 people tragically lost, over 3,000 houses destroyed, and more than 100,000 farm animals and three billion native animals wiped out. Confronted by a hellfire that burned too hot to contain, even the oldest souls within Kangaroo Island's small community gravely whispered, 'never before.'

The real strength of author and academic Margi Prideaux's book, FIRE: A Message from the Edge of Climate Catastrophe, is that it not only captures the emotional journey she and her husband experienced after losing their home and farm during that tragic season, but also chronicles a community's journey through trauma and climate grief; from disaster into stark awareness of climate chaos; from climate apathy to front-line witnesses of a global climate crisis. A journey billions more people will suffer as climate disasters escalate.

FIRE is a love letter to a small community who has a message for the world. The time for hollow words and targets and plans is over. Communities need to take back their control and consciously adapt to living in a world with more apocalyptic wildfires, killer heat domes, catastrophic rain bombs, lethal floods and mudslides, deadly droughts, and violent sandstorms. Essential reading for anyone interested not just in humanity's future but our present. 'We have experienced the beginning of the climate change curve and we cannot hand this hell to tomorrow.'

Margi Prideaux has written about wildlife, international politics, and law almost every day for the past thirty years. As an international negotiator and independent academic, with a PhD in wildlife policy and law, her words have been tuned to inform policy audiences in over twenty different international conservation processes. She has published three books: FIRE: A Message from the Edge of Climate Catastrophe, Birdsong After the Storm: Averting the Tragedy of Global Wildlife Loss, and Global Environmental Governance, Civil Society and Wildlife, and co-published another two Tales from the River: An Anthology of River Literature and All Things Breathe Alike: A Wildlife Anthology. Her shorter musings have been published by Dark Mountain, openDemocracy, Global Policy, Live Encounters, AlterNet, Wildlife Articles and Ecologist. Having lived and lost in Australia's 2020 Black Summer fires, she now writes because she believes time has run out. 'To save what we love, we must compress our attention and focus on the communities, wildlife and wildlands where we actually live - we must become radically local.' She has joined the Planet Politics Institute and begun writing with a radically new direction. FIRE is her first book in this new theme.