Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth

A rupture of life on Earth is currently unfolding. What, then, does this rupture signify, not only in terms of being alive during such an upheaval, but also in terms of being alive to upheaval itself? Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth takes the reader on a journey deep into the nature of our home, to give us the tools to learn how, in the middle of that rupture, to comport ourselves with honesty, clarity, culpability and intelligence.

The purpose of this journey is straightforward: to formulate the basis of a philosophy for living during this rupture of life on earth. A philosophy for living in the twenty-first-and-last century of life as we have known it on our planet. A toolkit, as it were, for living at the confluence between being petrified at the prospect of extinction, and becoming petrified in the most real and physical sense.

Lyrical, playful, and deadly serious, Petrified aims to provide a new worldview for a new world coming, creating a present-day fable about achieving fidelity to the vicissitudes of the cosmos. Wherein, the book asks: if desperate times call for desperate measures, how can the response be measured against its only true correlate – the cosmos?

Joshua Wodak, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australien.

Dr Joshua Wodak is an artist, writer, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.