Christine Eriksen, Senior Lecturer in geography, and Susan Ballard, Senior Lecturer in art history, from the University of Wollongong (Australia) presented their jointly authored book Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants, and People (Palgrave, 2020) in our Greenhouse online book series on Monday, 25 May, 10:00 Central European time.
Through a truly interdisplinary study, this book explores how fire, plants and people coexist in the Anthropocene. In a time of dramatic environmental transformation, the authors examine how human impacts on the planetary system are being felt at all levels from the geological and the arboreal to the atmospheric. The book brings together the disciplines of human geography and art history to examine fire-plant-people alliances and multispecies world-making. The authors listen carefully to the narratives of bushfire survivors. They embrace the responses of contemporary artists, as practice becomes interwoven with fire as well as ruin and regrowth. Through visual, textual and felt ways of being, the chapters illuminate, illustrate, impress and imprint the imagined and actual agency of plants and people within a changing climate — from Aboriginal ecocultural burning to nuclear fire. By holding grief and enacting hope, the book shows how relationships come to be and are likely to change due to the interdependencies of fire, plants and people in the Anthropocene.
