Fire is a love letter to a small community who has a message for the world. The time for hollow words, targets and plans is over. Communities need to take back their control and consciously adapt to living with more apocalyptic wildfires, catastrophic rain bombs, lethal floods and mudslides, deadly droughts, and violent sandstorms.
Across the world people have high expectations their governments will adapt to the changing climate. 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 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 climate 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 1 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 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 bequeath this hell to tomorrow.'
About the Author :
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 five books and her shorter musings are regularly published in Dark Mountain, openDemocracy, Live Encounters, Wildlife Articles, AlterNet, Global Policy, and Ecologist. Having lived and lost in Australia's 2020 Black Summer fires, she now writes because she believes time has run out.
Review :
'This book is a revelation; an ambitious, poetic, sweeping account of the Black Summer fires ... a natural catastrophe on a ferocious scale beyond the realm of anything previously experienced, or for that matter, imagined ... a sterling primer for survival in the age of climate chaos which deserves very wide readership. This is a must-read book for the climate crisis era we are now living in.'
-Peter Garrett AM, noted environmentalist, former Australian Federal Minister, and Midnight Oil frontman
'I absolutely loved 'Fire'; the way in which Margi has weaved personal recounts through the book to support her research reiterates the dire need for action. Margi's work is truly a powerful 'call to arms' - one of utmost importance; a must read for all.'
-Melissa Jones, CEO, BlazeAid
'Margi Prideaux's no newcomer to articulating the dire predicament we face due to the extraordinary complacency - and complicity - of our political leaders who dance around the edges of much needed change. Her wisdom gleaned from personal experience and her willingness to dive deep and untangle the wicked problems we now face provide us with more than hopium.'
-Petrea King, Quest for Life Foundation
'Margi Prideaux weaves graphic human stories through the reality of our changed environment. A powerful, must-read for today and the future. A truly incredible book, written with compassion and understanding from within the fire-scar of earth.'
-Becky Westbrook, Evie and the Bushfire
'Fire is brilliant and powerful and deeply, deeply moving. It is not a book I will easily forget. And I suspect that as the years of climate collapse roll on, I will think of and turn to it many times.'
-Stephen Harrod, Earth Grief: The Journey Into and Through Ecological Loss
'An expression of despair, anger and bewilderment. The only way forward is not with more failed government policies, but through resolve and action at the grass-roots community level.'
-Alan Atkinson, Three Weeks in Bali
'An authentic recollection of disaster recovery everyone needs to read in order to create change together for a safer future.'
-Sabrina Davis, Humans of Kangaroo Island
