Alliances in the Anthropocene

Dr Christine Eriksen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her interests bring together social and cultural geography with natural hazards and disasters. She is author of Gender and Wildfire: Landscapes of Uncertainty.
Dr Susan Ballard is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts, English and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She works at the intersection of art history and the environmental humanities. She is the co-author of 100 Atmospheres: scale and wonder in the Anthropocene.

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.

Provides a unique exploration of the alliances between fire and plants, plants and humans, and humans and fire

Chapter 1 Imperfect Alliances.- Chapter 2 Illuminations: This Is Bigger than Us.- Chapter 3 Illustrations: Echoes of What Was.- Chapter 4 Impressions: Embodying Uncertainty.- Chapter 5 Imprints: Ways of Seeing.- Chapter 6 Impermanence: Elemental Forces.- Chapter 7 Illusions: World-Making in the Anthropocene.