AustLit

'‘Today’ writes Dipesh Chakrabarty, it is precisely the ‘survival of the species’ on a ‘world - wide scale’ that is in question and the question for ‘all progressive political thought’. 2 Again and again we are warned by the climate scientists that the human species faces one of its greatest challenges with the warming of the globe. The dire condition of our planet is now more widely recognised; that is the real ‘Eaarth’, 3 which is no longer a garden of Eden, nor pastoral paradise. Australia has warmed by approximately one degree since 1910 and most of the warming has occurred since 1970. 4 Humans barely qualify as an intelligent life form on the planetary scale, because environmental issues are ‘high on the extra -terrestrial age nda’ proposes Linda Jaivin in Rock n Roll Babes From Outer Space (1996). Our ‘barely’ intelligent human life form is responsible for global warming, massive pollution, species depletion and biodiversity loss, toxic methane release, melting ice-caps, increasing intensity of cyclones and rainfall, wildfires and dying forests. This consciousness of planetary change is reflected in recent cautionary climate change narratives; it is timely to re-examine our understandings of the role of the environmental imagination in Australian literature. What follows is merely a preliminary exploration, mere field notes on the approaching catastrophe.' (Author's introduction, 3)