Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?

Abstract

We must regenerate ourselves if we are to regenerate the earth. … Our feelings and emotions must be engaged, and engaged on a large scale. Judith Wright Two words haunt any ecologically attuned consideration of the historical hour in which our increasingly globalised world currently finds itself: one, which heads this special issue of the Ecological Humanities, is 'anthropocene'; the other, lurking as a grim potential, or even an unfolding reality, within the notion of the anthropocene is 'ecocide'. The former term implicates us all in a call to responsibility: the future of Earth, understood as a diverse collectivity of more-than-human life and the conditions in which such life either thrives or fails, we are told, now lies in our human, all-too-human hands. Awesome, and certainly burdensome, though the responsibility connoted by this word may be, the latter term is more troubling, implicating us, and some considerably more than others, as perpetrators of a crime against our Earth others that is at once historically unprecedented and morally unforgivable, and by which we too are now imperiled. Thinking these two terms in conjunction, we are confronted by the question of whether the anthropocene will be the era in which the ecocidal violence that modern industrial civilization has thus far unleashed upon the Earth will culminate in the utter destruction of humanity's planetary birthplace, the oikos that remains still our only home and the home of the myriad other beings who are our kin; or whether we will manage to pull back from the brink, vouchsafing our Earth others the possibility not merely of a continued existence after their own kind, but perhaps even of a renewed and greater flourishing, as those of our kind, who had come to consider themselves apart from and above the rest, learn to live in a more just and compassionate pattern of relationship with the more-than-human lives in whose midst, and through whose grace, we ourselves exist. In this article, I want to make a case for the value of writing in the anthropocene in the mode of prophetic witness. Such writing would seek to disclose the catastrophic consequences of continuing on our current ecocidal path and Australian Humanities Review -Issue 47 174 awaken us to the possibility of another way of thinking and being: one that holds the promise of reconciling urban industrial society with the Earth. The model of prophetic witness that I call upon here is biblical, but I am going to bring it to bear in an ecocritical rereading of a work of modern secular literature: Judith Wright's 'Dust', a poem penned during the Second World War that has acquired a whole new salience in the era of anthropogenic climate change. Before I get there, though, I want to dwell for a moment on the difficulties of this undertaking, and especially the risk that, in the face of the unspeakable horror of an unfolding ecocide, all our fine words might amount to little more than 'idle chatter'.