Living for the Future during Climate Crisis with Dany Celermajer

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♪ (bass music) ♪

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(cock cackles)

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(pattrice) Welcome to "In Context".

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Coming to you from Vine Sanctuary,

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an LGBTQ-led farmed animal refuge in Vermont.

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We bring you conversations with authors and organizers,

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exploring the connections between animal advocacy,

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race, gender, and social justice,

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to help put today's big questions in context.

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(geese honking)

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♪ (music) ♪

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Hi, and welcome to In Context. I'm pattrice jones,

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speaking to you from the grounds of Vine Sanctuary.

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My guest today is the always fabulous Dany Celermajer,

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who is joining us from Australia.

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And of course, then,

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I am thinking about the emus here at the sanctuary.

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Particularly the first two emus here at the sanctuary, Tiki and Breeze,

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who, when In Context producer, Sarahjane Blum first saw them,

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she said they seem like royalty from another planet.

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Regal, but confused.

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And that really did capture what they're like,

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because they have a dignity

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and, oh, I wish you could know what it's like to walk side by side with them,

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looking right in the eyes, because they're the same height as you.

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But they don't belong here in Vermont.

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Emus are more than two million years old.

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They've been here so much longer

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than human beings have.

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Modern humans have only been in existence for 160,000 years.

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Emus were here on this planet for literally millions of years

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before we ever even thought of existing.

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They've survived two different brushes with extinction,

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they survived a war against emus

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waged by the Australian government in 1932.

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And yet they persist.

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And so they give me something like hope

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for the persistence of the larger-than-human world.

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Regardless of whether or not humans are able to do the things that we need to do.

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Speaking of the things that we need to do,

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I want to introduce our guest Professor Dany Celermajer.

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Welcome, Dany.

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(Dany) Hi, pattrice.

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It's such a beautiful experience to bake it across the world,

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and I just love that story about our elders, the emus. Thank you.

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(pattrice) Dany is a professor at the University of Sydney,

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as well as one of the directors of the Sydney Environmental Institute,

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and the founder of the multi just--

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I'm sorry, Multi-Species Justice Collective.

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Can you tell me what that is?

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(Dany) Well, it's a mouthful to start with, isn't it?

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So, the Multi-Species Justice Collective

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I like to think of as a collective of all sorts of people, human people,

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and people other than humans,

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who are concerned with thinking about

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and living a way of being on the planet

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that takes seriously the aspirations to live well of all Earth beings.

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That's a a very non-academic way to put it,

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but even though it's housed to some extent at the University of Sydney

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and in other academic institutions,

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I think of it much more as a life aspiration.

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(pattrice) Dany is also the book-- the author of an amazing book

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called "Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future",

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which Dany wrote in the midst

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of the horrific forest fires in Australia in 2020.

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And thank you first for writing that book.

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It's not yet available in the US

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and so I'm gonna tell folks a bit about it,

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and then hope that maybe you can share with us some of the things

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that I know you wanted to share with the world cause you wrote that book.

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So, when the fires started, you were living...

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I've heard people say that it's in the bush.

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So, you live in the countryside?

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(Dany) So, I actually should have started by saying that right now

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I'm on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people, in Sydney,

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but normally I live on the unceded lands of the Dharawal people,

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which is on the Southeast coast of Australia, it's inland a little bit.

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So, there are three rivers that pass through these very high escarpments

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and we live at the top of the river that is nearest the coast.

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So the land is rain forest land.

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And when you're there, it feels as if the escarpments or the cliffs,

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you probably think of them as canyons.

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It's as if they've got their arms around you,

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so you're nestled in this very high valley with the arms of the canyons around you.

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And then a river running through the valley, and that is where we leave.

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(pattrice) You said to me once that you moved there

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for a purpose.

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So before we get to the terrible events of 2020

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that provoked you to write Summertime

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can you tell me something about that purpose?

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Because I think it has something to do with the Multi-Species Justice Project.

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(Dany) It does.

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There are really two purposes.

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Of course, we always do things for reasons that we don't understand,

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but there were two that I do understand.

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And one of them was, like most human people

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who are brought up in this culture, who are shaped in this culture,

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I had a very anthropocentric way of being.

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So, for example, thinking about, justice

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the way that we conceive of justice is justice is with humans.

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And that became increasingly intolerable for me,

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my own anthropocentrism,

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the way that I thought about and lived with other beings.

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I didn't want to be that way anymore.

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And part of my own journey of understanding

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was that the transformation that I needed to go through

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wasn't one that I could give myself,

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that to think that that I could change myself in that really radical way

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was part of the same problem as if human beings are floating over above the world

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and somehow our ideas come from our heads

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or from some transcendent-like source out there,

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and that if I was going to become a different human being

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who didn't place myself above everybody else,

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I needed to live with everybody else.

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I needed to bump into everybody else every day,

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I needed to have what they wanted and what life was like for them

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be part of my everyday reality.

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And so,

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so I just started to leave the city and go and live in a place where

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all sorts of other people lived,

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forest people, moss people and animal people,

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wild animal people,

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animal people who had been brought here

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mainly for human needs,

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and to live with them in a very everyday "How do we make life together?"

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So that's the first reason,

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but I do want to mention the second one, because it's relevant to Summertime,

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and that is...

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when my...

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so, my grandparents and my parents were both survivors of the Shoah,

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and when my grandparents came to live in Australia,

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it became evident to me, from the time I was a young adult,

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that they lived very much for those who came after.

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And so, what they did, and in their case it was investing in property,

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so that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on,

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and those those in their community would have safety.

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And when I got to a certain age,

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when I got to 50, actually,

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I thought, well, now it's my turn, right?

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What does it mean for me to live for the future?

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What does it mean for me to take responsibility in my life

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for those who come after?

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And, in my case, it wasn't biological family.

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It was all beings who come after.

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Thankfully, I've been given that gift of thinking more broadly,

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and in the context of climate crisis,

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it seemed to me that that had to be about living on land,

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caring for country,

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living in a place where we could be part of tending the garden of the planet,

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so that we could all flourish as best we could

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in the context of a very rapidly changing climate.

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- That's why I moved. - (pattrice) That makes sense.

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So, you took your commitment

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to justice

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which had at first been expressed with regard to humans --

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your first book was about the prevention of torture --

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and you wanted to expand that, and you felt like,

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to do that you really needed to do that with your body,

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not just in your head, and so you went

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to the bush, to this beautiful land, and soon there were many

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people of various species living with you,

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donkeys in particular,

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but also...

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now there are some chickens, I think, but I think there were all horses,

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and then two pigs,

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Katie and Jimmy.

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And now we start to come to

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the hard part, which was the experiences that led you to write

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a book that has the subtitle "Reflections on a Vanishing Future".

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So, the fires of 2020 came and they came closer and closer to you.

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It was summer, it wasn't raining,

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the fires were raging,

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the skies were turning colors that you've never seen before,

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couldn't have even imagined before,

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and seemed to be coming closer and closer, and so, you decided

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at some point that, for their safety,

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you needed to relocate Jimmy and Katie

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to another property,

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with a friend,

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and then, in an unthinkably tragic

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turn of events,

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the fires shifted and that property was burned.

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And you initially thought that both Katie and Jimmy had perished in the fires,

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but then it turned out miraculously

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that Jimmy had survived

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and you went to him.

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Do you remember that?

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(Dany) Like it's right in front of me, I remember that.

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So it was the 31st of December, 2019,

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and Jimmy and Katie had gone to this place Cobargo,

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which is now very infamous in Australia

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because it's where some of the worst fires were,

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and we had emptied our house,

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my partner had driven to Sydney with all of our belongings.

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And I was in the house,

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and I went outside to roll the gas bottles away,

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so that if the fire came, the gas bottles didn't explode.

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And when I came back in, there was a missed call on my phone

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from the person who I call M in Summertime,

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and I called her back --

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she was the person who was caring for Jimmy and Katie

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and she said everything's gone.

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And I didn't push her during that conversation

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because she had literally just been dragged out of a burning house.

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But as you said, pattrice,

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for the next 24 hours, we assumed that Jimmy and Katie

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were both immolated in the fire,

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which I just cannot begin to express

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although I'm sure everybody here who has lost beings that they love,

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their family, understands,

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but to feel that we had tried to make them safe

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and that the randomness,

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the complete unpredictability of climate catastrophe means that

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even this effort to keep people safe is undermined.

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Twenty-four hours later

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I received a text from M

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saying, "We found Jimmy", and I assumed that that meant

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that they had found Jimmy's body

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because she had found Katie's body,

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and moments later a very roughly-grained video came in

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of Jimmy with a black mark on his head

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running towards the camera and M's voice saying, "I know, I know".

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And so I knew that Jimmy was alive,

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but it took us a week to get down to see him

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because all of the roads were closed, because there were fires raging

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right across the country.

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And when we got there,

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it's difficult to to imagine what a landscape

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that had been immolated by these fires,

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which are beyond any fires that we had seen before.

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It was like, you know,

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it's like I imagined the landscape after a nuclear bomb.

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Just nothing.

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Nothing.

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Black, or sometimes the land was a like a vomit,

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yellow from everything that had been burnt and destroyed.

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And we got to the property

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where we were supposed to meet M and her partner, but they were off

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seeing the Red Cross, right? The Red Cross in Australia.

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That was the level of emergency that we were in.

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And so there were no fences, or the fences were down.

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And we went out and we started to call Jimmy

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and we called him,

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and eventually he must have heard our voices.

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He was somewhere away and I saw this,

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I always thought of him like an ocean liner,

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because he was so big

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and beautiful the way he moved,

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this pink ocean liner moving across the black land,

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and he approached us, but he wouldn't actually come near us.

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It was very strange.

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He walked parallel with us, about 30 feet away from us,

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back to where the house had been and was no longer,

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where our car and the trailer were parked.

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And this is hard, what I'm about to say.

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Katie was also there.

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And I saw Katie before I really had a choice

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about whether I wanted to see Katie or not.

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And once I saw her,

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I felt like I had a responsibility to really see her properly

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and not to walk away.

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I felt like she had had to go through what she had to go through

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and that my bearing witness and being present to her

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and what that was going to do to me,

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how I was going to understand, as a result of that, is really important.

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And so, I stood,

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and I described in Summertime what that was like,

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to stand with this person who I love so much,

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who I had crouched over her water trough trough with her,

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looking at her and her looking at me,

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and where I had hung out with her.

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And I used to go and read with Katie, I used to take --

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but this is part of my practice

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we were talking before about your body --

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I used to take my books and my papers down into where they lived,

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and I would lie on Katie's side and read.

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And there was this being who had been warm and stood next to me.

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And there she was, black, charred.

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And Jimmy was alive, like, Jimmy was alive.

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And so we managed to take Jimmy home.

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It was a horrific four and a half hour drive.

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He was so hot.

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Imagine living for a week on this burnt land

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where even a week later when you put your foot on the land,

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it was still hot from the fire.

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And when we got him home,

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It was the most joyous experience,

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out of this devastation, to see him walk into his home.

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And he took himself into his mud bath.

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I have a little grainy video that I took of it.

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He took himself into his beautiful wallow

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that we had filled up with water, of course, because it was too dry.

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There was no rain.

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And he, you know, swam around it and and he covered himself in mud.

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And then he went to bed, he went to his house and he went to sleep.

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And the next morning when he got up,

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he was different.

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He stood,

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I remember exactly where he stood near their house,

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and he just looked around

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and he looked around

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as if he had been placed in another universe that he didn't recognize.

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And he didn't want his breakfast, he didn't want to drink,

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and it seemed to me

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that what had happened to him and what had happened to Katie

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was now present to him.

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For that week after they died, he had been in such hyper-vigilance and terror

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that I don't think that he'd been able to process what happened.

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But once he got home and once it was safe again, or reasonably safe,

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I think it it became present what he'd been through

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and that Katie was not there any longer.

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Katie and Jimmy,

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we didn't say they were brother and sister,

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and they had been taken from the floor of a factory farm,

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where they were wasted pigs, right?

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They were thrown there to die.

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And so they had survived together,

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they had found life together, they had made life together,

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they had slept together every day of their lives.

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And now Katie was no longer,

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and Jimmy had slept alone for the first time in his life.

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And so, for the next ten days,

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Jimmy didn't really eat and didn't really drink.

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He was remarkable, pattrice.

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I learnt so much from Jimmy during that time.

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Jimmy was an incredible architect and engineer

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and he had built in his world

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the most wonderful places to lie.

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There were places where it was cool in the afternoon

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and there were places where it was warm in the morning.

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And he just took himself to his different places that he built

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and he lay on the earth.

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And we did what we could to care for him

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with the help of amazing people all around the world

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who, after I wrote about him and they read about him,

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who offered care,

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but really, it was up to him.

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Really, he was deciding whether he was going to live or die.

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And at a certain point he decided to live,

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and the first thing he ate was Soba Miso, Soba Noodles

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that we -- like, we were like the Jewish parents offering him food all the time --

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but he chose the Miso Soba Noodles, and...

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Yeah, I learned a lot about what it means to grieve,

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what it means to confront climate catastrophe,

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what it means to decide to live

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after you have been immersed

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in climate catastrophe.

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I learnt a lot from him. I still learn a lot from him.

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(pattrice) Pretty shortly, even while this was happening,

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you wrote,

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and people responded to what you wrote.

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And at some point you decided this is going to-- I'm writing a book.

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What was it you were wanting to convey?

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(Dany) During the Black Summer fires,

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there was a global conversation about these fires

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everywhere in the world.

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You know, there was articles on the front page of the New York Times

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about the fires.

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It was in the global media. It was a global conversation.

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And there was, I think, more recognition

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of the impact that climate catastrophe has on beings other than humans,

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and there had been before,

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because, I think of the extent of the killing,

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you know, in the end, we estimate that

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three and a quarter billion, three and a quarter billion --

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just stop with that for a second --

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wild animals were killed.

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So, there was a recognition that this was not just about human beings.

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And yet still, it felt to me like

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we still other them a little bit.

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We still didn't really get that

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they were having an experience of this, an experience that was emotional,

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an experience that was full of meaning.

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You know, this is one of the big divides that people in this culture have made

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between human people and other people,

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is that we're the storytellers, right?

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We're the ones who have a meaningful universe,

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and it's just like watching being with

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my community,

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my other-than-human community.

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It was clear that it was full of meaning for them.

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It was affecting their relationships,

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it was affecting how they moved around their worlds,

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with deep, it had deep emotional impact on them.

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And because that was so close to me,

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I wanted to make that present for other people,

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and that, I think that was what was so important

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about the piece that I wrote about Jimmy,

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which, as you said, pattrice, I wrote before he decided to live.

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I wrote about five days after,

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when he was still in this place of such profound grief,

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and I wanted to make present for others

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that we're not the only ones who are in loss and fear,

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and hope,

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and terror and rage, and this full range of emotions

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that we human people feel, that other people are feeling that as well,

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and that, as we move forward and think about

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what do we do,

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how do we need to transform our practices and institutions,

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they have to be there too, right?

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They have to be part of that as well,

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because they're here with us as well.

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And, you know, as you said, when you introduce me,

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in the last 17 years, I've been an academic

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and the beautiful thing about being academic

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is that you Get all this time to think, right?

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And to hone your ideas.

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But the downside of it is it tends to be a pretty close conversation.

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And we talk to a group,

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and we have all sorts of walls that we build around our conversation,

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the language that we use, where we publish,

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what we assume about the nature of the conversation.

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And

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that's not that's not okay for me anymore.

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These are questions that affect everybody.

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Every human, every being other than human.

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And this is a conversation that we have to be having together.

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And certainly I feel like I have been so privileged

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to be able to think about these things.

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And then here's this being who's me

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who has had the privilege of being able to think about things

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and then I'm thrown into the conflagration of climate catastrophe,

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and that meant that I felt like I had a big responsibility

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to talk about this in a way that

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would give others -- to the extent that writing can do that --

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an imagined understanding of what it was like to be there for all of us.

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And once...

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once you have that understanding -- certainly that's been my experience --

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everything changes.

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Everything changes.

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What matters to you changes.

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What you're willing to say no to changes.

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What you're willing to say yes to changes.

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Because when you love place,

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when you love other people,

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when you want them to have a life,

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like I wanted Katie to have her life,

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and what humans or some humans are doing that's making that impossible,

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and you know that in your body, I think you change what you do.

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And that's what I wanted to do with the book.

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I wanted...

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I don't want everybody to have to have the fire at their door

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to know the truth of what this means

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for all of us Earth beings who live there.

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I don't want that.

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That's my fear.

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My fear is that it is going to have to be as real for Jimmy...

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as real for others as it was for Jimmy, before they get it.

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And...

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So, my work, my writing is an effort to make that not true,

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is an effort to have other people get that,

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so that they will do what we need to do.

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And I don't know what that is.

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I'm not presuming to know what it is,

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but we have to work that out together, right?

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But first we have to know the importance of the at-stakeness

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of what's going on.

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(pattrice) I really appreciate the way you said that

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and I think that's why you called it the Multi-Species Justice Collective,

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because we do have to collectively figure out what to do.

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But we also have to be collectively motivated,

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sufficiently collectively motivated.

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One of the things I love about Summertime is how accessible it is.

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It reads like a novel, rather than like an academic tome.

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And so I'm going to shout out to Penguin Australia

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that we need that to be published in the US and elsewhere in the world.

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And I'm also going to put on our show notes for this show

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links to Dany's first article about Jimmy

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and some other Dany's work that you might be interested in reading.

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How...

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How do...

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I don't want to say, how do you keep going?

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But I want to ask, how do you keep going?

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I heard you say something

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at some point

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about hope as a discipline.

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What kind of discipline?

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Can you say more about that?

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Because I think that so many people

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who have come face-to-face

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with any of the horrors

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that we've now mentioned, whether that be

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the fires, and floods elsewhere,

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war,

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torture,

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struggle.

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So what's your way of managing that struggle

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against despair?

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(Dany) That expression, hope is a discipline, is Mariame Kaba.

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She talks about her grandma saying to her that I hope is a discipline.

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And I also really appreciate

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Mary Annaïse Heglar's notion of hope, as she says --

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I love that -- she says, if you want hope, go out and earn it.

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So, this idea that hope isn't some amorphous idea

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that somehow we have in our heads.

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Hope is a practice.

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Hope is-- You make hope

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like you make food.

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It's something that you do every day

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in the way that you live.

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What enables me to do it?

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Well, firstly, what enables me to do it

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is that I have a responsibility to do it.

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Like I said, I am one of the beings on this planet

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who has been gifted with this enormous privilege,

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and I've lived a good life,

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and I've been, unlike many other people,

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I've been able to flourish in many ways,

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and with that comes responsibility, right?

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And it's also about, you know, being an older person like we, you know,

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an Aboriginal woman said something to me that I found really

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quite confronting and true, and a real call.

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It's like, who are you to feel despair, right?

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Who are you to feel despair?

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You've lived a good life.

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Get in there and work, so that others can live a good life.

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So, that's the ethical part of the story, and also part of that is,

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you know, there's something that I'm incredibly grateful for

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that my parents and grandparents were survivors of the Shoah,

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because I know in my body that worlds can come to an end.

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This is not abstract for me,

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and with that knowledge, again, comes responsibility,

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so that is a big driver for me.

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But the other is a lot less highfalutin,

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which is, I just live with really beautiful people.

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You know, I am--

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(pattrice) You're speaking, of course, of donkeys.

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(Dany) Yeah, donkeys. I get to wake up every morning

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and I look out and they're in their house

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and I go into the kitchen where there's a big window

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and they're looking at me with their arms crossed,

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going like, you know, breakfast is late.

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And that that daily call into their lives,

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and then being able to go down and have them push me against the wall

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and touch me with their beautiful warm noses,

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and show me how they live.

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And the lessons that they give me, you know,

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we've moved two years ago, the Summer of Fire,

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and this has been the Summer of Floods,

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and I've shared this with you, pattrice,

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but it's one of my favorite events of these floods

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has been...

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We have lots of wombats where we live.

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We don't have emus,

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We're too high and wet for emus, but we have wombats,

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and for anyone who doesn't know what a wombat is,

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I have an American friend who, I thought, beautifully described wombats

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as a 200-pound hamster.

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(Laughter)

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So they're like little Australian bears,

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and they're the most brilliant creatures,

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but their homes are underground.

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And so, the wombats who live,

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with whom we live, have lost their homes, because their homes were all flooded.

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But now one of the wombats lives in the donkeys' house,

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and so, often in the morning, I go in there,

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and the chickens are in there, because the donkeys are really good guards,

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and the wombat is there and the donkeys are there,

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and I'm like, you guys, you know, you are the Multi-Species Collective.

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(Laughter)

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You know, you are showing me what it means to adapt to climate change.

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I don't believe that wombats and donkeys and chickens

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have a history of living together.

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And yet there they are, living together.

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And that experience of surprise.

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That surprise.

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You know, you talked about

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the Wonder of coming eye-to-eye with emus

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and how the history of emus survivors of the attempts

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of omnicide, of genocide against them

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gives you hope.

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And that's-- They give me hope

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because they have all sorts of ways of navigating their world,

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even as their world is changing,

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that I don't know about, which is great.

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There's nothing better than being put in your place.

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Right? There's nothing better than being shown every day

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that you know this tiny, tiny little bit of the universe,

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and that if you make friends with other people,

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if you're permeable to them,

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if they become part of the collective of how we can lives,

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wow, the expansion of what we can learn is just infinite.

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(pattrice) That's so beautifully said.

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And I see that we're out of time.

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I'm still thinking about emus now.

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And what you said about hope, I was thinking about how the emus here

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completely disregard all of the things that the humans built for them

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or thought that they would like or would want to do,

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and yet have created all of these pathways

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through the woods, through their walking,

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and that reminds me of them, the emus, where they belong, in Australia,

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who have survived these millions of years.

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I was thinking of this when you were talking about discipline

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and just do it,

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because they make paths by walking,

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like, they don't wait for there to be a path.

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The walking is what creates the path.

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And so I'm going to thank you so much, Dany Celermajer.

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Please check our show notes for links.

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Thank you for tuning in to In Context.

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In addition to thanking Dany,

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I want to thank our producer, Sarahjane Blum.

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And I want to thank you for tuning in and say that I am so excited to see

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what paths you will create by walking.

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Thank you.