Review: Now or Never, by Tim Flannery

By popular request (hi Clare!), today I’m reviewing Tim Flannery’s essay in the latest issue of the Quarterly Essay. It’s called Now or Never, and it’s about sustainable living in Australia.

The Quarterly Essay is pretty much what is sounds like: 4 times a year, they get someone to write an essay for them on current events. Then letters responding to that essay go in the back of the next edition. The essays and the responses are allowed to be quite long, which allows for a more in-depth discussion than you can get on TV or in a newspaper. It’s well worth checking out.

Now or Never is about Flannery’s hopes and fears for how Australia will deal with the climate change emergency. He starts by giving a description of the Gaia hypothesis, and asks us what “sustainable living” really means, not just in practical terms but in the sense of what it means to us morally and ethically.

He gives us a brief explanation of how our planet is made up of three interlocking systems – the air, the ground and the oceans – and how we’re affecting all of those. Then he discusses some of the bleakest predictions made about what we’re doing to our only home, and how probable those scenarios are.

But Flannery is ultimately an optimist – he doesn’t shy away from discussing the hard questions, but he believes we can fix this situation. So the last half of the essay floats some large-scale ideas about how we could make serious reductions in CO2 emissions:

• ways of removing fossil fuels from our energy mix,
• creating a new geothermal-powered city in the Cooper Basin,
• sponsoring rainforests the way we sponsor children from around the world,
• new methods in farming management, and
• making charcoal from wasted plant material on farms, and using it to enrich the soil (instead of relying on petroleum-based fertilisers).

This section is great for those of us who enjoy exciting new ideas about sustainability, even if they seem a bit wacky at first. Flannery is interested in the big ideas, those that need us to re-think the way we do things, but should give a lot of bang for our buck.

Finally, he speculates on the type of society that we’ll need to become if we’re to survive the climate crisis. What kind of values will we need? What challenges will we face?

Now or Never is a challenging and exciting article to read. For a bit of a preview, you can read an extract (PDF) from the essay or see his interview on Enough Rope, where he discusses some of the same ideas.

I think anyone who’s interested in the big picture of sustainability in Australia and the world should look into it. The Quarterly Essay costs $15.95, and is available in large bookshops and newsagents. And I’m sure your local library can get a copy for you, if you ask nicely.