Photo: Tom Canning
Three and a half years since Raphaël died, I’m back in France, walking barefoot on the long triangle of land that he rewilded. He’s with me in the way he always is, but alongside us is a new companion: my little dog Mishka, whose white fur is already dotted with tiny goosegrass burrs. Still a puppy, she bumbles through the long grass, chasing butterflies, stopping to sniff a new smell, gnaw at a stick, investigate animal droppings, or burrow into a molehill until her face is caked with earth. A world away from the city, we’re surrounded by ragwort, gorse, Michaelmas daisies, spider orchids, poppies, cow-parsley, and vast tangles of blackberry bushes, their red fruits tight and hard. The pleasure of feeling the dew-drenched grass and soil on my bare skin, to smell the scents of fresh wild mint and thyme, and to see more insects and hear fresh bird-calls than I have in many years is deep and visceral. A few nights ago I heard a nightingale, and every day a pair of grey redstarts visits our veranda. In the nearby woods I find the eggshells cast off by hatchlings, and a birder friend who stayed earlier in the summer tells me that in addition to the blackbirds, carrion crows, robins, woodpigeons, swifts, starlings, sparrows, collared doves, magpies and great tits that we most regularly see, he spotted nuthatch, serin, cirl bunting, robin, house martin, firecrest, blue tit, long-tailed tit, chiffchaff, greenfinch, chaffinch, blackcap, goldfinch, pied wagtail, jay[LJ1] , and heard golden oriel, cuckoo, raven, jackdaw, turtle dove, melodious warbler, woodlark and tawny owl.
In the distance, by the house, Carsten is working on his novel and Matti and Piluca – now married – are sunning themselves and resting, aware that the next three months are a time to shore up their energy. They will be needing it: in the autumn, they are expecting twin girls. The pregnancy came easily and unassisted, and with no history of twins in either family, the double blessing feels cornucopian. Raphaël would have loved to be an uncle. But I know that in his way – especially in places that he loved, observed and nurtured, like this patch of extravagantly regenerating land – he will be.
I can’t know what he’d be doing now if he were still alive. But I know that it would involve activism, in an era in which many countries, public protest has become much harder. The British conservative government has just passed the authoritarian Public Order Bill, which drastically limits the scope of public demonstrations, and emboldened judges have meted out brutally long custodial sentences to frighten those who draw attention to the omni-crisis caused by extractivism, ecocide and climate injustice into silence.
Last summer, the trial of the XR activists accused alongside Raphaël of vandalising the Brazilian Embassy presented his defence to the judge alongside their own statements, and received four-month suspended sentences. Since then, countless other activists all over the world – people who will one day be seen as heroes – have been fined, jailed or killed for doing what they could to avert catastrophe, concentrations of C02 have reached their highest in two million years, the planet has reached its highest temperature in human history, the UN has declared that climate change is ‘out of control’, and Sir David Attenborough, in his final, iconic ‘witness statement’, has concluded that ‘our blind assault of the planet has finally come to alter the very fundamentals of the living world.’ By the time you read this El Niño will have exacerbated global heating and left a slew of disasters in its wake, and there will have been further, even more urgent calls for world leaders, corporations and sections of the media to stop their criminal negligence and step up. While a million species hurtle towards extinction, every year will see increasingly devastating fires, storms, hurricanes and droughts. In the hottest regions of the world, the soaring wet-bulb temperatures that are already causing untold numbers to die of organ failure will take further, devastating tolls on human life. And as the financialisation of the non-human world continues unabated – be it in the form of poaching, trafficking or the mass-scale intensive farming of birds, mammals, and even octopuses, new zoonotic pandemics are waiting in the wings. Further symptoms of this turbulent kairos era – among them global recession, the rise of authoritarianism and social extremism, resource wars, soaring poverty, a burgeoning global population, diminishing life expectancy, and rampant inequality – mean that only the most privileged or wilfully blinkered people can imagine a better future in the immediate term – not for humanity, but for their own descendants. It’s no wonder there is a mental health crisis among the young.
It’s a challenge on a cosmic scale. But it’s in our grasp.
This is the world that my grand-daughters will grow up in, and which will form their baseline. Never in human history have new generations been more imperilled than they are now. But my hope for them is active, because in times of reckoning, anxiety, trauma and grief are just part of the story. With every crisis – and this is without doubt the biggest and most fully global one that humans have ever faced – comes an opportunity for fundamental and regenerative change. Our task as a species is to effect this change and avert the worst impacts, if the ten billion people predicted to live on this planet by the end of the century – among them my grand-daughters – are to have the kind of future that Raphaël knew was possible. It’s a challenge on a cosmic scale. But it’s in our grasp.
The neoliberal status quo that brought us to this point believes the solution is not scaling down consumption but promoting economic growth; the energy companies who spend mind-bending sums distorting and downplaying the evidence of climate science for the sake of profit want us to believe it’s the continuation of unlimited access to fossil fuels; some billionaires want us to believe it’s through the colonisation of an unhospitable planet.
They’re wrong.
A flourishing future involves not more of the same, but visionary ecological change, and the intelligent, committed effort that comes with it. The Covid pandemic showed what vast changes governments and citizens were capable of making at short notice, at a cost that dwarfs what is needed for the world to transition to renewable energy. It means those in power abandoning the wishful thinking that has led us to the brink, and ensuring that the practical steps that can save civilisation from collapse – replacing fossil fuels with renewables, transitioning to a plant-based diet, and living justly and sustainably – are scaled up, speeded up, and addressed with the same urgency as Covid. As individuals, it requires us to see ourselves as citizens rather than consumers, to waste less food and energy, and to travel less, and better. But far more than that, it demands a psychic shift: to acknowledge our grief over all that we are losing, and undergo the regenerative sea change which brings with it an acceptance that the living world is radically important. Imagine self-interest morphing into common interest, ruthlessness becoming compassion, and injustice being seen – universally – as the basic inhumanity it is. Imagine seeing the natural world not as a human birthright but as a sacred gift, and cherishing the diversity of all the other beings with which we share the planet. Human civilisation is being tested as never before. But there is still time – just – to avert collapse and become the best version of ourselves that I know we can be.
The transformation that leads to the future that Raphaël envisioned, and that billions of others yearn for, is not just urgently necessary. It’s an exquisite opportunity. And it’s possible.
May we rise to the occasion.
[LJ1]And heard golden oriel, cuckoo, raven, jackdaw, turtle dove, melodious warbler, woodlark and tawny owl.
Liz Jensen is the Anglo-Danish author of eight novels including the evolutionary comedy Ark Baby, the Hollywood-adapted The Nonth Life of Louis Drax, and the climate thrillers The Rapture and The Uninvited. She co-founded the British literary group XR Writers Rebel and founded the Rebel Library, an online collection of climate and ecological literature in all genres. Her grief memoir Your Wild and Precious Life, written after the sudden death of her son Raphaël, is published this year.
Excerpt from Your Wild and Precious Life: on grief, hope and rebellion by Liz Jensen.
KLIMAAKSJON / NORWEGIAN WRITERS´ CLIMATE CAMPAIGN // NWCC 