Melbourne Writers Festival’s panel, Wilder Shores: Writing the Changing Planet seeded a fascinating and foreboding discourse on the nature of the climate emergency, and how we can use the written word to combat our eco-anxiety. Held at the Victorian State Library, I was amongst a diverse flowering garden of sober yet eager attendees of all ages. Authors Ana Svetel, Romy Ash and Bri Lee were guided in conversation by the attentive MC, Nadia Bailey. Not only did they promote their exciting latest works, these writers also offered amusing and powerful commentary on some resonating, very real concerns for the future of our planet. 

Cultural and environmental anthropologist based in Slovenia’s University of Ljubljana, Ana Svetel spoke about her specialised academic research in the Northern Alpine and Arctic regions. Her work is interested in the chiaroscuro of light and darkness, and how this forms part of the ephemeral changes in nature. Alongside her Phd and further field work––which considers human relations to these environments, particularly in Norway and Iceland––Svetel also writes prose and poetry. In fact, these themes of light and dark “first entered her work through poetry,” and now her literary work is almost always concerned with this juxtaposition. Through it, she raises the question of which changes and cycles are natural and meant to occur, and which are harmful and should be halted. I was deeply moved by the poetry she shared with the audience, it had a beautiful sense of meditation and contemplation on the present. A particular line that struck me was, “in winter the waves love listening to themselves.” More recently, Svetel has begun to focus on her more local Slovenian Alps and is currently working on a project called Fragile Futures, which considers the eras and areas where it might be “unimaginable to think about the future.” She expressed that she feels these alpine environments really heighten one's awareness of fragility and temporality, and the legacy of human interactions with and within our natural world. 

Fiction writers Romy Ash and Bri Lee used the space to discuss their recent releases, which both feature environmental researcher protagonists reckoning with ecological  collapse. Romy Ash spoke about her latest book Mantle, teasing an abundantly spirited approach to wider alarming questions and inevitable fears for the fate of the Earth. She voiced, “when I got to the page it was so centred with feeling,” grappling with grief and its many looming forms in the novel. Despite this, the book was also described as having a “funny heart” by its author. Following a geologist named Ursula who is navigating a dystopian near future on the coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania, Mantle promises an immensely textured and playful writing style. This was captured in an excerpt describing the protagonist’s wonder as she dives for mussels, interacting with an underwater reef through touch, taste and play. Having gotten my own copy at the event, signed by Ash with “hug the moss,” I’m eager to be encased in its child-like embodied relation to the Earth. Ash mentioned this during the panel, expressing a desire to consider the inseparable connection between humanity and our natural world. Her book is perhaps another reminder that we aren’t merely distant observers, but inextricably part of the planet’s ecosystem of natural wisdom. She hinted at a leaning into body horror in the book, without revealing too much, saying “I don’t think I’ve written so much about being with the body.” Ash also wanted to experiment with a corroding of the boundaries between the human and the non-human world. To research her novel, she combined book learning on forest ecology and geology with spending time in nature, venturing into the non-human world often during her writing practice. A hands-on approach taken for a very hands-on book. Ash made an amusing, yet horrifying point that our bodies are ecosystems in themselves; our skin is literally crawling with life. She also poignantly put that ecosystems are communities, just as our individual bodies are composed of both micro-organisms and tactile memories. I found this idea, alongside the book’s light-hearted and humorous moments, as endearing as I found Ash’s own temperament. Mantle seems to envelop a complex collective reckoning with climate grief and fear, whilst also reminding us of the need to feel hopeful, to play and to chase joy.

The prolific Bri Lee had an intimidating presence, voicing her foreboding wisdom with incredible eloquence. I had previously read some of her impressive non-fiction release Who Gets to Be Smart (2021), but only realised this connection whilst writing this review. Her latest book, Seed, fostered some gripping philosophical discourse. Like Mantle, Lee’s novel also incorporates horror elements, particularly the horror of the everyday, as we watch Earth decay right before our eyes. Research for the book was similarly immersive, with Lee travelling to Antarctica in early 2023 to undergo field research, observing researchers and attending lectures whilst on her expedition. I was perplexed by how she attempted to describe such an enigmatic location. She voiced it as “uncanny” and “like another planet,” difficult to shape with language, yet it “argues its own voracity.” Lee described the feeling everywhere in Antarctica as similar to the experience of gazing up at stars in an empty sky, or seeing whales in the ocean; “the bliss of being reminded of how tiny you are.” Antarctica also famously doesn't have any native people; it is perhaps governed by the non-human world. Another point she made was how paradoxical visiting this eerie location felt, for it enabled her to truly see the drastic impact of the climate emergency in a way that only the extremely wealthy can access––a privilege Lee was given through a grant. Seed, described as an eco-thriller, follows the story of an unlikeable male protagonist, Mitchell, who possesses anti-natalist views. A philosophy described by Lee as “undeniably personal.” Seed reckons with the belief that having children is morally wrong, both for the unborn child, and the additional strain it would place upon the planet. During the panel, Lee very nobly considered anti-natalism against the backdrop of our highly pro-natalist global culture, stressing its relevance to recent anti-abortion legislation in Trump’s America, for instance. I was riveted by this discussion of such a controversial belief, which Lee proposed as being deeply rooted in care for all––even those not genetically related to us. I also enjoyed her navigation of gender in regards to this, as she framed fertility as an expectation, and the defining value of women in our culture. Lee described the experience of exploring anti-natalism through a man in Seed as “uniquely challenging.” At the same time, it also made it easier for her to philosophise, as there was “no baggage” of birth trauma and motherhood that she found to be embedded in the experience of being a woman. Seed thus enabled a sense of distance at which she could explore “uncomfortable ideas,” linked, perhaps, to her own moral questioning of bringing new life into the world. 

Bri Lee also spoke of hope, of the immense potential of collective activism and her own experiences in voicing and witnessing advocacy. I surmise her articulation that the climate emergency is an ongoing conversation, and that the binary of individual and systemic change is in fact a spectrum; we all have something meaningful to contribute. Bri Lee, along with Romy Ash and Ana Svetel left me to consider written language’s ability to make us feel the full weight and urgency of ecocide, something undeniably interlocked with genocide. My mind whirled with questions as to how we can communicate the breadth of our ecosystem of emotions, and reckon with such a dislocated and ill-fated future in the deeply grooved and impactful ways that these writers do. Stepping out of the panel, I was swept back onto the dribbling streets of Melbourne’s CBD. Feeling wistful and eager as an irritable insect, their ideas had inspired me and were nurturing something primordial. There is, lodged in humanity's core, some fragment of hope for environmental healing.