Petrified - (Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies) by Joshua Wodak (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A rupture of life on Earth is currently unfolding. What, then, does this rupture signify, not only in terms of being alive during such an upheaval, but also in terms of being alive to upheaval itself? Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth takes the reader on a journey deep into the nature of our home, to give us the tools to learn how, in the middle of that rupture, to comport ourselves with honesty, clarity, culpability and intelligence.

The purpose of this journey is straightforward: to formulate the basis of a philosophy for living during this rupture of life on earth. A philosophy for living in the twenty-first-and-last century of life as we have known it on our planet. A toolkit, as it were, for living at the confluence between being petrified at the prospect of extinction, and becoming petrified in the most real and physical sense.

Lyrical, playful, and deadly serious, Petrified aims to provide a new worldview for a new world coming, creating a present-day fable about achieving fidelity to the vicissitudes of the cosmos. Wherein, the book asks: if desperate times call for desperate measures, how can the response be measured against its only true correlate - the cosmos?

Review Quotes

"Petrified is not another book about the climatic and ecological collapse of our world or how it could have been prevented - there is no longer much need for that. Petrified is something different, a lurid tapestry of pop culture, real science and new philosophies. A burst, if you will, of laughter in the darkness. Because this is a book about how we, as individual human beings, must now deal with the fact that we have gone beyond most sane, risk-averse solutions to the planetary collapse playing out around us.

It considers a conundrum that is entirely novel: how do we, as creatures bent on happiness, conduct ourselves at the end of the world as we know it? How, in short, do we live amongst the consequences of ignoring our impact on the planet for well over a hundred years, caught between guilt, powerlessness and the indefatigable human pursuit of joy? And how great or small is the end of all we know, against the backdrop of the greater universe?

Petrified is a wild tragicomic ride that throws the conventions of its genre against the wall and asks us a very difficult question: having created the conditions for a complete destruction of all we have ever known as life on earth, can we go into that breach clear-eyed and honest, with our guilt and our humility, our individual goodness and our hope for new futures that humanity will not see intact?

Part serious contemplation and part acid-trip, Petrified is a profound meditation delivered with the lightest and oddest of strokes and an essential book for every human who has ever asked themselves the question of how they wish to live, here at the end of our world."

- Jonathan Littell, author of The Kindly Ones (prix Goncourt and prix de l'Académie française 2006)

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"How can we live well in a cosmos that is far beyond our control while also confronting the harm that human activities are doing to the planet? Joshua Wodak's Petrified takes aim at some of the thorniest issues on Earth - but does so in a way that is at once playful, tragic, comedic, speculative and profoundly instructive. His is a voice that speaks for a generation who has known only looming catastrophe, and this is a book for every one of us who is trying to make sense of the current planetary predicament."

- Nigel Clark, Professor of Human Geography, Lancaster University, United Kingdom, author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet

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"Joshua Wodak has in this refreshing and entirely original analysis of Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth found a way to engage our understandings and passions in the face of the grimmest potential catastrophe that our human-occupied planet has ever faced. To do so, he has set out to arrest even the most disengaged, soured, bored or indifferent of readers by making his environmental case using entirely novel means of writing and communication. Combining an astonishing breadth and depth of knowledge in environmental science, synthetic biology, ecology, psychology, art, philosophy, and social theory he never bores or patronizes his readers. Instead, he presents us with a dazzling kaleidoscope of wit, humour, comedy, visual, literary and musical examples that entice and inspire his readers to think and care about global climate change in entirely fresh and exhilarating ways."

- Iain McCalman, Emeritus Professor, Department of History, University of Sydney, author of The Reef - A Passionate History

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"To be petrified in our Anthropocene present means to experience fear and to be frozen in inescapable decline. Joshua Wodak's lively and erudite book protests against this fossilization with recourse to rock lyrics, bioengineering projects, poetry, utopian ideas, Far Side cartoons, and a dynamic understanding of earth systems and earth history. The result is a dizzying portrait of what it's like to live in our unstable present on our changing planet."

- Steve Mentz, Professor of English, St. John's University, United States of America, author of Ocean and Break Up the Anthropocene

About the Author

Dr Joshua Wodak is an artist, writer, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.