Summertime

Fires in Australia in 2019 and 2020 killed billions of animals in a climate disaster. The numbers are impossible to comprehend.

In this beautiful, elegiac book, Dr. Celermajer grieves the losses by telling of one of her beloved pigs. She moves outward to reflect on how individual stories allow us to remember enormous losses. She refuses to tell this story of a climate catastrophe by telling of a few wrongdoers.

In one powerful reflection, she concludes that it is essential if almost impossible to say ‘it is I, it is I’ when speaking of who brought these losses. 

I’ve been researching climate justice for years, but it took Celermajer’s exquisite, heart-breaking prose to bring home to me the devastation wrought by human-caused climate change on non-human animals. She tells the story of the Australian summer of bushfires, unflinchingly, as it devastated her own community of rescue animals, and the wildlife around them. Witnessing the searing grief of her pig, Jimmy, for his lost companion, we come to understand our commonality with other animals—and how much, beyond ourselves, is truly at stake.