Negotiating Multispecies Care amid the Australian Black Summer: A Spatio-Temporal Perspecive

In the forests of southeast Australia, a fundamental conflict between a fire-prone ecology, extractive land use and an ongoing colonial human-nature separation unfolds in light of the escalating climate catastrophe. The 2019-20 bushfires have unsettled established nature-society relations and call into question contemporary land use, such as current forestry and farming practices. They´ve also uncovered the fundamental entanglements and vulnerabilities humans share with other than human creatures and their environments. Amidst “Black Summer´s” devastation, people who are concerned about the future of these shared worlds, are faced with the question how to live well together in multispecies relations at the brink of extinction and landscape change. Between April 2022 and April 2023, I worked with environmentally-minded people in bushfire-affected communities in East Gippsland, Victoria, to better understand their ways of caring for the environment and other creatures in the light of this unfolding conflict of care in more-than-human relations. Normally an abstract phenomenon, climate change materialises in concrete localised conflicts where people negotiate meaning together with nonhuman others such as rare gliding mammals, giant trees and ancient forests. Engaging in recuperative activities which afford a strong grounding in place and the present, they´re set to undo both the slow and the fast violence of climate disaster. To better understand the conflicting ways, climate change impacts communities and may facilitate or obstruct societal change, I argue we need to better understand the spatio-temporal dimension of human-environment relations and how they contribute to senses of identity and belonging, home and community.