Professor Dany Celermajer is a director of the Sydney Environment Institute and the Multi Species Justice Project and the author of Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future. She joined pattrice for a deeply moving discussion about her experiences of the Australian bushfires of 2019, which devastated animal life and ecosystems in ways that are becoming all-too familiar as climate catastrophe changes the world around all of us.

You can read more from Dany here:

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/danielle-celermajer-learning-to-live-in-jimmy%E2%80%99s-world/12000232

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/07/who-killed-summertime-how-do-we-trace-the-complex-roots-of-responsibility

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(cock cackles)

(pattrice) Welcome to "In Context".

Coming to you from Vine Sanctuary,

an LGBTQ-led farmed animal refuge in Vermont.

We bring you conversations with authors and organizers,

exploring the connections between animal advocacy,

race, gender, and social justice,

to help put today's big questions in context.

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Hi, and welcome to In Context. I'm pattrice jones,

speaking to you from the grounds of Vine Sanctuary.

My guest today is the always fabulous Dany Celermajer,

who is joining us from Australia.

And of course, then,

I am thinking about the emus here at the sanctuary.

Particularly the first two emus here at the sanctuary, Tiki and Breeze,

who, when In Context producer, Sarahjane Blum first saw them,

she said they seem like royalty from another planet.

Regal, but confused.

And that really did capture what they're like,

because they have a dignity

and, oh, I wish you could know what it's like to walk side by side with them,

looking right in the eyes, because they're the same height as you.

But they don't belong here in Vermont.

Emus are more than two million years old.

They've been here so much longer

than human beings have.

Modern humans have only been in existence for 160,000 years.

Emus were here on this planet for literally millions of years

before we ever even thought of existing.

They've survived two different brushes with extinction,

they survived a war against emus

waged by the Australian government in 1932.

And yet they persist.

And so they give me something like hope

for the persistence of the larger-than-human world.

Regardless of whether or not humans are able to do the things that we need to do.

Speaking of the things that we need to do,

I want to introduce our guest Professor Dany Celermajer.

Welcome, Dany.

(Dany) Hi, pattrice.

It's such a beautiful experience to bake it across the world,

and I just love that story about our elders, the emus. Thank you.

(pattrice) Dany is a professor at the University of Sydney,

as well as one of the directors of the Sydney Environmental Institute,

and the founder of the multi just--

I'm sorry, Multi-Species Justice Collective.

Can you tell me what that is?

(Dany) Well, it's a mouthful to start with, isn't it?

So, the Multi-Species Justice Collective

I like to think of as a collective of all sorts of people, human people,

and people other than humans,

who are concerned with thinking about

and living a way of being on the planet

that takes seriously the aspirations to live well of all Earth beings.

That's a a very non-academic way to put it,

but even though it's housed to some extent at the University of Sydney

and in other academic institutions,

I think of it much more as a life aspiration.

(pattrice) Dany is also the book-- the author of an amazing book

called "Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future",

which Dany wrote in the midst

of the horrific forest fires in Australia in 2020.

And thank you first for writing that book.

It's not yet available in the US

and so I'm gonna tell folks a bit about it,

and then hope that maybe you can share with us some of the things

that I know you wanted to share with the world cause you wrote that book.

So, when the fires started, you were living...

I've heard people say that it's in the bush.

So, you live in the countryside?

(Dany) So, I actually should have started by saying that right now

I'm on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people, in Sydney,

but normally I live on the unceded lands of the Dharawal people,

which is on the Southeast coast of Australia, it's inland a little bit.

So, there are three rivers that pass through these very high escarpments

and we live at the top of the river that is nearest the coast.

So the land is rain forest land.

And when you're there, it feels as if the escarpments or the cliffs,

you probably think of them as canyons.

It's as if they've got their arms around you,

so you're nestled in this very high valley with the arms of the canyons around you.

And then a river running through the valley, and that is where we leave.

(pattrice) You said to me once that you moved there

for a purpose.

So before we get to the terrible events of 2020

that provoked you to write Summertime

can you tell me something about that purpose?

Because I think it has something to do with the Multi-Species Justice Project.

(Dany) It does.

There are really two purposes.

Of course, we always do things for reasons that we don't understand,

but there were two that I do understand.

And one of them was, like most human people

who are brought up in this culture, who are shaped in this culture,

I had a very anthropocentric way of being.

So, for example, thinking about, justice

the way that we conceive of justice is justice is with humans.

And that became increasingly intolerable for me,

my own anthropocentrism,

the way that I thought about and lived with other beings.

I didn't want to be that way anymore.

And part of my own journey of understanding

was that the transformation that I needed to go through

wasn't one that I could give myself,

that to think that that I could change myself in that really radical way

was part of the same problem as if human beings are floating over above the world

and somehow our ideas come from our heads

or from some transcendent-like source out there,

and that if I was going to become a different human being

who didn't place myself above everybody else,

I needed to live with everybody else.

I needed to bump into everybody else every day,

I needed to have what they wanted and what life was like for them

be part of my everyday reality.

And so,

so I just started to leave the city and go and live in a place where

all sorts of other people lived,

forest people, moss people and animal people,

wild animal people,

animal people who had been brought here

mainly for human needs,

and to live with them in a very everyday "How do we make life together?"

So that's the first reason,

but I do want to mention the second one, because it's relevant to Summertime,

and that is...

when my...

so, my grandparents and my parents were both survivors of the Shoah,

and when my grandparents came to live in Australia,

it became evident to me, from the time I was a young adult,

that they lived very much for those who came after.

And so, what they did, and in their case it was investing in property,

so that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on,

and those those in their community would have safety.

And when I got to a certain age,

when I got to 50, actually,

I thought, well, now it's my turn, right?

What does it mean for me to live for the future?

What does it mean for me to take responsibility in my life

for those who come after?

And, in my case, it wasn't biological family.

It was all beings who come after.

Thankfully, I've been given that gift of thinking more broadly,

and in the context of climate crisis,

it seemed to me that that had to be about living on land,

caring for country,

living in a place where we could be part of tending the garden of the planet,

so that we could all flourish as best we could

in the context of a very rapidly changing climate.

- That's why I moved. - (pattrice) That makes sense.

So, you took your commitment

to justice

which had at first been expressed with regard to humans --

your first book was about the prevention of torture --

and you wanted to expand that, and you felt like,

to do that you really needed to do that with your body,

not just in your head, and so you went

to the bush, to this beautiful land, and soon there were many

people of various species living with you,

donkeys in particular,

but also...

now there are some chickens, I think, but I think there were all horses,

and then two pigs,

Katie and Jimmy.

And now we start to come to

the hard part, which was the experiences that led you to write

a book that has the subtitle "Reflections on a Vanishing Future".

So, the fires of 2020 came and they came closer and closer to you.

It was summer, it wasn't raining,

the fires were raging,

the skies were turning colors that you've never seen before,

couldn't have even imagined before,

and seemed to be coming closer and closer, and so, you decided

at some point that, for their safety,

you needed to relocate Jimmy and Katie

to another property,

with a friend,

and then, in an unthinkably tragic

turn of events,

the fires shifted and that property was burned.

And you initially thought that both Katie and Jimmy had perished in the fires,

but then it turned out miraculously

that Jimmy had survived

and you went to him.

Do you remember that?

(Dany) Like it's right in front of me, I remember that.

So it was the 31st of December, 2019,

and Jimmy and Katie had gone to this place Cobargo,

which is now very infamous in Australia

because it's where some of the worst fires were,

and we had emptied our house,

my partner had driven to Sydney with all of our belongings.

And I was in the house,

and I went outside to roll the gas bottles away,

so that if the fire came, the gas bottles didn't explode.

And when I came back in, there was a missed call on my phone

from the person who I call M in Summertime,

and I called her back --

she was the person who was caring for Jimmy and Katie

and she said everything's gone.

And I didn't push her during that conversation

because she had literally just been dragged out of a burning house.

But as you said, pattrice,

for the next 24 hours, we assumed that Jimmy and Katie

were both immolated in the fire,

which I just cannot begin to express

although I'm sure everybody here who has lost beings that they love,

their family, understands,

but to feel that we had tried to make them safe

and that the randomness,

the complete unpredictability of climate catastrophe means that

even this effort to keep people safe is undermined.

Twenty-four hours later

I received a text from M

saying, "We found Jimmy", and I assumed that that meant

that they had found Jimmy's body

because she had found Katie's body,

and moments later a very roughly-grained video came in

of Jimmy with a black mark on his head

running towards the camera and M's voice saying, "I know, I know".

And so I knew that Jimmy was alive,

but it took us a week to get down to see him

because all of the roads were closed, because there were fires raging

right across the country.

And when we got there,

it's difficult to to imagine what a landscape

that had been immolated by these fires,

which are beyond any fires that we had seen before.

It was like, you know,

it's like I imagined the landscape after a nuclear bomb.

Just nothing.

Nothing.

Black, or sometimes the land was a like a vomit,

yellow from everything that had been burnt and destroyed.

And we got to the property

where we were supposed to meet M and her partner, but they were off

seeing the Red Cross, right? The Red Cross in Australia.

That was the level of emergency that we were in.

And so there were no fences, or the fences were down.

And we went out and we started to call Jimmy

and we called him,

and eventually he must have heard our voices.

He was somewhere away and I saw this,

I always thought of him like an ocean liner,

because he was so big

and beautiful the way he moved,

this pink ocean liner moving across the black land,

and he approached us, but he wouldn't actually come near us.

It was very strange.

He walked parallel with us, about 30 feet away from us,

back to where the house had been and was no longer,

where our car and the trailer were parked.

And this is hard, what I'm about to say.

Katie was also there.

And I saw Katie before I really had a choice

about whether I wanted to see Katie or not.

And once I saw her,

I felt like I had a responsibility to really see her properly

and not to walk away.

I felt like she had had to go through what she had to go through

and that my bearing witness and being present to her

and what that was going to do to me,

how I was going to understand, as a result of that, is really important.

And so, I stood,

and I described in Summertime what that was like,

to stand with this person who I love so much,

who I had crouched over her water trough trough with her,

looking at her and her looking at me,

and where I had hung out with her.

And I used to go and read with Katie, I used to take --

but this is part of my practice

we were talking before about your body --

I used to take my books and my papers down into where they lived,

and I would lie on Katie's side and read.

And there was this being who had been warm and stood next to me.

And there she was, black, charred.

And Jimmy was alive, like, Jimmy was alive.

And so we managed to take Jimmy home.

It was a horrific four and a half hour drive.

He was so hot.

Imagine living for a week on this burnt land

where even a week later when you put your foot on the land,

it was still hot from the fire.

And when we got him home,

It was the most joyous experience,

out of this devastation, to see him walk into his home.

And he took himself into his mud bath.

I have a little grainy video that I took of it.

He took himself into his beautiful wallow

that we had filled up with water, of course, because it was too dry.

There was no rain.

And he, you know, swam around it and and he covered himself in mud.

And then he went to bed, he went to his house and he went to sleep.

And the next morning when he got up,

he was different.

He stood,

I remember exactly where he stood near their house,

and he just looked around

and he looked around

as if he had been placed in another universe that he didn't recognize.

And he didn't want his breakfast, he didn't want to drink,

and it seemed to me

that what had happened to him and what had happened to Katie

was now present to him.

For that week after they died, he had been in such hyper-vigilance and terror

that I don't think that he'd been able to process what happened.

But once he got home and once it was safe again, or reasonably safe,

I think it it became present what he'd been through

and that Katie was not there any longer.

Katie and Jimmy,

we didn't say they were brother and sister,

and they had been taken from the floor of a factory farm,

where they were wasted pigs, right?

They were thrown there to die.

And so they had survived together,

they had found life together, they had made life together,

they had slept together every day of their lives.

And now Katie was no longer,

and Jimmy had slept alone for the first time in his life.

And so, for the next ten days,

Jimmy didn't really eat and didn't really drink.

He was remarkable, pattrice.

I learnt so much from Jimmy during that time.

Jimmy was an incredible architect and engineer

and he had built in his world

the most wonderful places to lie.

There were places where it was cool in the afternoon

and there were places where it was warm in the morning.

And he just took himself to his different places that he built

and he lay on the earth.

And we did what we could to care for him

with the help of amazing people all around the world

who, after I wrote about him and they read about him,

who offered care,

but really, it was up to him.

Really, he was deciding whether he was going to live or die.

And at a certain point he decided to live,

and the first thing he ate was Soba Miso, Soba Noodles

that we -- like, we were like the Jewish parents offering him food all the time --

but he chose the Miso Soba Noodles, and...

Yeah, I learned a lot about what it means to grieve,

what it means to confront climate catastrophe,

what it means to decide to live

after you have been immersed

in climate catastrophe.

I learnt a lot from him. I still learn a lot from him.

(pattrice) Pretty shortly, even while this was happening,

you wrote,

and people responded to what you wrote.

And at some point you decided this is going to-- I'm writing a book.

What was it you were wanting to convey?

(Dany) During the Black Summer fires,

there was a global conversation about these fires

everywhere in the world.

You know, there was articles on the front page of the New York Times

about the fires.

It was in the global media. It was a global conversation.

And there was, I think, more recognition

of the impact that climate catastrophe has on beings other than humans,

and there had been before,

because, I think of the extent of the killing,

you know, in the end, we estimate that

three and a quarter billion, three and a quarter billion --

just stop with that for a second --

wild animals were killed.

So, there was a recognition that this was not just about human beings.

And yet still, it felt to me like

we still other them a little bit.

We still didn't really get that

they were having an experience of this, an experience that was emotional,

an experience that was full of meaning.

You know, this is one of the big divides that people in this culture have made

between human people and other people,

is that we're the storytellers, right?

We're the ones who have a meaningful universe,

and it's just like watching being with

my community,

my other-than-human community.

It was clear that it was full of meaning for them.

It was affecting their relationships,

it was affecting how they moved around their worlds,

with deep, it had deep emotional impact on them.

And because that was so close to me,

I wanted to make that present for other people,

and that, I think that was what was so important

about the piece that I wrote about Jimmy,

which, as you said, pattrice, I wrote before he decided to live.

I wrote about five days after,

when he was still in this place of such profound grief,

and I wanted to make present for others

that we're not the only ones who are in loss and fear,

and hope,

and terror and rage, and this full range of emotions

that we human people feel, that other people are feeling that as well,

and that, as we move forward and think about

what do we do,

how do we need to transform our practices and institutions,

they have to be there too, right?

They have to be part of that as well,

because they're here with us as well.

And, you know, as you said, when you introduce me,

in the last 17 years, I've been an academic

and the beautiful thing about being academic

is that you Get all this time to think, right?

And to hone your ideas.

But the downside of it is it tends to be a pretty close conversation.

And we talk to a group,

and we have all sorts of walls that we build around our conversation,

the language that we use, where we publish,

what we assume about the nature of the conversation.

And

that's not that's not okay for me anymore.

These are questions that affect everybody.

Every human, every being other than human.

And this is a conversation that we have to be having together.

And certainly I feel like I have been so privileged

to be able to think about these things.

And then here's this being who's me

who has had the privilege of being able to think about things

and then I'm thrown into the conflagration of climate catastrophe,

and that meant that I felt like I had a big responsibility

to talk about this in a way that

would give others -- to the extent that writing can do that --

an imagined understanding of what it was like to be there for all of us.

And once...

once you have that understanding -- certainly that's been my experience --

everything changes.

Everything changes.

What matters to you changes.

What you're willing to say no to changes.

What you're willing to say yes to changes.

Because when you love place,

when you love other people,

when you want them to have a life,

like I wanted Katie to have her life,

and what humans or some humans are doing that's making that impossible,

and you know that in your body, I think you change what you do.

And that's what I wanted to do with the book.

I wanted...

I don't want everybody to have to have the fire at their door

to know the truth of what this means

for all of us Earth beings who live there.

I don't want that.

That's my fear.

My fear is that it is going to have to be as real for Jimmy...

as real for others as it was for Jimmy, before they get it.

And...

So, my work, my writing is an effort to make that not true,

is an effort to have other people get that,

so that they will do what we need to do.

And I don't know what that is.

I'm not presuming to know what it is,

but we have to work that out together, right?

But first we have to know the importance of the at-stakeness

of what's going on.

(pattrice) I really appreciate the way you said that

and I think that's why you called it the Multi-Species Justice Collective,

because we do have to collectively figure out what to do.

But we also have to be collectively motivated,

sufficiently collectively motivated.

One of the things I love about Summertime is how accessible it is.

It reads like a novel, rather than like an academic tome.

And so I'm going to shout out to Penguin Australia

that we need that to be published in the US and elsewhere in the world.

And I'm also going to put on our show notes for this show

links to Dany's first article about Jimmy

and some other Dany's work that you might be interested in reading.

How...

How do...

I don't want to say, how do you keep going?

But I want to ask, how do you keep going?

I heard you say something

at some point

about hope as a discipline.

What kind of discipline?

Can you say more about that?

Because I think that so many people

who have come face-to-face

with any of the horrors

that we've now mentioned, whether that be

the fires, and floods elsewhere,

war,

torture,

struggle.

So what's your way of managing that struggle

against despair?

(Dany) That expression, hope is a discipline, is Mariame Kaba.

She talks about her grandma saying to her that I hope is a discipline.

And I also really appreciate

Mary Annaïse Heglar's notion of hope, as she says --

I love that -- she says, if you want hope, go out and earn it.

So, this idea that hope isn't some amorphous idea

that somehow we have in our heads.

Hope is a practice.

Hope is-- You make hope

like you make food.

It's something that you do every day

in the way that you live.

What enables me to do it?

Well, firstly, what enables me to do it

is that I have a responsibility to do it.

Like I said, I am one of the beings on this planet

who has been gifted with this enormous privilege,

and I've lived a good life,

and I've been, unlike many other people,

I've been able to flourish in many ways,

and with that comes responsibility, right?

And it's also about, you know, being an older person like we, you know,

an Aboriginal woman said something to me that I found really

quite confronting and true, and a real call.

It's like, who are you to feel despair, right?

Who are you to feel despair?

You've lived a good life.

Get in there and work, so that others can live a good life.

So, that's the ethical part of the story, and also part of that is,

you know, there's something that I'm incredibly grateful for

that my parents and grandparents were survivors of the Shoah,

because I know in my body that worlds can come to an end.

This is not abstract for me,

and with that knowledge, again, comes responsibility,

so that is a big driver for me.

But the other is a lot less highfalutin,

which is, I just live with really beautiful people.

You know, I am--

(pattrice) You're speaking, of course, of donkeys.

(Dany) Yeah, donkeys. I get to wake up every morning

and I look out and they're in their house

and I go into the kitchen where there's a big window

and they're looking at me with their arms crossed,

going like, you know, breakfast is late.

And that that daily call into their lives,

and then being able to go down and have them push me against the wall

and touch me with their beautiful warm noses,

and show me how they live.

And the lessons that they give me, you know,

we've moved two years ago, the Summer of Fire,

and this has been the Summer of Floods,

and I've shared this with you, pattrice,

but it's one of my favorite events of these floods

has been...

We have lots of wombats where we live.

We don't have emus,

We're too high and wet for emus, but we have wombats,

and for anyone who doesn't know what a wombat is,

I have an American friend who, I thought, beautifully described wombats

as a 200-pound hamster.

(Laughter)

So they're like little Australian bears,

and they're the most brilliant creatures,

but their homes are underground.

And so, the wombats who live,

with whom we live, have lost their homes, because their homes were all flooded.

But now one of the wombats lives in the donkeys' house,

and so, often in the morning, I go in there,

and the chickens are in there, because the donkeys are really good guards,

and the wombat is there and the donkeys are there,

and I'm like, you guys, you know, you are the Multi-Species Collective.

(Laughter)

You know, you are showing me what it means to adapt to climate change.

I don't believe that wombats and donkeys and chickens

have a history of living together.

And yet there they are, living together.

And that experience of surprise.

That surprise.

You know, you talked about

the Wonder of coming eye-to-eye with emus

and how the history of emus survivors of the attempts

of omnicide, of genocide against them

gives you hope.

And that's-- They give me hope

because they have all sorts of ways of navigating their world,

even as their world is changing,

that I don't know about, which is great.

There's nothing better than being put in your place.

Right? There's nothing better than being shown every day

that you know this tiny, tiny little bit of the universe,

and that if you make friends with other people,

if you're permeable to them,

if they become part of the collective of how we can lives,

wow, the expansion of what we can learn is just infinite.

(pattrice) That's so beautifully said.

And I see that we're out of time.

I'm still thinking about emus now.

And what you said about hope, I was thinking about how the emus here

completely disregard all of the things that the humans built for them

or thought that they would like or would want to do,

and yet have created all of these pathways

through the woods, through their walking,

and that reminds me of them, the emus, where they belong, in Australia,

who have survived these millions of years.

I was thinking of this when you were talking about discipline

and just do it,

because they make paths by walking,

like, they don't wait for there to be a path.

The walking is what creates the path.

And so I'm going to thank you so much, Dany Celermajer.

Please check our show notes for links.

Thank you for tuning in to In Context.

In addition to thanking Dany,

I want to thank our producer, Sarahjane Blum.

And I want to thank you for tuning in and say that I am so excited to see

what paths you will create by walking.

Thank you.