My first book Fire Storm & Flood: the violence of climate change will be published by Head of Zeus, 5th August 2021. Pre-orders are available here. The project was commissioned and managed by Unipress Books. The writing began by me thinking about the statement: “Climate change has been happening for millions of years, so what humans are doing now isn’t anything unnatural or something to be worried about.” OK – so let’s look at the Great Dying 251 million years ago. And the rest is history.
Synopsis An unflinching photographic record of the epic effects of a violent climate, from the earliest extinction events to the present. Violent geologic events have ravaged the Earth since time began, spanning the vast eons of our planet’s existence. These seismic phenomena have scored their marks in rock strata and been reflected in fossil records for future humanity to excavate and ponder. For most of the preceeding 78,000 years Homo sapiens simply observed natural climate upheaval. One hundred years ago, however, industrialization stunningly changed the rules, so that now most climate change is driven by us.
My second book will be for Bristol University Press and will explore the idea that humans have built a civilisation that is potentially beyond our control. It will develop some of the ideas proposed in my longread article co-published by The Conversation and The Independent, We’ve created a civilisation hell-bent on destroying itself. That article was developed from a talk I gave to a Rethinking Economics workshop in London in 2019