Tim Winton’s Juice is eco-anxiety on steroids. Surely its lesson is not to accept we are hopeless, but to act

It has long been stated by philosophers that knowledge is power: scientia potential est”. Is this always true, though? What if knowledge is pain? What if you become aware of a grave problem, yet are impotent to fix it?

Think of the fact that there are now a host of names for our growing, often paralysing distress about our warming, melting, wild planet. Eco-anxiety. Climate distress. Solastalgia. Climate anxiety. Climate rage. Ecological grief. Eco-trauma. Eco-despair. Eco-guilt. Eco-shame. Eco-anger. Eco-depression.

Reading through the mounting research on this phenomenon, and leaving aside arguments about definitions, a couple of things quickly become clear.

First, this response is, in many ways, rational: the earth is hurtling towards its own devastation, faster than we thought, as scientists repeat again and again: “We warned you.”

Second, what makes it worse is our lack of ability to address the cause. Social scientists call this “response unavailability” — put simply, we believe that there’s nothing we can do about it, there is no response from us as individuals that can fix the problem. So the combination of scientific forecasts of impending degradation of the earth, and a sense of our impotence, is leaving people shaken and upset — especially, naturally, the young.

Two thirds of Australians aged 16 to 25 report suffering from eco-anxiety. Some have even set up “climate café” sessions, where they can discuss their fears. Eco-anxiety is said to cause physical symptoms — as well as worsening existing mental health vulnerabilities — including irritability, insomnia, loss of appetite, patchy concentration, weakness, panic attacks and muscle tension.

Therapists have reported an influx of young people making appointments to discuss their eco-anxiety.

But surely this is not a load for therapists alone. Surely it’s not something to be pathologised.

And surely we need to work out ways to do something, to do more, a lot more, fast.

Winton wants Juice to force a reckoning

This is where Tim Winton’s electrifying, sobering, grimly compelling new book Juice comes in. In writing it, he says he intends to grab us all by lapels and force us to reckon with what’s happening to the planet.

It’s set in a future Australia — said to be post-apocalyptic but it’s really post the ravages of climate change — when entire swathes of the world are uninhabitable or unrecognisable.

Our narrator ekes out an existence on the northern end of Western Australia, growing up with a sturdy mother who teaches him how to be a self-reliant homesteader and horticulturalist, despite gruelling conditions. The heat is savage and unbearable, in the mid-50s — in summer they live underground, and even the winters are hot.

Their health, their statures and their way of life are significantly diminished, their skin scarred from the sun, heat sickness a constant danger, horizons narrow. Criminal gangs roam and rule.

What changes our narrator is discovering that this is not always the way the world was; once it was lush, green, fertile and cool. And what enrages and astounds him is realising that generations before him knew this would happen, and continued to poison the earth. That some profited handsomely from this. That the world he lived in was not an accident, or inevitable evolution, but a consequence of deliberate acts and deliberate decisions made with full awareness of their consequences.

He says: “It was infuriating to the point of derangement. It was impossible to imagine that humans had knowingly let this happen.”

This is not a story without hope

Realising he was “born of ashes and delivered into sorrow”, he joins the resistance and fights to hunt down those responsible for these atrocities, the wealthy cocooned in compounds, luxury and complicity.

I felt sick reading this book, yet I also couldn’t put it down. It’s a cracking yarn. But most of all it made me realise how rarely we actually stop to imagine the gritty mechanics of daily life in the future.

Two years ago, at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt, the UN chief António Guterres said we are “in the fight of our lives” and losing, “fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible”.

Scientists were saying that without doing more, the earth is predicated to warm by 3.2 degrees by 2100. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator,” Guterres said.

Juice is Winton’s vivid imagining of that hell. Eco-anxiety on steroids.

He wrote in The Monthly: “All I did was to allow myself — force myself, if I’m honest — to imagine the existence my grandchildren’s grandchildren might be fated to live. The conditions they’re likely to endure in the very landscape I inhabit now.”

This is not a story without hope, though. In 2019, Winton wrote a piece for the Marine Conservation Society website where he lamented the loss of reefs, the ongoing approvals of coal mines, but added:

Despair is not an option. And cynicism is just cowardice in a mask. Who can afford either? At moments like these, when our leaders traduce our interests, it’s important to remember that the ordinary citizen has real power. When we share knowledge and passion, when we get organised and gain strength and momentum from another, we make our will known. That’s when we achieve mighty things, and no government or corporation can stop us. Australians asserted their will at the Franklin Blockade, in the old growth forests of WA, at Fraser Island and the Daintree. I was there to see it up close at Ningaloo. This is what I remind myself of, steel myself with.

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Surely the lesson is to act

With the release of this book, he has continued to argue that we can harness “the collective energy of good people, which is a force that’s real and potent”.

“Heartsick as I am about our age, I still believe in the goodness of creation, I believe in the courage and creativity of humans, which are expressions of that creation. We are smart enough to fashion a future worthy of our children’s children, worthy of the earth that made us, the planet that is our parent.”

As my co-host Jeremy Fernandez pointed out on our Not Stupid podcast (in a bonus out on Monday), communities like those working to restore Sydney’s polluted Cook’s River can achieve almost miraculous things.

I clearly remember Winton leading the fight to save Ningaloo Reef in WA, one which resulted in thousands of people protesting in the streets, and ended with its listing on the World Heritage Site in 2011 (though the need for constant vigilance remains, there as well as in the neighbouring Exmouth Gulf).

It seemed like a magical place, with whale sharks and turquoise water, one I yearned to visit. When I finally made it there, I was filled with gratitude for every one of those marching feet, and respect for Winton for caring so much about this sacred, ancient land. I have never seen a more beautiful place, with the red crags of the Cape Range and its long, teeming, fringing reef, so full of life it sounds like wind-chimes under water.

Going there changed me. It kept me upright, as the natural world does for so many.

So, what can we do about this creeping eco-anxiety? Some will scoff about it, dismiss it as folly, weakness or alarmism, but it’s clearly a growing and understandable problem. I can’t be the only parent who has comforted a child weeping about the melting planet or overheard kids talk about a shadowed future. Surely the lesson is not to accept that we are hopeless, that we should distract and mollify ourselves, but to act.

Knowledge is power if we can do something with it. Eco-anxiety can only fester if we feel we are unable to effect change, to harness the frustration and fear into force. And political parties will only, eventually, catch up with public sentiment if it is forcefully expressed.

Leadership is required. Hope is not absent. Solidarity, here, is everything.

Even writing the book is an act of hope, a belief in persuasion, in the power of stories.