Chapter 1

3

See Wilson (2019) for an analysis of the complex cultural politics of these debates in Australia prior to the 2019–2020 fires.

4

See Haraway et al (2015) for a discussion of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and other alternatives.

5

In their book Country: Future Fire, Future Farming (2021), Gammage and Pascoe state that: ‘“Country” is an English word Aboriginal people have transformed. Country is physical, communal and spiritual – land, water, sky, habitats, sites, places, totems and relationships, a world of the mind, a way of believing and behaving. Creator ancestors made Country in the Dreaming, and they still oversee it. Not only obvious features that newcomers name, but every pebble and ripple disclosed both the ecological logic of its existence and the Dreaming’s presence’ (Gammage and Pascoe, 2021: 81–82). It should be noted that while Gammage and Pascoe use a capital C (which we will follow in this book to convey the specific Aboriginal transformation of the word), other authors do not.

6

Shelley Pacholok’s book Into the Fire: Disaster and the Remaking of Gender (2013) is a detailed analysis of the ways in which gender was remade among firefighters during an extreme wildfire event in Canada.

Chapter 2

Chapter 4

1

The associated website clarifies that: ‘For pregnant women most will not experience problems due to smoke. For a small proportion, exposure to smoke over several weeks during pregnancy may slightly reduce the weight of their babies. This slight reduction is unlikely to have a long-term effect on the health of the babies’ (https://nceph.anu.edu.au/phxchange/communicating-science/how-protect-yourself-and-others-bushfire-smoke).

3

Marc Böhlen’s research into water quality monitoring in New York similarly found that citizens’ judgements, based on smell, do not tend to correlate with scientific measurements of contamination levels in water at public beaches (Böhlen, 2016).

Chapter 5

2

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns for a table of lengths of lockdown across different jurisdictions

Chapter 6

1

The Immigration Restriction Bill, which enacted the White Australia policy, was one of the first substantive pieces of legislation to be introduced to the new Commonwealth Parliament in 1901 (Kendall, 2008).

2

Objectively, countries that are already experiencing disadvantage are more likely to be worse off. This is apparent in the Global Climate Risk Index produced by Germanwatch, a German NGO that measures North-South Equity and sustainability (see https://www.germanwatch.org/en/19777). According to this index, Australia’s climate risk is not extreme, while its overall performance on climate change mitigation is very low. This ranking was awarded by another German NGO, the NewClimate Institute for Climate Policy and Global Sustainability (see https://newclimate.org/2021/11/09/the-climate-change-performance-index-2022/).

Chapter 7

1

The question as to whether or not there are too many animal individuals is not addressed in this book, but see Haraway (2008; 2018).

2

‘All new human members of the group who are born in the context of community decision making come into being as symbionts with critters of actively threatened species’ (Haraway, 2016: 139–140). Only those born ‘through individual reproductive choice’ (that is, outside the community’s decision-making arrangements) are fully human genetically.

3

See Schlunke (2016) for a queer, feminist account of the immediate aftermath of losing one’s house to bushfire.