BEYOND CLIMATE GRIEF is a very personal book written to help individuals manage climate grief. It has been highly praised by some as the must-read book that ‘will give us courage when we are overwhelmed by what is happening’. I found it to be just the opposite.  It is a jumble of many different topics lightly discussed. A sample from the book appeared in Sunday Life, a magazine in the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age. It is a good Sunday magazine piece, but not the great book it is touted to be. For example,  Charlie Pickering, who the author interviews and promotes in the book, is one of the people quoted on the cover: “An extradentary book”.  Jane Caro, also a Sunday Life writer, is quoted on the cover with “Brilliantly researched”.  It is not brilliantly researched. 

The author is a veterinarian, an ABC presenter and presumably an informed citizen of the world. Yet, she admits to not becoming seriously anxious about the climate crisis until she realised that her favourite activity would be in jeopardy if the world continues to warm. She is a keen skier. Snow is melting and some snow resorts are consequently suffering. We have known for decades that there is a climate crisis yet she gives the impression she only realised it when it affected her. Her main concern doesn’t appear to be others such as the farmers in India.

She describes the December 2019 fires in Mallacoota as an example of the climate catastrophe. The chapters on the Black Summer fires are not any more illuminating than the many other personal descriptions and they don’t add much to the broader narrative on the fires. This fire thread is then mixed with the thread of her personal roller-coaster emotions when her partner ABC presenter Robyn Williams got cancer. 

There is a heroic attempt to cheer us up by saying that entrepreneurs are working on the problem, citing particularly Mike Cannon-Brookes’ climate leadership. There are quotations from her conversations with songwriter Missy Higgins, Charlie Pickering (The Weekly) and Craig Reucassel (War on Waste) intended to demonstrate how taking a stand and doing something is their method of battling anxiety. Newby interviews several teenage activists and gives us their advice on how to manage anxiety: have a support group, join a strike, listen to favourite music, have an outlet. She writes that ‘These kids are the antidote to anyone’s grief’. Apparently they provided an antidote to her own grief, but not surely to everyone’s grief.

At the end, there is a six page summary of advice from Dr Rob Gordon and Professor Sandy McFarlane that was given to people in Mallacoota after the fires. The author says this specific fire-recovery advice ‘can be applied to any experience of disaster’. That is the sort of breezy unfounded statement that is unhelpful.

BEYOND CLIMATE GRIEF is no doubt well-intended. It may have helped the author relieve her own admitted anxiety. However, the climate emergency is too important for any of us to be satisfied with a speed-to-market title about cancer, bushfires, skiing and the climate all bundled into a jumble.

BEYOND CLIMATE GRIEF by Jonica Newby 

Paperback published March, 2021 by NewSouth Press

ISBN: 9781742236834

Published in Paperback and eBook

Review by Carol Dance