Crafty prepping

An apocalyptic future, which seemed millennia away or even fictional in the 1980s of my childhood, is arriving. Generations of abuse and neglect in Australia, as well as other parts of the world, have built up into a crescendo of bushfires, dust storms, floods, drought, heatwaves, hail, hot blobs, melting glaciers, global trash and a thousand other variations to mark out this period, our period, finger‑pointedly known as the Anthropocene. Scientific researchers, First Nations peoples and the rational alike warned that the speeding‑up of mass production and resource grabbing, driven by the greedy and power-hungry over the last two centuries, would have dire consequences. Alongside the accelerated and overwhelming spread of information, time now feels increasingly fleeting, vulnerably finite and out of pace with maintainable or even tolerable rhythms. These perceptions, supported by mounting evidence, have convinced an increasing number of citizens, including artists, that we cannot sustain this rapidity and have only a small window of time to shift pace—a decade or so, if that.