Introduction by Croakey: As catastrophic fires devastate lives, property and the environment in Los Angeles, many of us are contemplating related health concerns, from the traumas of loss to the impacts of smoke, the spread of misinformation and fears for our collective futures.
It is timely to consider what can be learnt from a recently released novel – Juice, by Tim Winton – about how the arts and imagination can contribute to more effective climate policy and communications.
Dr Arnagretta Hunter, a physician with a longstanding interest in climate communications and climate and health, commends the book in her review below, saying it “achieves what many of us strive for in policy work – demonstrating the impacts of our decisions today on the lives of future generations”.
Arnagretta Hunter writes:
Stories shape our lives and our understanding of so many things. Many of you will have found your climate advocacy influenced by stories. Stories about what we’ve already faced, shared across social media, through news articles, academic papers and larger works telling stories of change from experience or imagination, sometimes both.
We make sense of our own experience of flood, fire, heatwaves, and smoke through story telling. And it is stories that help us understand the need for change.
Several years ago, in the aftermath of Black Summer and during the COVID pandemic, the Indian heatwave in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future focused my conversations on the health impacts of heat in ways I couldn’t have done had without the book.
Imagining heat, humidity, loss of power and cooling, people broiling in their perspiration and in the available simmering warm water, the opening scenario of Robinson’s book highlights the lethal impact of humidity and the likelihood of sequential and connected challenges – loss of water and power – around extreme weather events. Like many parts of that book, it offered a glimpse toward our human future, a future in which our lives are shaped by the changing climate.
Imagining the future as the climate changes is challenging and complex. Working across health, public policy and climate change, I’ve been involved in several scenario-based approaches in policy development, using imagination to help understand the consequences ahead.
A highlight of this work was with the Climate and Health Alliance (CAHA) in 2020 when a group of us imagined four future scenarios from highly dystopian to potentially utopian and found pathways toward the safer option. This process and its report helped lay the pathway for the National Health and Climate Strategy we see developing federally today.
In academic, advocacy and advisory roles, I’ve spoken with policy makers about the role of collectively imagining often-grim future scenarios. Many of these discussions have been truncated or deferred as the potential emotional and psychological impact of this work becomes clearer. ‘How will we cope? How do we balance optimism and hope against what can be brutal realities of the biological limits to survival?’
In 2020 my friend, composer Kim Cunio, and I imagined dying in a heatwave, attempting to communicate this complexity in a brief installation piece we designed for performance with the J.M Coetzee Centre in Adelaide.
And so, I approached Tim Winton’s recent book Juice as a reader invested in imagining our human future, with both deep interest and some care.
Juice is a great read. Winton describes the book as ‘A novel about a bloke in a hole telling stories while he still can.’
Surviving the future
Across an easily digestible 500-plus pages our narrator takes us into a future in which the climate is irrevocably changed. Decades or centuries away from where we are now, the world is different.
Echoes from our lives now, the consequences of our choices, are felt throughout the narrative in which the Australian continent exists, but it’s a world beyond nation states. It is a warmer world in which many billions have died during the Terrors, a vague event that occurred as the climate shifted years before our story unfolds.
Some densely populated cities remain but other parts of the world including northern Australia are uninhabitable. Our protagonist’s life unfolds in what is probably Western Australia, and is a life focused on survival – particularly through brutal summers in which it is impossible to spend time outside.
Our main character is recruited into a mycelial global collective that contends with the past and looks to the future. He is given basic education in awe, history, health, geography, logistics and kit. He learns the distant history of human civilisation, the time during which people understood what the consequences of burning fossil fuels would be, and yet they did not change course.
“Of course, the Dirty World was rotten to the core. It seems too good to be true because it was. Every miracle came at a cost – a river poisoned, a people enslaved, a species or language expunged. It was a monster that devoured everything in its path, including its children. Then it gorged on the future, which is to say its children’s children. Unwittingly at first. Then by design. Some faked ignorance. Others pretended to care and promised to change course. But all along the most powerful knew what was coming, what it was costing. They hid that knowledge. Buried it. Confused it. Diluted it. To gain advantage, accrue more riches, and, finally, time enough to prepare themselves for flight.” (p. 119)
The visceral rage experienced by our character, the rage of generations to come when they realise that we knew what was happening at the time and did not act, resonates throughout Juice and will stay with me for a long time.
As a physician focused on climate and health, so many details in Juice got my attention. The fundamental foundations of our health – ‘air, food and water, where and how we live’ – all make significant cameos in the narrative.
Animals are no longer eaten in the district where much of this book unfolds. They can no longer be farmed in the climate. Wild animals and plants make brief cameo appearances (the fig tree, an eagle, kangaroos) highlighting scarcity and loss in their absence. The landscape and places are described with love, yet dystopia with its heat, dust, and harshness is unavoidable.
Food production is gruelling, and greenhouse-based, the best mechanism for resilience in face of an angry climate. And the climate is harsh. Unprecedented weather cascades through the book with turbo charged heat waves, humidity, storms, monsoonal deluges, hurricanes.
Patterns of rainfall come only with extreme events – flooding events become the only chance to gather rainwater for drinking. Oceans are tepid and still, particularly at the equator. The seasons are failing. Seasonal variation is lost.
Heat could be a character of its own in the story, an arch villain. Many people die from heat, broiling in unsurvivable, lethal humidity and collapsing with the high temperatures alone.
The impact of heat is not just mortality. The book shows how heat changes thinking, processing and relationships. Drugs are needed to survive the summer, to aid with rest and sleep. Relationships suffer and fracture as the temperatures become more extreme. The devastation of heat-stroke, its physical and mental health impacts and its echo for ages in recovery are intense.
Our skin changes in this warmer world. People are reliant on paste applied every time they need to go outside. Skin suffers – cracking, burning – the lesions, injuries, scarring, the fungal infections after cataclysmic storms, the mosquitoes and their vector borne infections.
People don’t live a long time. Old age is uncommon, and as the story evolves it is clear human fertility is rapidly declining. Children are rare.
Connecting hearts and minds
Throughout Juice, Winton describes the impacts of climate change on the messy bits of humanity that are key to our existence and survival, our lives, relationships, meaning and our future.
By centring a remarkable (and plausible) future around humans and how we connect to people and place, he achieves that with which we often struggle in policy and academia, to connect our hearts and minds to the impacts of our choices today on the generations that will come.
There is so much that is valuable for all of us in this work of fiction. Constrained by questions about ‘the evidence base’ and how ‘robust is the science’, in policy circles we have not communicated effectively what climate change looks like, feels like, and how we will all change with our planet.
While Winton’s approach to the science is intelligent and informed, there is ‘no evidence’ for his imagined future, it’s not ‘peer reviewed’. And yet the painted picture is a compelling one that commands attention.
Winton also contends with the other serious challenge in climate change work – the disciplinary silos. Again, through focusing on messy human life, we move through climate science, health and wellbeing, environment and agriculture, transportation and energy, cities and the built environment and much more – demonstrating a true ‘transdisciplinary’ approach to the challenges that are ahead.
Only a few weeks into this new year of 2025, we watch Los Angeles burn. It is another unprecedented extreme weather event in which a major global city suffers devastating wildfires, in winter, while water and other critical infrastructure and disaster response mechanisms are inadequate to prevent wide-spread injury and loss.
This unfolding disaster offers us insight into the science of climate change – as the world breaches 1.5 degrees and higher average temperatures, these extreme events will be more common and more intense. Extreme events will be unprecedented – and again the LA fires offers us insight into the benefits of using imagination to understand our future, and the need to be better prepared.
Understanding climate, environmental and health science offers a robust foundation upon which we can understand the future as the climate changes.
It is imagination which gives meaning to that science, demonstrating the impacts on core human needs of connection and care. Fiction and storytelling that focuses on these relationships help us understand well the social and health impacts of the changing climate.
Through Juice, Tim Winton’s writing achieves what many of us strive for in policy work – demonstrating the impacts of our decisions today on the lives of future generations.
This use of creativity, imagination and fiction challenges us to do better in the work we do – and be brave in our imagination.
Author details
Dr Arnagretta Hunter is a physician and academic working across healthcare and public policy. She works as a general cardiologist and has particular interest in health and climate change. She completed a Churchill Fellowship looking at narrative medicine and listening in healthcare. She has contributed to debate on catastrophic and existential risk for several years through work at the Australian National University where she is currently the Human Futures Fellow with the National Centre for Epidemiology and Public Health.
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