A Fever that Won't Break

Roberto Grossi, Stefano Liberti, and Stefania Prandi share one worry with the audience gathered at the Seminario Vescovile: When are we going to realise that our world, the home we neglect, is changing? At times, perhaps too often, we pretend the climate crisis is not happening. Yet the changes to our lives are tangible, from record temperatures to more frequent and intense droughts and floods.

Drawing on biographical notes, travel logs, and their multifarious work - as in Grossi's La grande rimozione, which blends drawings, non-fiction, and personalia - the authors foreground the damages made by anthropic activities. Think of industrial fishing, for example, drastically altering the Mediterranean sea and its rich heritage. Or the careless use of fertilizers, decimating insect populations, most crucially those of pollinators. The narration is personal, centring the people at the frontline of such transformations. Is the "personal" the key to make the climate "political"?

One point stands out: We are all in this together, but we are not in this together equally. Climate panels and other international organisations have long elucidated the disproportionate contribution to environmental disaster wrought by a super-wealthy minority. Yet political decisions that would limit wealth remain anathema to governments of all stripes. While the political levers are there, the authors might concur with Mark Fisher, and Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek before him, asserting that: ''It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism''.