Illusions: World-Making in the Anthropocene

This chapter reflects on collaborative world-making and storying in the Anthropocene. Throughout this book, we have traced the ways people, plants and fire coexist in an era marked by uncertainty and change. We have followed experiences of ruin and regeneration that underpin new understandings of the world today. In building on these new understandings, we are intentionally not offering answers or solutions in this concluding chapter. Instead, in writing together, we seek to embed and embody the stories we have told of the fiery environment—as it has already been experienced and as it is imagined for the future. Looking at the artworks, and listening to the narratives of survivors, we are reminded that nature is formed through the agency and interdependencies of humans, nonhumans (flora and fauna), elemental and material ecologies. Like the alliances we (humans) are a part of, the world we make in this book will exist into the future through stories of grief and survival, acts of care and elemental images of transformation.