The rock off Nayarit, Mexico, is the sacred place of the Wixarika, where their world began. The author, in character as Anna ‘the writer’, is on a pilgrimage to the rock as environment catastrophe seems the inevitable end of our world. Her stories book-end the historic episodes the rock has witnessed, full of betrayals of humanity, but pervaded by a spirit of hope that our crisis will not be final. An intensely emotional and lyrical read.
... she watched a YouTube video of a middle-aged woman in her living room, giving a talk entitled 'Heading for Extinction and What to Do About It'. The woman had a PhD in molecular biophysics. She spoke calmly about the recent data - how there was more carbon in the air than at any point since the Permian period, when 97 per cent of life on earth became extinct, gassed by hydrogen sulphide. How the earth was already well into the sixth mass extinction, and how the biological annihilation was accelerating. How the precautionary principle had been abandoned by those who governed in favour of capitulation to fossil fuel lobbies and short-term gain. This woman spoke of hedge fund managers, CEOs of brokerage houses, who were putting the finishing touches to their underground bunkers and wondering how they might maintain authority over their security forces when society had collapsed and money was worthless.
