This is an elegiac book, curiously devoid of anger, notably short on politics, suffused with discontented restlessness but paradoxically passive. It is difficult to see where it will take its likely readership except into a place of disconsolate bias confirmation.

We need to engage with scale. We need to keep thinking that the loss of a million animals is a terrible tragedy that must be avoided at all costs. We must also realise that the loss of a billion animals is not the same. It’s a thousand times worse.

As Aboriginal people, we’ve been fighting the capitalist, colonial system that created this crisis for over 200 years. Forgive me if I find your brand of hope a little hard to swallow.

These days the hippies aren’t so hopeful; they’re asking: now that hope and confidence are insufficient to the task at hand, how do we live with integrity?

Scientists tells us that as many as a million species are at risk of extinction. Amongst their number is a growing cohort of intensively managed species that limp along, year after year, with no clear prospect of recovery. Are we entering a new period of conservation characterised by extinction in slow motion, a hospice earth?

Imagine if we could collectively agree that we no longer had enough space on ourselves to store the externalities of our rampant material desires.

There's no future in nihilism, but sometimes it seems like there's no future regardless. On this level, it can be therapeutic to wallow in it for a little while – just sometimes.

It was a long summer. We saw unsettling things in the news, and we felt them at home – the unrelenting temperatures, steeped nights, no rain. That now-infamous global heat map showing Australia like a blistering boil of weeping red. The bloated fish after algal blooms.