Full Circle

Book excerpt: A visionary book for our wild times. Scott Ludlam draws on his experience as a senator and activist to capture our world on a precipice and explore what comes next. One way or another, we are headed for radical change. We are now in the Anthropocene – humans are changing the earth’s climate irreversibly, and political, human and natural systems are on the cusp of collapse. Ludlam shines a light on the bankruptcy of the financial and political systems that have led us here: systems based on the exploitation of the earth’s resources, and 99 per cent of the world’s population labouring for the wealth of 1 per cent. In Full Circle, Ludlam seeks old and new ways to make our systems humane, regenerative and more in tune with nature. He travels the globe to see what happens when ordinary people stand up to corporations and tyrants. He takes the reader on a journey through time to discover the underlying patterns of life. And he finds that we are at a unique moment when billions of tiny actions by individuals and small groups are coalescing into one great movement that could transform history. Bringing together a wealth of new ideas, Full Circle outlines a new ecological politics. ‘Scott Ludlam’s Full Circle ranges very far in space and time – the story stretches over hundreds of millions of years and every inch of our planet. Ludlam’s insights are often cogent and deep – and more than that, they're earned. His willingness to engage in the fight he's describing gives his take on these existential questions real power.’—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature ‘Australia lost a senator, the world gained a luminous writer. Scott Ludlam’s Full Circle is at once a comic chronicle of the climate apocalypse, a heartbreaking work of paleohistory and a fugitive tourist diary, strange, uncategorisable and magnificent.’—Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing