It’s the figurative cold shower we need off the back of Sydney’s hottest day ever. After Sydney and Melbourne turned out to march against climate change in record numbers.  The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change, co-authored by Jane Bryony Rawson and James Whitmore, deals with the practical advice and personal stories that will help us cope in a world of greater environmental instability. Designed to be read cover to cover or dipped into as you please, the Handbook is accessible as it is smooth at driving home the realities of daily life living in a hotter, harsher climate. We had a couple of questions for Jane – for more you’ll have to read the Handbook.

Can you introduce yourself, and your writing?

Sure – I grew up in Canberra and I’ve lived in Melbourne for the last ten years or so, with a few stops on the way in San Francisco and Eastern Europe. I’ve worked as a professional writer for most of my adult life, writing about environmental issues, parenting, transport, IT and all kinds of other things. I’ve also written a novel, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (Transit Lounge, 2013) and a novella, Formaldehyde (Seizure, 2015).

I’ve read a few articles on climate change, but I’ve never read anything quite like this before. Had you?

James and I started thinking about this book when we were both Environment & Energy editors at The Conversation. We were seeing a lot of work being published on the politics of climate change, and on ways countries and individuals might reduce their emissions. But despite the widely held view (at least, widely held among scientists and informed policy makers and politicians) that there was no way the world was going to keep warming to under 2 degrees, we weren’t seeing much on how we should prepare for the effects of climate change. We wanted to write something that would be both consciousness-raising and actually practically useful. We wanted people to understand what we were in for, and give them tools to get ready so they could do more than just panic or passively wait.

Where does your passion come from?

As the Environment & Energy Editor at The Conversation I spent all day every day helping scientists and other academics write evidence-based articles about climate change. I’d definitely been aware of the issue before – I was raised by environmentalist parents and had previously worked on developing policy to reduce emissions from transport – but seeing the research as it came out, and understanding how worried scientists were, gave me a firm kick up the butt. It’s shocking to read that kind of stuff all day and then look at the state of public discussion on climate change in this country. It’s like there’s a huge truck heading for us and we’re dawdling across the intersection, stopping to pick up loose change we see on the ground as though that’s more important than our imminent death.

The realities of climate change are still abstract for many people. How does preparing for living with climate change affect your life right now?

Despite writing a whole book about preparing, I still mostly either fret aimlessly or forget entirely that it’s happening. But I am on a bit of a mission this summer – which is meant to be a hot one – to trial ways to stop the house warming up during the day. Heat and breakdown in services – food supply, electricity, transport – are the main risks where we live, so I’m starting with the easy one.

If you were to pick a top 3 things people should start considering now in order to cope better living with climate change, what would they be?  

It really varies a lot depending on who you are, where you live, what’s important to you, what your personal vulnerabilities are. I’d say the first thing is to figure out physical risks wherever it is you live, and the second is to make a plan to deal with them, whether that’s a bushfire plan or knowing what to do in a heatwave or working out what you’ll do if the power goes out. And the third is to work on ways to deal with anxiety and stress. One great way to cope with anxiety and despair about climate change is to meet up with other people who have the same worries and get politically active about it. If you’re feeling powerless, joining in might help.

Why have you made our emotional response to climate change a focal point in the Handbook?

 Even people who face no imminent physical threat from climate change can feel overwhelmed by the havoc it will wreak on other species, on ecosystems, on other people and on their dreams of a future world that is better than the present. This despair can be crippling; it’s particularly hard to imagine constructive ways to deal with reducing our emissions and changing our political system when you’re overcome by the sadness and futility of it all. And for those who face disasters, panic makes a bad situation considerably worse. Learning how to carefully plan and how to remain calm under pressure will be very useful skills in a world with much more extreme weather. For all those reasons, we thought mental preparation was just as important as physical preparation for surviving climate change.

One thing I like about this book is that it can be funny. Is there space for a sense of humour facing the threat of climate change?

James and I are both oddly light-hearted people, while being profoundly worried at the same time. We didn’t want to write a stern, lecturing book. Who wants to read something like that? And besides, it’s not like either of us are geniuses at figuring this stuff out: we’re not in any position to be serious and scholarly. I really like jokes and can’t imagine I’d ever want to write something without them.

How do you think we’ll deal with the issue of climate change in the near future? 

Personally I don’t see us continuing on with this system of endless economic growth, consumerism, leaving everything to the market and letting businesses externalise costs like pollution, as well as solving climate change. As far as I can tell, one or the other has to give. I’d rather see capitalism go than the system that supports life on Earth, but that’s just me. Whether it will happen is another matter. There’s a lot of power on the side of sacrificing life support systems in the name of profit.

Read more from Jane Rawson on her blog, and buy the book here. Images supplied by the author or under Creative Commons. Interview by Emilia for Homecamp.