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A visionary book for our wild times. Scott Ludlam draws on his experience as an Australian 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 was an Australian senator from 2008 to 2017 and served as deputy leader of the Australian Greens. He has also worked as a filmmaker, artist and graphic designer. This is his first book, the fruit of a life of activism, study and travel.
"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, a fugitive tourist diary, strange, uncategorisable and magnificent."
– Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing
"Ludlam proves himself as capable with metaphor and magic realism as he is with history and political theory [...] Ludlam shows that the tools, the ideas, the models and the will to alter the status quo and save the planet from capitalism's excesses and the climate catastrophe already exist – they just need to be joined together in a single global network of determination and action."
– The Saturday Paper
"A magnificent book by a true thinker – stimulating, challenging, and bold. Full Circle has more ideas in it than the past decade of Australian political memoirs put together."
– Nick Feik, editor of The Monthly
"A book like none other, marrying the cosmos to the community for the biggest story of them all. This is both a poetics of evolution and an irresistible summons to the village square."
– Anna Goldsworthy
"Dense, passionate and vital, Full Circle really deserves to be book of the year. As I internalise the reformation of politics it proposes, I feel that I'm reaching out towards a most satisfying and achievable future."
– Tim Flannery
"Ludlam highlights new and old ways to make our systems humane, regenerative and more in tune with nature."
– Z Feed
