Facing up to the climate catastrophe and its consequences in Australia.
Co-authored with Prof. Richard Hil.
Published by Peter Lang, July 2026.
Unspeakable
Why we wrote it
Climate change is the story that will accompany us for the rest of our lives. What it actually means, for the many ways it will disrupt how we live, our societies and Country, is hard to fathom. Richard Hil and I wrote Unspeakable to understand why it has been so difficult to face the unimaginable squarely. The book is an attempt to hold steadily the thing most of us would rather look past, that the climate catastrophe is no longer arriving but is already here, and that its consequences in Australia will ask more of us than our institutions, arranged as they currently are, seem ready to give. Alongside that reckoning, we wanted to offer real, tangible and immediately applicable ways that anyone might act now, without waiting for government or their workplace, to live through the climate disruptions already underway.
What is the book about
Some things are hard to say out loud. That the climate catastrophe is no longer a future threat but a present condition. That the institutions we trusted to hold the line are already failing. That in many places in Australia — swept by floods, fires, droughts and heatwaves — what is coming has, in part, arrived.
Unspeakable confronts the silence around these facts. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and grounded case studies from Australia, the book portrays climate disruption not only as a scientific or technical problem, but as a crisis of meaning, relationship, and moral responsibility. It explores grief, power, and inequality alongside practices of mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and regeneration, with particular attention to how communities respond when institutions falter.
It asks what it means to live within climate collapse, and how forms of civic life, care, and collective agency emerge amid profound systemic disruption.
Who is it for
It is written for people who are already uneasy, who sense that the reassurances on offer do not quite match what they can see out the window, and who would rather understand the situation than be managed through it.
If you would like to better understand how things are unravelling around us, or if you work in an organisation or are part of a community that will be asked to hold things together when the systems around it come under load, the book may give you language, as well as clear pathways and actions you can take in your own life, for what you already suspect.
What’s inside
Introduction: Being in and of this moment
Part I The Age of Endings
Chapter 1. Living in a time of endings
Chapter 2. The trauma, the science, the unravelling
Chapter 3. Business as usual? Hypernormalisation and the climate disaster
Part II Reimagining Life as We Fall
Chapter 4. Living with mortality: From despair to deep peace
Chapter 5. Rebuilding civic culture: Resilience through community
Chapter 6. The way ahead: Exercising agency through collapse and renewal
Conclusion: Facing endings, cultivating beginnings
Who are the authors
Prof. Richard Hil is an Australian sociologist and writer whose work focuses on power, inequality, youth, social change, and contemporary cultural critique.
Dr. Jean Renouf is a business leader and community resilience practitioner, and founder of Safer Future and Plan C, working at the intersection of climate disruption, civic life, and place-based response.
Endorsements
(click + to read each endorsement)
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"As we witness climate-fuelled worsening extreme weather driving deadly floods like those in Lismore in 2022, megafires like those in Maui and Los Angeles, and of course our own Black Summer, it would be easy to become paralysed with fear... Then along comes this book. While speaking honestly about what we all face, it provides hope rather than despair and throws us a lifeline, an alternative way of framing the existential threat of climate change, of reaching into the core of our humanity, and recreating true community. It tells that together we are much stronger... Unspeakable is a must read."
Greg Mullins AO, AFSM, former Commissioner Fire & Rescue NSW; founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action; author of Firestorm
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"Leadership to address these catastrophes will not come from conventional institutions, it is coming from communities directly. This is why this book is long overdue. Jean Renouf and Richard Hil have direct hands-on experience of handling climate disasters... They canvass the entire background to this existential threat, suggesting means of moving beyond feelings of impotence and rage, to see collapse as an opportunity to fundamentally change a flawed system into a sustainable and satisfying future. Thoroughly recommended!"
Ian Dunlop, former Chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors
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"This book is a field guide to life at the end of the world as we know it. It offers not false hope but sensible ways to cope in more resilient communities."
Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University
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"Brave, necessary, and beautifully human. This book is for you... It invites you to move at the speed of trust, to act bravely without abandoning tenderness, and to remember that our shared courage grows stronger every time we show up for each other. You are seen here. And you are not alone."
Wendy Brown, President, Main Arm Disaster Recovery
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"This is a timely and important book... Facing that reality does not demand despair or justify fatalistic inaction... The impending crisis must be a catalyst for rethinking the way we live, work and play. This book suggests broad approaches which will help us to navigate the troubled times ahead. It will help you be part of the change we all need."
Ian Lowe AO, Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society
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"Unspeakable is one of those rare books that manages to bring together what is usually kept apart: science and emotion, spirituality and politics, inner life and agency, the individual and the collective, the dark and the light... Richard Hil and Jean Renouf guide us through the mourning of what is lost, without ever letting us sink into despair. For it is precisely there, in this difficult space, through connections and stories, through community, that something new and exciting is born. An essential read!"
Pablo Servigne, author of Another End of the World is Possible
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"Unspeakable offers us the opportunity for honesty about our point in time... it brings the reality of this moment into clear perspective, while also offering guidance as to how we might move through and beyond it, together... Unspeakable connects with our yearning to live differently, and it is this connection that can give us the juice we need to turn towards a future through and beyond what we now face, a future that could be regenerative, safe and resilient. It's not too late."
Carmen Stewart, Regenerative Futures Practitioner, Imagine Northern Rivers
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"This radical and important book holds the reader's hand while looking at our peculiar, shared, global trauma squarely in the eye. With an Australian focus and a penchant for the truth, it carries for us the conversation that often fails to land with others... For an exhausted community leader, this book has both fanned my activist flame and reminded me of the deep still pool that I can be for both myself and my community."
Mel Bloor, founder and president, Resilient Uki
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"Unspeakable is an important contribution to the growing literature on living well together as the path through collapse to community. Weaving together threads of Indigenous wisdom, grassroots practice, spiritual thought, and academic rigour, Hil and Renouf tell a story that unflinchingly faces reality, ask crucial questions and provide vital guidance."
Tim Hollo, author of Living Democracy
Where to buy it
Peter Lang (publisher, softcover and eBook, US$52.95): https://www.peterlang.com/document/1461391
Your local independent bookseller: ask for it by ISBN 978-1-80374-544-2 (softcover)
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/Unspeakable-climate-catastrophe-consequences-Australia/dp/1803745444/