1. Encroaching the psychic geography of invulnerability

As non-Indigenous individuals, we are conscious of the crescendo of millennia-old methods of Indigenous care of community and country and, at the same time, the limits of our own lived experience. Thus, in our analysis, the most urgent voices witnessing and warning against climate catastrophe are those of First Nations peoples worldwide. They call for a fundamental shift towards a relational existence, where human identity is woven into the fabric of the more-than-human world, beyond instrumental value and economic utility. In Canada, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson evokes such a restorative world in Theory of Water: nishnaabe maps to the times ahead, where placing her body on the shore, on ice and snow, in water with cattails, bark, bullfrogs, and more, she demonstrates that “what we do on a small scale is how we exist at the larger scale.”Footnote ⁴ Renowned Kahnawà:ke Mohawk activist and scholar Taiaiake G Alfred presents a passionate argument for Indigenous reconnections as the only pathway towards cultural regeneration in It’s All About the Land: Collected Talks and Interviews on Indigenous Resurgence. Footnote ⁵ In Australia, Tony Birch, Bhiamie Williamson, Alexis Wright, among others, have relentlessly written about the kind of world we make together—one that is only possible through Indigenous agreement-making, caring for country, and the intergenerational transmission of knowledges. For these writers, this connection is the source of true resilience, a principle Wright articulates by explaining that “through our stories of country, we know how closely related and interconnected we are, not only to each other but to everything else in the continuous cycles of life. We are taught resilience through the stories of regeneration that have ensured the survival of our culture.”Footnote ⁶

These concerns are not being voiced solely by Indigenous writers. Our own identities and readings point to the embrace of vulnerability as a crucial response to invincibility. This is a theme echoed globally by racialized, minoritized, queer, trans, disabled, dispossessed, and disenfranchised voices who reveal the mechanisms of power that divide bodies: human from human, and human from non-human.Footnote ⁷ In India, for instance, Yuvan Aves’s Intertidal: the hidden worlds between land and sea, highly commended for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, asks us to reconnect with the natural world.Footnote ⁸ He invites us to heed to sublime frog calls in the night and measure butterfly miles into the ocean, amidst the churning of longshore currents. This attentive witnessing is portrayed as a form of solidarity, as communities stand together to preserve the homes of coastal inhabitants, human and non-human. Shaunak Sen’s documentary film, All That Breathes, hones into the lives of two Muslim brothers who rescue and restore back to health black kites falling from the smog-choked skies in Wazirabad, Delhi.Footnote ⁹ The film portrays a deeply upended balance between humans and nature, seen through minuscule worms composting garbage and rats scurrying on landfill heaps, while the mesmerizing raptors soar above the terrifying expanse of urbanity below.

In this respect, the discipline of philosophy has carefully analyzed the mechanisms that foster a sense of invulnerability in the West that severs our relationship with the world. In her seminal account of the cultural construction of illness, Susan Sontag maps the human landscape of bodily fallibility:

The defended, dysfunctional behaviour that arises from this rigid division is the use of metaphor to describe illness and disease. Sontag’s argument is compelling, but our concern is not with metaphor. We are interested most in two dynamics: first, the binary oppositions day/night, well/sick, and being a citizen of one place and not the other; and second, the implicit state of denial—the fantasy that the “self” can be sequestered in that one desirable kingdom of wellness and never occupy the embodiment of the other place. Into that state of denial are woven complex, knotted psychodynamic processes where wellness relies on a separation from the body. By contrast, sickness is thoroughly and undeniably embodied.

A dualist logic shapes this psychic landscape. It operates on a simple, brutal principle: Western cultures maintain their sense of detachment and safety by projecting physical vulnerability onto others. They make certain that human and non-human bodies are over-embodied and hyper-vulnerable to sustain the illusion of their own disembodiment. This binary logic reflects a transformation in our understanding of technology, one that is intrinsically tied to the concept of the sublime. The discourse of denial underpinning contemporary techno-optimism about climate change can be understood as the product of a convergence between the natural sublime of the eighteenth century and the technological sublime of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Natural sublime captured the relationship between the individual and the world through experiences of awe and wonder that reinforced a sense of invulnerability over the natural world. Today, technological sublime has become the carefully managed spectacle of the digital. The astonishing power of innovations like AI produces a stunned cynicism, letting us ignore current crises due to a deep-seated belief that technology will ultimately save us. The question now, returning to Sontag, is how to dismantle the narrative rooted in wellness and abstract disembodied superiority. Can we understand the Kingdom of the Well as a toxic rejection of the intrinsic fragility that comes with having a physical body?

Judith Butler argues that vulnerability is enacted upon certain subjects, but conversely is also an innate, foundational state of human embodiment: “accidents, illness, attacks” render us all vulnerable.Footnote ¹¹ To be made vulnerable by another would seem to preclude agency, making the subject saveable only by the paternalistic action of those with power. Vulnerability would seem to sit in binary opposition with resistance. However, Butler writes: “Once we understand the way vulnerability enters into agency, then our understanding of both terms can change, and the binary opposition between them can become undone.”Footnote ¹² Vulnerability can be an active force, an act of resistance to power, even its overthrow. The radical act is to propose that vulnerability is “a constituent feature of a human animal both affected and acting.”Footnote ¹³

Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman, a Noongar artist-novelist with ancestral ties to Western Australia’s south coast, offers a compelling example in this context. While we cannot explore all of the work’s full depth here, its core technique is key: it uses storytelling to make the familiar seem strange. This approach, known as defamiliarization, is central to great science fiction. It also reflects the real-world experiences of First Nations peoples, who have witnessed disruptive, futuristic-level changes in their own communities. As Wright powerfully observes, Indigenous peoples “know the apocalyptic realities of two and a half centuries of continual invasion […] which has been driving the major environmental disasters of the Anthropocene and the harmful realities of globalization.”Footnote ¹⁴ By deploying this technique, Coleman’s work does more than tell a story; it fundamentally challenges and reshapes how we understand vulnerability itself. Set in this colonized continent-country, the novel initially appears to present an account of the British invasion largely from a First Nations perspective. As the narrative unfolds, we encounter passages such as: “people died, many of them, and those that survived were herded and collected and taken to fenced camps to so-called missions. Only they were being used as cheap labour … They called it protection, these Settlers, protecting the Natives.”Footnote ¹⁵ In these pages, the reader’s identification with the plight of the natives mirrors the dynamics of the natural sublime. Through a process of catharsis, the Western reader is drawn to empathize with their suffering and condemn the colonizers. Yet, this very connection also highlights the reader’s own distance from the events. There is a sense of relief in knowing this is just a story, which allows for deep emotional engagement without being consumed by the narrative’s harsh reality.

It is only well into the first half of the novel that the reader makes a startling discovery: what initially appears to be a historical narrative of Australia’s colonial occupation is, in fact, an account of an alien invasion. This twist places all of humanity in the vulnerable position historically forced upon First Nations people. The reader’s previous sense of safe distance collapses, making way for a more complex and genuine empathy. This shift happens through a rapid change in perspective. Suddenly, we are positioned as the natives, experiencing vulnerability and dispossession. At the same time, we are forced to confront an unsettling truth: we also share a complicity with the Alien colonizers, recognizing in them our own world’s paternalistic and technocratic impulses. This defamiliarization shatters the illusion of a separate self, safe from the world’s dangers. It compels the reader to abandon the illusory safety of the Kingdom of the Well and instead inhabit what Butler terms “a middle region”—a space where vulnerability can be reconceived as a source of strength and action.Footnote ¹⁶ Of course, this remains a narrative device rather than a concrete blueprint for dismantling the prevailing state of denial. Nevertheless, Coleman’s critique proves strikingly effective: the misplaced faith in technocratic saviours who promise to resolve climate crises through a suite of technological fixes is allegorically exposed in the brutal regime of the superior alien species. As readers, we are forced to adopt the perspective of the subjugated humans, who come to recognize that the techno-salvation complex is not the solution but in fact a fundamental part of the problem.

Ellen van Neerven, a Mununjali Yugambeh queer thinker and literary activist from south-east Queensland, offers us a glimpse of radical vulnerability in quite a different way. Their novella “Water” imagines an Australia in which the government has devised the “Australia2 project” off the Brisbane coastline, the creation of a “super island” that will serve as a second “country” where “Aboriginal people can apply to live.”Footnote ¹⁷ The island is created through technological intervention, a process of sea-mining which results in “islandising.” For completion by 2028, the planned en masse relocation can only take place if the Australian government is able to remove a prolific local population of “sandplants” from the area, seemingly strange plant–human hybrid creatures that have emerged from the water when the mining begins. While considered an intelligent species with “green human-like heads” and of research interest to the Science Centre where they are tested as “specimens,” the “sandplants” are also an Indigenous population that stands in the way of progress.Footnote ¹⁸

Kaden, a Murri woman working on her people’s Ki Island (Russell Island), narrates the story. Her backstory involves generational trauma from her father’s experience: his art was co-opted and monetized by Brisbane’s first Aboriginal gallery, leading to his death by overdose from alienation. Named “orchid” by her father, Kaden has since dealt with this trauma by distancing herself from her heritage. Kaden’s move to take up a job as “Cultural Liaison Officer,” alongside the engineering “re-forming” industry, is explained as a way of dealing with the loss of culture, given that her mother is white.Footnote ¹⁹ Preferring to address the “sandplants” as “sandpeople” or “plantpeople,” Kaden is entrusted with the job of dosing the sandplants with a chlorine-based formula that renders them docile and “roots” them, in order ultimately to transplant them. Kaden’s meeting with Larapinta, named after the botanist’s daughter who “discovered” them (also a reference to the 231-km long-distance walking track in the Northern Territory’s Tjoritja/West MacDonnell National Park) is framed as an encounter that is at once strangely familiar and deeply alien, where the binary between human and vegetal comes undone. Kaden is “struck both by how startlingly human-like they are and how alarmingly unhuman they are.”Footnote ²⁰ When Larapinta speaks, her expression “sounds human, but everything in her voice indicates she is not.”Footnote ²¹ Kaden increasingly finds affinity and attachment with Larapinta as the latter improves upon her human language.

Kaden’s developing closeness to Larapinta is entangled with a new and fundamental acceptance of her human bodily vulnerability. At the outset, fresh from a mainland urban environment, Kaden must relearn her body in relation to the ocean. Out on the water for the first time, she begrudgingly accepts and only scantily applies sunscreen, adamantly asserting “I don’t burn.”Footnote ²² She pays for her hubris with severe sunburn on her face. Later, foolishly ignoring the “blue blobs” in the water, Kaden wades under an old jetty and is stung on the sole of her foot by bluebottle jellyfish.Footnote ²³ As red welts develop and pain immobilizes her, Larapinta appears. She treats Kaden with a “trick,” using her fingers to extract the seawater from her skin and releasing a stream of freshwater over the sting—“just the first drop makes it better.”Footnote ²⁴

The moment of utmost radical vulnerability arrives when it becomes clear that in the process of questioning what Larapinta may be, Kaden herself lets go of her claim on humanness. As the “sparkle” between them grows and Kaden finds herself fantasizing about Larapinta, we know it is but a matter of time that they will be enjoined into a sexual union.Footnote ²⁵ When it arrives though, we are startled into the upending of the very meaning of what it means for a human being to be sexual, or what Larapinta calls being “private.”Footnote ²⁶ Kaden’s thoughts might be ours: “To feel she is human now is a lie, I must be with who she is. I feel her mind crackle on mine as our foreheads touch, I feel what is between her eyes.”Footnote ²⁷ This is not a mere inter-species liaison that van Neerven is suggesting here: rather, the foundational assumptions of human intercourse and communion are dissolved in the opening out of the very meaning of love, a state to which every creaturely being has to adapt, the narrative suggests. The appearance of red and yellow flowers on Larapinta’s fingers as a result of their coming together, an “uncharted experience” for both, brings the edifice of human–non-human crashing down in such “renewal” and adaptation.Footnote ²⁸

The ending of van Neervan’s “Water” stages a revolt against the technological destruction of the aquatic ecosystem. Her Uncle Theo tells Kaden that the “sandpeople” are actually “Jangigir,” the “spirits” of Indigenous elders, explaining that “something happened when the dugai brought the sea up. They rose with it.”Footnote ²⁹ The revelation mobilizes Kaden to reunite with her paternal family and join the human–Jangigir resistance movement, which plans to overthrow the creation of “Australia2.” While Kaden steals the scientific research findings on the “sandpeople,” along with the recipe for the “formula” that has been used to immobilize them, “many thousands” of jangigir overpower the guards on Ki Island, destroy the mining machinery and infrastructure, and form a circle of protection around Ki Island. Kaden loses Larapinta, who sacrifices herself to the struggle, but feels the “force of the leaping waves” as the power of what we might describe as collective climate action takes back ownership of the islands and waters.Footnote ³⁰

In van Neerven’s “Water,” as in Coleman’s Terra Nullius, strident resistance against the climate and environmental destruction driven by technology is imagined and described. Literature is a relational art; it invites us in as readers. In these acts of storytelling, we are also being invited to consider our own embodied vulnerabilities, the illusory nature of our invulnerability, and our unquestioning embrace of technology. These Indigenous narratives also exhort us to abandon our inaction and denial and replace these with unequivocal and propulsive environmental action. We believe that widespread awareness of these fictional works will enable us to build momentum on climate action, by offering informed views that do not allow denialism and by showing alternative accounts of how the planet can heal itself. Storytelling has immense power to offer hope to humanity, and we argue that by expanding on our world repertoire of narratives, we will be able to contribute from the perspective of the arts to different ways of envisioning climate action now.