Medusa: Stories from the End of the World as We Know It

Matteo De Giuli and Nicolò Porcelluzzi have transformed their newsletter Medusa into a book, 'Medusa. Storie dalla fine del mondo (per come lo conosciamo)', published by NERO Not Editions in Rome in 2021. The essay, born from biweekly bulletins on Nero's website, uses a unified first-person narrative to explore the Anthropocene and ecological complexity. It travels from the top of the Pirellone with peregrine falcons to China's Xiling Gorge and the Three Gorges Dam, then along the Mississippi, through Tora Bora caves, the Amazon rainforest, and Nigerian oil fields, mapping disaster. Drawing on historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, the authors argue for changing the language around the Anthropocene to highlight historical dynamics, asymmetries, and inequalities. They discuss new environmental activism by Greta Thunberg and Fridays For Future, and Extinction Rebellion, which demands governments declare ecological emergencies. The final section addresses the role of art and literature in fostering radical imagination for a symbiotic future. The book includes a dense bibliography.