THESE ARE ANGRY times. The Earth itself is angry. Flames roar through the land, human tempers flare and the political world is angrier than it has been since the 1960s. A furious sixteen-year-old rails at the United Nations in an incandescent speech built around the refrain, ‘How dare you!’

When things go so badly wrong that the future of human life on Earth seems in jeopardy, the prophetic voices of youth cry out in alarm, as they did in the ’60s with the threat of nuclear war looming as an immediate prospect. Now that those who were young then are old, where are their voices? In Indigenous cultures, a crisis in the relationship between the people and the land is a call to the elders to diagnose the causes and propose remedial action. Yet the Boomer generation cruises into the ‘senior’ category, assailed with advice about health, fitness, finance and care services, as if our public responsibilities were over and we had nothing to care for but ourselves.