Climate Crisis

But Latour’s version of politics means not treating non-human agents as mere externalities, as in, we used to think that the weather had nothing to do with politics. But now the changing weather, reacting to what we have done with carbon, is a revolutionary agent. It is arguably the most important political actor of the last few decades, in that we can’t afford not to calculate its effects: bringing down national leaders, changing voting patterns, defunding scientific expertise and the arts, everything.

Reading the losses arrayed in this anthology to write this review – even as they were tempered by expressions of joy or hope at ecological resilience, or calls for action – I felt somewhat overwhelmed. In that state, I recalled the classic Freudian account of melancholy as a mourning of loss that becomes pathological, because it is perpetual.

There is no single solution to the climate crisis. But neither is there an inevitable outcome. Both assumptions are forms of magical thinking that obscure much more complicated realities. Coming decades are going to be unimaginably difficult, and as societies and cultures struggle to transform themselves some will succeed better than others. There is no question there will be loss, and pain, and fear, or that there will be mistakes and defeats as well as successes. But fixating on collapse, and assuming the story can have only one ending elides not just the possibility of future change, but also the change that is already taking place. We need libraries and lifeboats, but we also need to recognise that history keeps happening, and that in the middle of transformative change and upheaval it is often difficult to see what lies on the other side.

Both books remind me of the ‘emerging’ discipline of planetary health, which is the scientific naming of what our ancestors already know, which is that people and place’s wellbeing are connected. A healthy planet means fewer diseases.

The dull fact bears repeating: routines of denial are so powerful and widespread in Australia because they are habituated; generation after generation, knowing-but-not-acknowledging gets re-inscribed in almost everyone’s cognition every single day that we live under the charring sun, on the taken ground. The fact is, we are habituated to denial. Denial comes easily, almost automatically, because we have been rigorously trained in the rubber-necked routine of seeing and looking away since the inception of the nation.

Events like these used to feel like warnings. Freak tides, catastrophic fires, once-in-a-century storms. We used to describe them as omens of a time to come. Now they are the times we live in.

Only a few short decades ago, we may have only felt their stealth and thought of them as understudies to real villainry. With bodies littering roads around the world and no end in sight, their presence is unavoidable, the existential questions they pose real. It has been a blockbuster season in Australia.

We are traumatised yet again, and yet again our voices are extinguished by not only flames and ash, but by narratives of settler suffering of this ‘hard’ and ‘extreme’ Country that settlers are still yet to actual settle into. The narrative of fear once again dominates: of black fullas, black voices, black solutions, blackened trees, blackened houses, blackened businesses, and black streets.

The birds fell silent this summer. For three days we didn’t hear or see them. Every morning and evening we stepped into the heat and smoke haze to place containers of water wherever shade could be found. The closest fire is 15 kilometres away and out of control. We are not in immediate threat from the fires here, but the smoke is thick. I am worried about the wildlife and our elderly neighbours.