Climate Crisis

One billion animals don’t just die without retribution. Some strong message was saying that were doing things all the way wrong and that a shelter-in-place could provide some food for thought on what we could do next.

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.