Breaking the Spirit of the Planet: Climate Catastrophe
By Susan Hawthorne
From September 2019 to March 2020 millions of hectares of Australia burned and the government did nothing. This is what happened.
Adults keep saying: "We owe it to the young people to give them hope."
But I don't want your hope.
I don't want you to be hopeful.
I want you to panic.
I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis.
I want you to act as if our house is on fire.
Because it is
Greta Thunberg, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference
And as Arrernte woman, Lorrayne Gorey (2019) says in her video,
“We finally need to treat the climate crisis as a crisis. It is the biggest threat in human history and we will not accept our extinction. We will not accept a life in fear and devastation. We have the right to live our dreams and hopes. Climate change is already happening. People did die, are dying and will die because of it, but we can and will stop this madness.
When profit is everything, nothing else matters: not teenage climate strikers; not Indigenous peoples; not the bodies of women; not the largest living organism in the world; not ancient rainforests that have never before burnt; not koalas; not anyone; just the profit to be obtained from fossil fuels, shonky investment schemes, peoples' bodies, industrialised farming, fishing and forestry, and endless prescriptions of lifelong drugs: Big Coal, Big Weapons, Big Medicine, Big Porn, Big Agriculture, Big Pharma.
In February 2017, Scott Morrison walked into the Australian House of Representatives and held up a piece of coal; he justified it by saying that coal would keep the lights on and keep power bills low. Since that time, he has changed jobs from Treasurer to Prime Minister. The debate over the Adani coal mine in Queensland has gone on no matter how much the government would like it to stop (but unfortunately, to date they have not stopped the proposed Adani coal mine). Extinction Rebellion rallies have been held in major cities as well as school-age children participating in the School Strike following the lead of Greta Thunberg. The most recent event, which has made that chunk of coal more chilling, was the massive fires burning across eastern Australia from September 2019 to March 2020. By December 2019, 4.6 million hectares had burnt. But this was just the beginning.
In the weeks immediately following that, the figures continued to rise. By 1 January 2020, 5,900 million hectares had burnt. By 17 January 2020, the figure had jumped to 10.7 million hectares. And by 4 March it stood at 18.6 million hectares. Thousands of buildings and homes have been destroyed and 34 people died. The number of animals killed is also heart wrenching, jumping from 500,000 to more than a billion. These figures are hard to stomach. The level of grief in the Australian community has skyrocketed.
When the Amazon rainforest was on fire in 2018, approximately one million hectares burnt. Forests in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area in Australia that were listed by UNESCO in 2000 have burnt for the first time in 2019-2020. It is an area with a huge diversity of eucalypt forest and endemic to the area are non-fire-resistant Gondwana-era species. By mid-January, more than 50% of Gondwana rainforests in world heritage areas had burnt. Like the Amazon rainforest, this is a precious heritage. We cannot afford to be losing this level of biodiversity. The number of trees is countless considering the understory, the nesting holes, all the microhabitats that make up forests and grasslands. People retreated to beaches, but even there ember attack made beaches unsafe places; breathing, because of thick smoke clouds that lasted for weeks, became arduous for many.
In the heat of Australia's summer with pyrocumulonimbus clouds entering our vocabulary along with the threat of fires started by lightning strikes, that piece of coal appears even more obscene. When Scott Morrison finally interrupted his Hawai'i holiday on 21 December 2019, hundreds of homes had already been lost and three firefighters had died in one week. In subsequent days, thousands of people fled fires along the South Coast holiday area of NSW. In Mallacoota, the navy was called in to evacuate people stranded on the beach. Vast stretches of alpine grasslands across the NSW and Victoria border region have burnt; Kangaroo Island in South Australia has been devastated with around half of the island burning.
The house called Australia began burning in September 2019 and it was late December before Prime Minister Morrison noticed that only the chimney remained standing along with a few sheets of corrugated iron. As Greta Thunberg said almost twelve months earlier on 26 January 2019, and Australians in burnt-out areas were saying to Scott Morrison, “We want you to panic. The country is on fire and you have done nothing. In fact, everything you have done has provided more fuel for the fire.”
This is the background against which I wrote this chapter. Politicians, the fuel and energy industries and the big coal miners all claim that climate change is not caused by their actions. They use terms like clean coal, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power and most recently 'a gas-led recovery'. But these words are meaningless. They are the Trojan horses of climate change. The fake promises of fossil fuel barons are pretending they are somehow clean energy sources equivalent to renewables.
headlights flash burnt tree trunks
standing like dead sentinels on a battlefield
the skyline is red the air is silent
no one sings here no bird flies overhead
between the blackened trees plain brown soil
as barren as a napalmed forest
my eyes are red my breath stilled
no animal feeds here where no plant grows
I wrote the poem above after the Black Saturday fires in Victoria in 2009. Friends lost their houses or came very close to losing them. Young people died when they could not escape. 173 people died in those fires. So, while some lessons have been learnt about how to save human life, several iterations of Australian governments have not listened and in fact, have introduced policies that only intensify the problem. In April 2019, 22 former emergency and fire service chiefs from across Australia tried to set up a meeting with Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Not only were they ignored they were criticised and belittled.
The idea that climate change is an emergency does not seem to have sunk in for politicians. Elaine Scarry in her book Thinking in an Emergency (2011) sets out what is required in an emergency and it looks very different from the Australian government's reaction. In order to prepare for foreseeable types of emergencies, early deliberation is required. The reason for this is that when the emergency eventuates, swift action must be taken. A government in denial about climate change is a government working against itself. Another requirement is practice. There are good reasons for the volunteer fire services around the country to regularly meet and practise skills when there are no fires. When the fires do come, they need to be ready for well-practised immediate action. Politicians arguing about whether the fire is a result of climate change are not practising for action in an emergency. While politicians recognise the need for action in an emergency, they are seduced to stop thinking. They think that action is all that is needed. But action under these circumstances could be worse than inaction.
This is where Australia stands in the grip of the emergency in early 2020, an emergency that governments could have been preparing for and practising for at least thirty to fifty years. Government reports on climate change have achieved nothing. Indeed the empty hole of policy has only grown larger.
Since 2013, the Coalition has been a government looking away from the looming disaster. And with the 2020 fires extinguished by heavy rain in February, the hope many held for action on climate change has come to naught. Instead, we hear that billionaire miners are donating their money into research that will end with more cleared forests.
Such misleading ‘donations’ echo ideas expressed by Scott Morrison and his government who would like to see National Parks opened up through clearing and resort investment and more thinning out of forests. They claim that these actions will reduce the hazard of fires. But ecological and scientific research shows that reducing the number of trees leads to increased drying out of the forest floor and that logging debris results in increased fuel.
The government and the coal industry are responsible for exacerbating climate change, for doing nothing to reduce emissions and nothing to help reduce searing temperatures across the Australian continent.
On 18 December 2019, the average temperature across Australia was 41.9C or 107.4F. The previous hottest day on record was the day before. Anyone living in Australia during this period understands just how hot it has been. The most severe consequence has been the bushfires that have devastated Australia. In addition to the 1.25 billion native animals that are estimated to have died, an estimated 100,000 farm animals have also died. The economics of this is revealing. Farmers who lose stock to natural disasters can expect some compensation for that loss, either through insurance or from government schemes to assist farmers recover. The people who look after native animals, ordinary locals in an area who feed the remaining animals, who grieve for their loss, get nothing. It strikes me that this is comparable to the way in which women's work is not counted. As Suzanne Bellamy, an artist whose studio near Braidwood was threatened with fires five times during the past fire season wrote:
I had a phone call this morning from the Agriculture and Livestock Board, a very pleasant woman from Goulburn. Did I have livestock impacted by the fire? I told her my land is native vegetation inhabited by native animals, and yes it has been impacted. Doesn't count, not commercial, no assistance. I do understand the distinction, and I feel for the cows and sheep and the farmers. I thanked her for the call. Still, it frames the dilemma of the land, money, usage, status and value. So we will cut up the carrots and sweet potato, scatter the birdseed and put out the water. We begin to let out the depth of mourning for our beloved friends with soft paws, square poo, spikes, slithery skin, feathers, pouches, ancient lineages and wild stories, beyond value so it seems (Suzanne Bellamy, 17 January 2020).
Just as women's unpaid and necessary domestic work is not counted in the UN System of National Accounts, nor are forests, grasslands, rivers, mountains and shorelines. The native animals who render their own kind of service to land are erased and given no value. I am not suggesting that counting will solve the problem, but we need to recognise the problem and come up with different systems. A generation has passed since Marilyn Waring (1988) wrote that the system was broken. It is still broken and the bushfire crisis is also a crisis of patriarchy and of capitalism.
For decades, Aboriginal peoples across Australia have been talking about traditional systems of land management. Indigenous peoples from around the world have a range of different practices such as prohibitions on felling certain trees. Darkinjung woman, Vanessa Cavanagh (2020) gives a sense of this in her moving essay about the impact of seeing an important grandmother tree near Colo Heights, northwest of Sydney lost in the Gospers Mountain fire. There are many new calls for cultural burning, a system that allows for low intensity fires to be used in areas that could come under threat. It would require the forestry industry (and misinformed corporates and governments) to cease adding to the fuel load through thinning and clearing of forests.
Victor Steffensen (2020) in his book Fire Country, about Indigenous fire practices learnt his fire skills from two elders who had been brought up in traditional ways in the area around Laura in Far North Queensland. The men taught him how to read country in a context-sensitive way. This is in stark contrast to hazard reduction and back burning carried out by Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS) with flame-throwers and no understanding of what kind of fire is appropriate for particular ecologies. Steffensen shows just how different the approach to burning is by Aboriginal people steeped in their traditions from the approach of those who are meant to conserve our National Parks.
Bruce Pascoe, writing about Aboriginal fire practices, suggests that it was intimately connected to farming. Farming in any sense is about land management and in Australia he suggests this could go back as far as 140,000 years. When we understand what poet, Mary Gilmore, noticed in 1934 – that burning had to do with spiritual practices – we need to ask more questions.
From my decades-long research into ancient cultures, it is quite clear that ecological protection and spiritual and ritual practices go hand in hand: an important river or series of waterholes; a small copse of fruit trees; a plant or animal species; a cave that gives shelter; a mountain with particular species. These connections become more and more evident. The dismissal or ignorance about such important ecological and cultural sites is at an all-time high in our current global culture that homogenises everything and ignores detail. The destruction of the Juukan Gorge site in the Pilbara region of Western Australia by Rio Tinto in May 2020 is one such example. Considered a sacred place by the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples, it contained artefacts that were at least 46,000 years old. Biodiversity is protected only when there is strong local knowledge of place, of country and appropriate respect, protocols and laws with teeth to ensure such places are protected.