Australia and the future

Every time I look at a news outlet I am horrified by what’s going on in Victoria. Wild fires destroying whole communities and leaving hundreds of people dead – this is incredible and deeply disturbing. I truly hope that the local police are wrong, and these fires weren’t deliberately lit. If this was all the result of a thoughtless – let alone malicious – action by a person, I will be even more upset than I already am.
Of course, I can’t help but view these events through the lens of global climate change. While it is impossible to say something simplistic like “global warming caused these fires”, it is entirely true that climate change is shifting the ecological balance so events like this will be more likely. See also the floods elsewhere in Australia; more extreme events like this are our shared future.
I still strongly advocate personal change and personal responsibility for one’s carbon footprint, but it is increasingly clear that there isn’t time for leadership to grow from the grassroots. There needs to be a political shift, and a rapid one. Paradoxically, I think that might best be achieved by personal change and personal responsibility. We don’t have time to create new leaders out of our communities, but if we change the communities around our leaders then hopefully they will take the hint.
Ethel bounced this link at me the other day – the Toronto Star writing on the exact field I spent the last 18 months working on for my masters, about deploying social norms to facilitate change. Notably, that linked to Canada’s One Million Acts of Green network, which came on the scene only 3 months ago and has already achieved its target. This is not an impossible task; we can change in time to avoid disaster. But we all need to take some responsibility, more than we currently have, even folk like me who already flatter themselves with their green credentials.
That’s kind of intimidating, but it’s empowering too. Back in the 80s when I was a schoolkid and nuclear war was the unspoken baseline fear under all our media, all our politics? That was worse, because all we could do was look at the lines on the maps and pray. This time we can do much more. And because of that, we have to.

6 thoughts on “Australia and the future”

  1. Wo, that gave me cause for pause! Ethel bouncing a link at you….. but then no, it won’t be my nearly-90 year old mother, Ethel Winifred. Tho just for a mo I thought the techno world had been embraced by her. Quite a scary thought.

  2. Of course in the context of Australia, the fires are supposed to happen… it is an important part of the ecosystem. Preventing bush fires is actually leading to habitat destruction and extinctions.

  3. Ooops, that came out kind of callous. I’ve also been horrified by the deaths, the destruction and the idea that someone could have done it on purpose… and yes… there probably is or will be a global warming link.
    I guess my point was just that forest fires in Australia are a natural phenomenen to which many native species have adapted…

  5. Karen, forest fires in Australia are “natural” in that much of the bush is the result of millenia of regular burnings initiated at least sometimes by the aborigines. So it’s as natural as the green fields of England.
    A big change is the number of commuters living in the bush, and the type of housing and attitudes towards the bush. In the olden days people would look at a tree within 10 metres of the house as a severe fire risk… today it’s a lovely feature. With the urbanisation of population we’ve got fewer people to fight the fires, less groundcover control, and more arguments about hazard reduction burning. But climate change feeds into all of that, especially hazard reduction burning – you need the right conditions to do it safely and those have been happening much less often over the last few years. We’ve also seen much more acceptance of high-risk housing and reliance on firefighters to protect homes (which falls apart in major bushfires because there aren’t enough of them). Australia also has a fascination with “stay and fight, but don’t have a safe retreat” that I find fascinating. If I was going to stay and fight, I’d want a bunker with a scuba tank to help me survive the fire front passing over the house. Not because I assume that will happen, but because if it does that makes it more likely I’ll survive.
    Of course, Australia also has a big group of “bushfires don’t happen in clearfelled forests” types, many of whom also believe the world is getting cooler (but some, like Garrett, just believe that it doesn’t matter who you sell out as long as you get to stay in the cool kids crowd). The politics is ugly, and not getting better.

  6. This open letter from the secretary of the United Firefighters Union of Australia to Kevin Rudd explicitly addresses the problem of climate change and bush fires, and is worth reading. It includes some appallingly depressing figures about how different levels of global warming can be expected to increase the frequency of these sorts of catastrophic fire events.
    http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/face-global-warming-or-lives-will-be-at-risk/2009/02/11/1234028114642.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

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