Planet Erland

hope

thecoopes:

it wasn’t so long ago, just weeks or even days, that i believed copenhagen could be something spectacular. not just for the planet but for world politics. lots of people were sceptical but i like to hope there are diplomats and leaders out there with foresight, driven by the desire to do brave and difficult things because they are right. it was a seemingly impossible task - bring together the heads of almost 200 countries to agree on something deeply unpopular that will cost money and require lots of work, predicated on something that essentially hasn’t happened yet. until the world is blazing and melting around us, it seems some people don’t want to believe climate change will happen, including, impossibly, very influential people in this country, where we are already seeing and feeling it on a regular basis.

i remember sweltering through this january as hundred-year heat records toppled on a near-daily basis. when trains in melbourne ground to a halt because the tracks were melting and warping, and thousands of homes and offices abruptly blacked out. i wrote stories about hundreds of people dying in the heat, mass beachings of whales confused by warmer oceans and changing habits of fish stocks. sacred aboriginal sites and watering holes dried up or polluted by the corpses of thousands of feral camels who had starved and thirsted to death. watched in horror as black saturday unfolded, hour upon hour, the death toll mounting and on every news bulletin shell-shocked faces. i cried as people, numbed with grief, recounted for the cameras the horror of watching as a car carrying their loved ones, their children, erupted in flames as they tried to flee.

my week covering those fires was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life, and i will never forget it. walking through the hiroshima of flowerdale, marysville, ghostly forests of completely ashen gum trees, melted swings hanging from their chains. you cannot imagine or describe the feeling of standing at ground zero of something so brutal and fierce. some images of those days will never leave me - the roadside littered with kangaroos who literally suffocated as they tried to flee, the flames sucking the oxygen from their lungs and roaring by so fast their fur was barely singed. police tape fluttering in the smoke where the blasted heap of what was once a car had screeched frantically off the road. all its doors open from where the occupants had, in absolute terror and desperation, tried to run from the firestorm on their feet. engulfed, burned to death, incincerated. the mother who got into the bath with her children and begged for her life. their bodies discovered by a husband, father, untouched by the fire but cooked from the inside by radiant heat as it passed, robbing them of their last breaths. i interviewed two water bomber pilots from the united states. between them they have more than 40 years experience fighting wildfires in canada and california, and they were moved to tears by what they saw in victoria. the pathos of these tiny, insignificant humans with hoses on top of their homes, thinking they could do battle with a firestorm with the ferocity of 1,000 atomic bombs. ten years of drought and a ten-day heatwave had parched that landscape so completely it was as flammable as petrol, and the fire was so intense and uncontrollable it created its own weather system. the same expressions came from everyone i spoke to - explosions, darkness as thick as night, a roar as deafening and rattling as a commercial jet.

this is the horror of climate change. our politicians have always said australia will be hit hardest and earliest by its effects, and this isn’t rhetoric - it’s the truth. our country is getting drier, hotter, more relentless and unforgiving. forecasters say this summer will be worse than anything we’ve seen before, including black saturday, when 173 people died. i’m frightened about what the failure of copenhagen means, because it isn’t about politics and money. it’s about life. we are on an unstoppable trajectory where disasters like black saturday will become almost commonplace, and the chaos beyond that is unthinkable.

yes, i am a leftie. i cycle to work and i recycle and i bitch and moan about electricity use and put energy-saving bulbs in my lights. i am a greenie in that typical inner-city journalist wank kind of way. but at a fundamental, cellular level, after all i have seen, i believe we need to do something drastic, and do it now. the short-sightedness of all this infighting and obfuscation terrifies me and makes me sick with anger. the truth is, none of us are likely to see the real and horrifying impacts of global warming at its worst because, quite simply, our silly little lives are short and none of us are much more than a blip.

however. in this lifetime, at this critical juncture in history, we have a duty to the future of the human race to rewrite the rules about how we all should live. with more compassion and consideration for the impact of every single one of our actions. in ways that are sustainable, and maybe require small sacrifices but will deliver massive outcomes. we have failed in a fundamental way, as sentient beings who have been blessed with a conscience, by allowing the pettiness of politics to override the urgency of this 11th hour.

years from now this day will be seen and recounted no doubt as one of the most spectacular and crucial failures in the history of the human race. they are still talking there, half a world away, well into the frosty night, on niggling minutiae that will make little difference. but it’s too late.

worse still, the worst kinds of cynics and hacks have already started up their bleating ’told you so’ chorus, defending their decision to oppose emissions trading laws here. such gutless, petty ignorance really leaves me at a loss for words.