Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of From a Climate Correspondent, a newsletter exploring the climate crisis around the globe.
This week's issue comes from an emergency workshop in Sydney, Australia, where a group of concerned academics and students shared their responses to the devastating fires that have swept the country.
The gap that has opened for persuading the government to turn around its current intransigence on the climate crisis is a small one - but there is a commitment to seizing it.
Thanks for reading!
From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
A World Upside Down
Letter no. 6 by India Bourke in Sydney, Australia
A workshop's participant shares her thoughts. Photo: India Bourke
It was pelting rain the morning I travelled from suburban Bondi to a bushfire-response workshop at Sydney University.
After months in which raging bushfires have devastated Australia on an unprecedented scale, walls of water were finally lashing down onto the road outside, kicking up clouds of spray and forcing commuters to huddle under long-unused umbrellas.
I’d flown there to visit a friend (with all the emissions-guilt that entails). So as I peeled wet shirt-sleeves from my arms, I hoped hard the flames might begin to quell -- and thought more generally about how visceral this latest climate disaster has felt.
Even watching from far-off screens in Hong Kong, my throat has turned dry at videos of koalas reaching for bottles of water and my chest has clenched at the images of kangaroos trapped and burnt alive against wire fence. While the thought that whole species might have perished is almost too horrific to hold in mind.
Yet though images like these spur empathy - that same response can also feel impotent and thin.
Empathy alone
Like the wet weather itself before the fires return, there is an underlying fear all the empathy in the world won’t alone be enough to turn around the Australian government’s intransigence on climate issues.
The country’s right-wing politicians and media (as well as much of the wider international community on the right) are already side-lining man-made climate change as the key underlying cause of the fires’ scale and severity - and evidence of their success feels as pervasive as bushfire smoke.
As I scrambled into an Uber, I was surprised to find the driver relatively unconcerned by the situation, and instead much more agitated by the fate of the wedding my co-rider was set to attend.
“Arsonists” had started the fires, he said, and “greenie” policies had made them worse; both problems that could be fixed.
Radical candour
It was a relief, therefore, to finally arrive at the meeting I’d been invited to at Sydney University.
For research fellow Blanche Verlie, coming back to work after weeks spent watching the scenes of devastation had left her feeling angry and overwhelmed.
So in addition to publishing an article on the need to talk about climate concerns, she also organised a special edition of a reading group composed of 20-odd fiercely-caring female academics and students -- to see if together they could help stop the wider disaster from passing unaddressed.
This resulted in a workshop that encouraged discussion using drawing, poetry and other tools designed by the Melbourne-based group Psychology for a Safe Climate.
Some attendees had relatives who’d been fighting the fires. Others spoke of those they knew who’d had to relocate, or indigenous communities who’ve long been suffering from extended drought.
Some cried. And some said they’d come because they felt like they needed to mourn but couldn’t; they just felt numb.
“It’s hard to know how the kids were processing it,” one mother told me, reeling after a Christmas vacation spent under blood-red skies and clouds that only rained ash.
“They seemed joyful playing in the water, catching the ash like snowflakes. But for me as an adult it was apocalyptic, like something from a science fiction novel.”
Yet out of the shared grief came tentative plans.
There were suggestions of working with online groups such as “Mad fucking witches” and GetUp, who are calling out misinformation in Murdoch’s media. As well as volunteering organisations for that are distributing water to communities in need, supporting cultural burning, or protecting old growth forests.
Others looked to politics. An artist from Manila suggested they write to Scott Morrison, the prime minister, using ink made of bushfire ash. A questionnaire encouraging members of parliament to clarify their positions on climate was proposed, as well as submitting responses to the upcoming review of Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
Of course all these suggestions were recognised as only small, shaky beginnings in the face of a vast climate-communications dam: “People are inhaling the same [climate sceptic] messages over and over again,” said Tema Milstein, a professor at NUSW who runs an online EcoCultural Communications group.
Yet there was a sense that through continuing to pursue the hard conversations, the current trickle of climate concern in Australia may yet become a flood.
As one researcher suggested, empathy alone is no longer enough to cut through the abstraction and apathy. From now on, only “radical candour” will do.
Must reads from the region
Burned tigers, rescued kangaroos? AFP Just as powerful images of animals harmed in the fires can help spur action, so misleading ones can lead to wider doubt and disbelief. And sadly many of the iconic scenes shared recently Facebook and Instagram are not in fact from the 2020 fires at all, as the linked article points out. Meanwhile this Guardian photo-essay takes you straight to the grim reality.
Ashes in the Anthropocene - Sophie Chao, Sydney Environment Institute A research associate at Sydney University has written this lyrical reflection on the nature of the bushfire’s falling ash: the burnt lives they contain and the endings they resist. It’s beautiful, elegiac and angry.
The pig who escaped the fires, but not the pain of loss - Danielle Celermajer, ABC The potential loss of over 1 billion animals in the fires is so vast it is hard to compute in any concrete emotional terms. Or to have any sense of what this experience might be like from the non-human side. But Danielle Calemajer’s account of her pig’s survival goes someway to filling in these gaps.
Baring all - Emily Atkins, Heated The story of Kayley Ward, a model blocked from Instagram after promising nude photos to those who could prove they’d donated to bushfire charities, has had me hooked. Emily Atkin in her climate newsletter took an excellent look at some of the contradictions in this and other sex-based fund-raising: such as using yet more consumption to tackle a consumption-crisis, and the unfair gap between individual and corporate giving. There still feels like more related issues still to explore however.
Mongabay editor arrest - Mongabay This is not a bushfire related story but I couldn’t not include today's news of the arrest of Mongabay editor Phil Jacobson in Indonesia over an alleged issue with his business visa. According to Human Rights Watch, violence against activists and environmentalists in the country is on the rise.
What else I'll be watching...
Years and Years - BBC/HBO The taxi-driver who returned me to Sydney airport at the end of my stay, a second-generation Aussie male in his 40s, told me he’d got involved in climate protests for the first time last year, as well as writing to politicians about his concerns. What prompted him to suddenly take action? Watching the 2019 TV series Years and Years, starring Emma Thompson. It’s now next on my playlist.