Fire, Flood, Plague - Australia, Bludgeoned By 2020's Events, Stumbles Forward Into The Pyrocene
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In mid-June the historian Geoffrey Blainey, writing in the Australian in defence of colonial statues, looked back on the first day of the year. His opening gambit was this sentence: “On New Year’s Day, no major economist, no famous medical scientist and no political leader had predicted that this would be a tumultuous year.” Only a defiant climate sceptic could have been so uncurious about the events unfolding that day and so dismissive of expertise. For on New Year’s Eve, the savage summer had pulsed into frightening ferocity on the New South Wales south coast and in East Gippsland. Eight people died that day in the fires. Sleepless tourists and residents faced the dawn of the new year without power, fuel or mobile-phone reception, and some without homes. The day brought evacuations, road closures, panic buying, collective fear and a surge of dire predictions. For months, experts and bush residents had been preparing for a tumultuous fire season and here on the first day of 2020 was a frightening climax.
Throughout 2019, fire experts had pleaded with the federal government to hold a bushfire summit to prepare for the dreaded summer, but the prime minister had refused. The crisis could not be acknowledged in case it gave credence to the need for climate action. As if neglect and omission in the face of the fire threat were not enough, Coalition politicians and their apologists then hastily encouraged lies about the causes of the fires, declaring that they were started by arsonists and that greenies had prevented hazard-reduction burns. Yet these fires were overwhelmingly started by dry lightning in remote terrain, and hazard-reduction burning is constrained by a warming climate. The effort to stymie sensible policy reform after the fires was as pernicious as the failure to plan in advance of them.
There was barely a moment to breathe between bushfires and Covid. Australians had been in lockdown for months even before the year began, fighting fires that had started at the end of winter, cowering indoors from smoke, heat and ash, and wearing masks on their brief forays outside. People spoke courageously of “the new normal” but did not yet understand that “normal” was gone. Just as they finally stepped outside to sniff the clearer autumn air, it was declared dangerous again. Their masks were still in their pockets. Despite the connections between these crises, politicians were keen to separate them, as if one blessedly cancelled out the other, not least because the pandemic gave the prime minister a chance to reset after his disastrous summer. Instead of forcing handshakes he was forced to withhold them. For the beleaguered Coalition government, Covid seemed to provide the escape it wanted from climate politics.
Australians were forbidden from talking about the obvious relationship between bushfires and climate, so how will we manage to interrogate the common origins of climate change and the pandemic? The fires and the plague are both symptoms of something momentous that is unfolding on Earth: a concentration and acceleration of the impact of humans on nature. As the environmental scientists Inger Andersen and Johan Rockström argued in June: “Covid-19 is more than an illness. It is a symptom of the ailing health of our planet.” Or, as the US science writer David Quammen succinctly put it: “We made the coronavirus epidemic.” Not in a laboratory but in the scary, runaway experiment humans are conducting with Earth. Historians and scientists predicted the unpleasant surprises. Like most infectious diseases in the history of humanity, Covid-19 spilled over from wild animals to humans and became a pandemic because of ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, the illegal wildlife trade and increased human mobility. “So when you’re done worrying about this outbreak,” Quammen warns, “worry about the next one. Or do something about the current circumstances.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/01/born-in-the-ice-age-humankind-now-faces-the-age-of-fire-and-australia-is-on-the-frontline