A new normal

I woke up to a new year, a new decade, and a new normal. The skies were cloudy orange, unlike the ordinary Canberra I knew. No, this was the smoke from the bushfires surrounding the Canberra region. This was a smoke signal from a scorched earth, fuelled by extreme weather conditions, prolonged drought and even more prolonged inaction. It was the apocalyptic nightmare that many climate scientists had been predicting.

Waking up to outside smoke once or twice might remind of out in the woods and waking up to a burnt out bonfire. But waking up to smoke day after day, with no clear end in sight, means something entirely different. With the end of year holidays ending and new years resolutions percolating, waking up to smoke puts you in a heightened reflective mode.

There's a point when you cannot watch the news anymore. Cannot watch the devastation to the environment, to communities, to animals and to other humans. The harsh realities outside your home forces you to retreat inwards. You reflect on your feelings, your ambitions, your plans for the future. And how that future must include climate change adaptation. Those rose-tinted dreams you harboured as a kid are now tinged by the deep red morning, afternoon and evening sky of bushfire season. The time has come and I am anxious and frightened. At the end of the day, we are of this Earth, and we belong to it. When it cries out, we also cry out. Both because of the pain of the Earth and because of the impact it will have on us.

Like the extremely dry landscape that have fuelled the bushfires, my feelings have been building up for a long time. It's been there since I first heard of the warnings about climate change over a decade ago. It's built as I waited for broader government action, as I watched a government call it the greatest moral challenge of our time, as I watched om as any meaningful, collective action destroyed by politicking across successive Labor and Coalition governments, and other vested interests. It's built as I've stood by, seeing this inaction manifest in my own life. This is the textbook definition of negligence, at all levels.

And like the bushfires themselves, when the conditions converge and a spark is lit, all that fuel is ignited into a roaring phenomenon. In the face of scorched earth,  we must act. In this world, we still have agency and can still decide how we want to act to respond to this threat.

We can do so in many ways. I only have control on how I will act, but I know that individual action alone cannot resolve this, and collective action is also necessary. Challenges as big as this need a response just as big. Individual actions will not work in isolation. But individual, personal actions still contribute in many ways, at the very least to show that we have some sense of control over our actions, and at the most to show and inspire hope that if we can change our individual actions, there is hope for change.

For me, the first step is always reflective and declaratory. I will no longer be a quiet Australian. Having reflected on all the information before me, I declare that I am living in a climate emergency, and that I will stand up and try to do something about it. I have been taking steps over the years (such as reducing my energy usage, composting, cycling to work), but I can always do more. We all have a duty of care, and we have all been negligent to some degree. The time is now to reflect and to respond. I cannot respond to everything all at once. I can only take one step at a time.

For the remainder of this year, I will document each month something that I have done that I think has contributed to our response to climate change. It will be a mix of individual action, and contributing to collective action. It's the only way I can stay sane and believe that I am contributing something meaningful, something productive, something effective, to save this scorched earth on which I stand.