Australia's coastline has seen massive changes in the past six months, 2015 was recorded as the hottest year on record, and 2016 is shaping up to be even hotter. Former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Bob Beale laments that nobody seems to be taking any notice.
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| Australians are experiencing an influx of destructive storms and cyclones. (Torsten Blackwood/Getty Images) |
My Facebook page prompts me to say what is on my mind. Actually I'm
feeling quite wretched. I have a very bad dose of solastalgia, a term
coined by my friend Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher.
Solastalgia is feeling homesick while you are still at home, a melancholy brought on by the loss or degradation of a treasured environment. My solastalgia is for my country, indeed for my whole planet. I'm asking myself, what exactly does Earth need to do to get our attention?
Look what has been happening lately around Australia's coastline alone. If our home is girt by sea, as our national anthem says, then all the signs are that we are effectively burning the floorboards. Disaster after disaster is happening.
Think I'm being alarmist? Well, think about this—off Queensland, more than nine-tenths of the Great Barrier Reef has just been bleached. Perhaps a quarter of it has died and likely won't come back.
Look up north in the Gulf—the worst mass die-off of mangroves ever seen, 10,000 hectares of it along great lengths of the coast. Look off Western Australia—960 square kilometres of kelp forest has just disappeared. More than a third of it is now extinct. And all of this has become evident in just the past six months alone. It's as if our oceans have just suffered a massive stroke.
And don't get me started about the terrible decline in bird populations around our shorelines, or about the rapid southward shift of tropical and subtropical fish, seaweeds and urchins. We are finding Nemo in Tasmanian waters!
And don't mention the millions of tonnes of man-made polymer waste materials, PET bottles, caps, bags, disposable plates, wrappers, you name it, that enter our oceans every year, turning them into one great plastic soup. The sand on every single Australian beach is now made up in part of countless grains of plastic. I could go on—but what's the point?
I know I'm far from alone in being aghast about all this. But if the list I have just reeled off hasn't got Australians off their butt demanding action and marching in the streets, I don't know what will.
So friends, I ask again, what will it take?
Climate records are falling with menacing regularity. In recent years we've broken record after record for heat, extreme rain and other disruptive weather events. Last spring we broke heat records. Last summer we had searing heat waves, and extreme temperatures smashed records across south-eastern Australian, followed by our warmest autumn on record.
Sea surface temperatures have been going off the charts as well. The world in general has been cooking too, with June being the hottest month ever recorded globally. 2015 was the warmest year on record, beating the previous mark set in 2014, and now 2016 is likely to break the record again.
Climate change is not some nebulous political game that might affect our grandchildren. To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this. Yet climate change was not even mentioned in the Turnbull government's first budget in May. Not a word, not a sausage. Such assiduous avoidance. Incredible, isn't it?
Worse still, that same budget gouged $1.3 billion in funds away from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. You have to ask, what on earth were they thinking? And climate change barely caused a flicker of debate in our recent federal election as well.
Instead we were fobbed off yet again by the major parties, and now we have Pauline Hanson elected once again on a platform of outright denial of climate science, to nourish fresh cankers of complacency and social division in our Parliament.
The real border security issue is the appalling damage we ourselves are doing to our coasts and oceans. The real negative gearing is the one we've been imposing on our planet. And the real superannuation problem is the squandering of natural resources, consumption for consumption's sake, at the expense of our kids and grandchildren.
Our civic leaders, our intellectuals, our politicians, and our mass media are playing Pokémon Go with us. When we try to reflect on, to consider and absorb the significance and meaning of these disasters, they blur our field of view by invoking phantoms to distract us. Indeed, they are worse than negligent, they are complicit. They know what needs to be done, but it's so much easier to deflect, distract, deny and delay.
Here's a word I just made up to describe our politicians in action on climate change—stagnertia.
A pox on all of them. A pox on them for leaving unattended and untreated the raging fever afflicting our planet.
One more time I ask, what will it take?
Bob Beale says the Earth is sending strong messages that things are seriously out of balance.
Links
Solastalgia is feeling homesick while you are still at home, a melancholy brought on by the loss or degradation of a treasured environment. My solastalgia is for my country, indeed for my whole planet. I'm asking myself, what exactly does Earth need to do to get our attention?
To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this.No, really, what the heckedy-heck does it take to make us truly sit up and notice the massive changes going on in the natural world around us? It's a travesty that so many people are fixated by staring at their so-called smart phones in a search for imaginary Pokémon creatures, while the real plants and animals of the world are turning up their toes in their billions.
Look what has been happening lately around Australia's coastline alone. If our home is girt by sea, as our national anthem says, then all the signs are that we are effectively burning the floorboards. Disaster after disaster is happening.
Think I'm being alarmist? Well, think about this—off Queensland, more than nine-tenths of the Great Barrier Reef has just been bleached. Perhaps a quarter of it has died and likely won't come back.
Look up north in the Gulf—the worst mass die-off of mangroves ever seen, 10,000 hectares of it along great lengths of the coast. Look off Western Australia—960 square kilometres of kelp forest has just disappeared. More than a third of it is now extinct. And all of this has become evident in just the past six months alone. It's as if our oceans have just suffered a massive stroke.
And don't get me started about the terrible decline in bird populations around our shorelines, or about the rapid southward shift of tropical and subtropical fish, seaweeds and urchins. We are finding Nemo in Tasmanian waters!
And don't mention the millions of tonnes of man-made polymer waste materials, PET bottles, caps, bags, disposable plates, wrappers, you name it, that enter our oceans every year, turning them into one great plastic soup. The sand on every single Australian beach is now made up in part of countless grains of plastic. I could go on—but what's the point?
I know I'm far from alone in being aghast about all this. But if the list I have just reeled off hasn't got Australians off their butt demanding action and marching in the streets, I don't know what will.
So friends, I ask again, what will it take?
Climate records are falling with menacing regularity. In recent years we've broken record after record for heat, extreme rain and other disruptive weather events. Last spring we broke heat records. Last summer we had searing heat waves, and extreme temperatures smashed records across south-eastern Australian, followed by our warmest autumn on record.
Sea surface temperatures have been going off the charts as well. The world in general has been cooking too, with June being the hottest month ever recorded globally. 2015 was the warmest year on record, beating the previous mark set in 2014, and now 2016 is likely to break the record again.
Climate change is not some nebulous political game that might affect our grandchildren. To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this. Yet climate change was not even mentioned in the Turnbull government's first budget in May. Not a word, not a sausage. Such assiduous avoidance. Incredible, isn't it?
Worse still, that same budget gouged $1.3 billion in funds away from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. You have to ask, what on earth were they thinking? And climate change barely caused a flicker of debate in our recent federal election as well.
Instead we were fobbed off yet again by the major parties, and now we have Pauline Hanson elected once again on a platform of outright denial of climate science, to nourish fresh cankers of complacency and social division in our Parliament.
The real border security issue is the appalling damage we ourselves are doing to our coasts and oceans. The real negative gearing is the one we've been imposing on our planet. And the real superannuation problem is the squandering of natural resources, consumption for consumption's sake, at the expense of our kids and grandchildren.
Our civic leaders, our intellectuals, our politicians, and our mass media are playing Pokémon Go with us. When we try to reflect on, to consider and absorb the significance and meaning of these disasters, they blur our field of view by invoking phantoms to distract us. Indeed, they are worse than negligent, they are complicit. They know what needs to be done, but it's so much easier to deflect, distract, deny and delay.
Here's a word I just made up to describe our politicians in action on climate change—stagnertia.
A pox on all of them. A pox on them for leaving unattended and untreated the raging fever afflicting our planet.
One more time I ask, what will it take?
Bob Beale says the Earth is sending strong messages that things are seriously out of balance.
Links
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