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Sunburnt Country: The history and future of climate change in Australia
by Joëlle Gergis
Melbourne University Press
$34.99 pb, 320 pp, 9780522871548
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Sunburnt Country is a
fascinating, timely, uneven book. Consisting of forty-one short
chapters, it is written by climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, who explores
the matter of climate change through an unusual mix of genres: colonial
history, popular science, scientific autobiography, and advocacy. The
first two of these dominate the self-representations of the book.
In
particular, it is framed as filling a gap in our (Western) understanding
of the Australian continent’s climate history by reconstructing earlier
settler colonial climates. Going beyond the official climate records
that commenced around 1900, the book reports on innovative Australian
research that has combed through settler diaries and other written
records for climate-relevant information.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the records found seem to be about
extreme events and provided by white male colonists. The result is a
romantic colonial-era drama that reiterates the undeniably epic nature
of the colonies’ early years. Key to this drama are the weather and
climate, which are given a powerful, capricious character that
continually trips up courageous colonial settlers as they slowly come to
the realisation that the country they invaded has ‘one of the most
spectacularly erratic climates in the world’.
Gergis, weaving together
the stories with flair, complements many with well-chosen details and
illustrations. In the process, these stories of early settlers’ lived
experiences are revealed as not just a second cousin to ‘real’ climate
data, but a valuable part of our cultural history, as professional
historians of Australia have long known. By relaying these stories of
climatic catastrophes with evident passion, compassion, and a
comfortingly simple focus on climate (one that does not engage with the
wider politics of settler colonialism or writing history),
Sunburnt Country
implicitly offers glimpses into both the physical and social reasons
that Australia has been mythologised as a ‘land of drought and flooding
rains’.
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Lauren Rickards researches and teaches on the social dimensions of climate change and the Anthropocene at RMIT University.
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Besides descriptions of colonial climates, the book includes an array
of insights and snapshots about the long-term climate of Australia and
how scientists are working to decode it. Using easy-to-understand
snippets of specific scientific studies, Gergis explains how past
climates can be read off the landscape thanks to the ‘tattooing’ of
climatic experiences on tree rings, ice cores, coral, and sediments. One
chapter also acknowledges indigenous Australians’ intimate
understanding of climatic cycles, contingencies, and expressions in the
landscape.
The overall result is a succession of interesting snippets of
information about past climates interspersed with valuable insights
into how different climate systems function and how such information is
derived. We learn, for example, that in New Zealand at least, tree-ring
data indicates that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate system has
been unusually pronounced in the twentieth century, but still does not
equate to what was experienced in the medieval period.
This attention to
the continuities as well as discontinuities with past climates usefully
complicates the oft-repeated binary of old climate versus new climate,
or climate variability versus climate change. At the same time, Gergis
describes in detail how a ‘human fingerprint’ on the climate is clearly
obvious from the mid-twentieth century. The upshot is that ‘modern
societies may not have experienced the full range of natural variability
that occurred in the past’, but this is just further reason to be
prepared ‘for some nasty climate surprises in the future’.
It is on the question of human-induced climate change that Gergis’s
stories of climate science in action are most compelling. Representing a
new era of concerted transparency in how climate science is done,
Sunburnt Country
provides not just generic insights about how climate science approaches
research problems, but about what it is like for Gergis and colleagues
to perform such work in a hyper-politicised social context.
This more
autobiographical element of the book usefully reveals the mundane
practices involved in professional research, such as writing grant
applications, checking data, revising publications, as well as the
moments of intellectual excitement that make it all seem worthwhile. Not
only does this window into the doing of climate science add an engaging
personal note to the story, but it usefully shines a light on what Paul
Edwards calls the ‘vast machine’ of climate science: the immense
cross-institutional, international network, structures, and procedures
that collectively produce, test, and validate scientific information
about the climate.
It is this diffuse machine and its convergence in
observational, modelling, and theoretical studies that points with
uncommon confidence to the fact that the global climate is changing and
is doing so due to human interference in the atmosphere.
We come then to a further element of doing climate science that
Gergis’s account usefully reveals: the way organised climate change
scepticism attempts to derail scientific processes, and the resultant
hyper-vigilance that now inflects climate science practices such as peer
review of publications. Gergis gestures to the painful embodied costs
of doing climate change science under the gaze of malevolent interests
and a paranoid discipline, costs that are layered atop the ‘normal’
emotional costs of climate change that all of us face.
Unsurprisingly,
Sunburnt Country also contains advice on how
society needs to act to ward off the worst of projected climate change
outcomes. Following some useful syntheses of the physical impacts of
projected climate change in Australia, including sobering assessments of
the situation facing different ecosystems, Gergis provides high-level
overviews and broad endorsement of the ‘symbolic start’ provided by the
Paris Climate Agreement. But rather than discuss adaptation solutions –
as may have been expected given the book’s focus on climate (change)
impacts and silence about sources of greenhouse gases – it turns to the
question of emission mitigation.
Here, despite decent overviews of recent developments in Australia,
Gergis stumbles on the over-trodden step from climate science to climate
solutions.
As social science and humanities scholars such as myself
frequently argue, the latter requires a deep, critical understanding of
society; deeper than provided by Gergis’s calls for government action,
technological innovation, and individual-level reconnection with nature.
While all of these things are undoubtedly required, on their own they
obscure the power of more important factors, namely corporate
capitalism’s ongoing frontier logic of expansion, extraction, and
externalisation, which is – the book might have noted – inseparable from
the settler colonialist project that led to temperate climate Britons
struggling with the more tempestuous Australian climate in the first
place.
This is the silence in
Sunburnt Country that I felt most
keenly. The very act of colonialism and the related effort to create a
new territory, settlement, and node in the imperial economy were
climate-changing acts.
Sunburnt Country left me hungry for a
parallel, intersecting history of Australia’s emissions and climatic
interventions; a history not of just a young nation’s struggles with a
seemingly capricious, volatile climate, but of the longer, uneven,
embedded engagement of Indigenous and settler populations with ‘the
environment’ (broadly defined), of which atmosphere and climate are a
part.
At a time when prime ministers continue to exploit Dorothea
Mackellar’s patriotic poem about Australia’s sunburnt character to
explain away ‘natural disasters’ such as the Tathra fires – disasters
covered with human fingerprints at multiple levels – we need to reboot
Australia’s climate re-education. The first, ongoing lesson is to
appreciate that extreme climate variability in Australia is natural,
normal, and inevitable; a message
Sunburnt Country contributes
to. But, as the book also indicates, a second lesson is now also needed:
the fact that the climate is not just variable but the whole climate
envelope is now shifting. A ‘new normal’ is emerging but the reasons are
neither natural nor inevitable.
To understand and address the latter we
need to return to Britain and Europe more broadly, not to unpack the
climate assumptions the early settlers brought with them, but to
understand why they were heading off to settle a new continent in the
first place. We need to return to the industrial revolution, the
scientific revolution, the rise of the Anglosphere, and the birth of the
corporation. We need to trek back beyond the mid-twentieth-century
‘Great Acceleration’ in consumption rates and carbon dioxide
concentrations that Gergis refers to, to the industrial revolution, the
sixteenth-century emergence of the Capitalocene, and the idea that to be
productive is to extract value from other bodies, things and places.
Understanding these longer histories requires socio-political literacy more than scientific literacy. At multiple levels,
Sunburnt Country
assists greatly with the latter. More importantly, though, it opens the
way for subsequent, more critical analysis of the relationship between
the ongoing settler colonial project and climate change.
