The Guardian - Alexis Wright
Governments of the world need to act. It’s time to speak to our planet with kindness before it’s too late
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| The writer Alexis Wright in Australia.
Photograph: Meredith O'Shea/The Guardian
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All the raspy-voice myna birds have come here, to this old swamp,
where the ghost swans now dance the yellow dust song cycles of drought.
Around and around the dry swamp they go with their webbed feet stomping
up the earth in a cloud of dust, and all the bits and pieces of the
past unravelled from parched soil. The Swan Book, by Alexis Wright.
A dense haze of smoke crawled over Melbourne and embraced us for a
day in its lonely pilgrimage, inviting us to contemplate its mourning
rite, its long prayer.
This smoke came from a cremation of the natural world - the bushfires
from the Bunyip State Forest that had begun during days of a major
heatwave running across the country. The forest lies 65kms east of
Melbourne where Mountain Ash grow, Prickly Tea-trees, Stringy Barks and
heathland swamps. In the Woiworung mythology of the Kulin Nation,
the Bunyip is a spirit that punishes bad people who disturb its home in the swamps of the Bunyip River, and according to the Parks Victoria information sheet on the park,
local Aboriginal people avoided the area.
Lightning strikes created the fires by igniting a tinder-dry forest
that flared up into “insane” flames from out of control bushfires. The
sky around the Bunyip bushfires quickly filled with ash-loaded clouds
reaching up to 6km in height where it produced its own erratic weather
system. This was another massive pyroconvection producing bushfire – a
super cell thunderstorm that was perhaps similar to the cumulonimbus
flammagenitus clouds associated with the 2003 Canberra bushfire, and the
2009 Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires which created pyrocumulonimbus
storms
reaching heights of 15 kms and generated hundreds of lightning strokes.
This is the new language of climate change. Words most of us have never
heard before but we are now learning to understand from experiencing
the extreme weather events affecting us more frequently.
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| Bushfires rage out of control in Victoria in 2009. Photograph: A Coppel/Newspix / Rex Features |
There were two thousand firefighters risking their lives in fighting
this “catastrophe” that had so far burnt 100,000 hectares of land. Homes
were destroyed. The intensity of these forest fires was so great that
many native animals perished, the beautiful birdlife including the
lyrebird, and all the small animals – nothing caught in the way of the
fires would have escaped. Most of these creatures were possibly still
growing their populations after the 2009 bushfires where 40% of the
Bunyip park was burnt. Nobody seemed to know when the fires would stop
burning, and it was said it might continue burning for months.
The Climate Council, Australia’s leading climate change
communications organisation, called the 2018-19 continental-wide
heatwaves and record-breaking hot days, as well as other destructive
extreme weather events such as bushfires throughout Australia and heavy
rainfall and flooding in northern Queensland, the
Angry Summer, and the forecast is that we can expect this worsening extreme weather to continue.
We have come to expect extreme weather events of the type that were
previously considered as being a one in a hundred year event. We no
longer think,
Oh! that won’t happen again in a hurry, so there is nothing to worry about. There
is not one among us in this country who is not feeling the heat of
hotter and more extended summers. We smell the smoke of major
environmental catastrophes and ask how safe we really feel in hotter
summers, and we will become more anxious, as each extreme weather event
comes by.
***
When a slow moving tropical low converged with a monsoon over the
coast of North Queensland in February 2019, it dumped more than one
metre of rain on Townsville within a week. So intense was the rain, it
created horrendous flooding in this regional city, and it brought back
memories of the 2011 flash flooding and lives lost in Toowoomba,
Grantham and towns in the Queensland’s Lockyer Valley. In Townsville, it
was said that some rainfall readings “were at levels probably recorded
once every 2,000 years
” and the rain created flood levels in the Ross River “that were greater than a one in 500 years event”
.
Who knows if what happened will be a one-in-a-100-year flood, or 50
years, or less? How do we plan for the future? Many residents of
Townsville thought that they lived in a flood-free area and were not
insured for flooding.
After this slow-moving extreme weather cell caused massive flooding
in Townsville, it then moved further inland, almost travelling to the
Northern Territory border before it petered out, as did Cyclone Yasi in
2011, which reached into the NT.
There was so much rain dumped in this twelve day weather event in
February 2019 that it created a vast inland sea stretching hundreds of
kilometres over flat drought-stricken country stretching east of
Cloncurry in North West Queensland, and as far up North as Normanton in
the Gulf of Carpentaria.
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| Cattle killed by floodwaters in Queensland, February 2019. Photograph: Jacqueline Curley |
The flooding was massive. Of approximately five million head of
cattle grazed in the region, nearly half a million head of cattle
perished. The local people say it was the biggest flood ever seen in the
Cloncurry River, that nobody remembers it flooding like this,
where creeks became a two kilometre-wide torrent.
Many of the pastoralists who run cattle on this land have spent their
whole lives taking the risks of gambling with climate. They love the
land, and show great bravery for taking these things on, and the
back-breaking hard work they do. They risk everything by gambling on the
climate in virtually a life or death situation, and suffer enormous
consequences of loss and hardship when the weather turns, as it did this
time.
They see the consequences of climate change first hand, and are the
victims of it, and there is a shift of understanding going on – that
man-made climate change and global warming is real, and that their lives
on the land will only get harder if nothing is done about it.
This was truly an unbelievable phenomenon that had horrific
consequences. It looked like hell on earth. Among the media reports of
the devastation, I saw a video clip of Brahman cattle standing in a sea
of flooding waters almost up to their necks. Their eyes stared out to
the world in horror, and I doubted that they would be saved.
One life-long cattleman who lost over 80% of his cattle vividly described what happened in his heart-breaking words that, “
there
wasn’t much life stuff, you’d just see dead stuff lying everywhere. All
the kangaroos, and bloody little marsupial mice and birds they couldn’t
handle it.” There was nowhere to hide, so they were wiped out. This great north country was silenced by the flooding.
I grew up in this country, and
I learnt to swim with
all the other kids in this river when it flooded, at a time when
Cloncurry held the record as the hottest place in Australia. We learnt
to wait for this fast-flowing brown water to flood the river a second
time before swimming in it – after all the dead cattle and tree trunks
and branches, etc had been carried away with the first flush. If you
were a child who was afraid of drowning, or being carried downstream,
you were considered by the other kids as not strong enough to run with
them. You learnt by swimming out into the deeper, fast-moving waters
until you caught hold of the slippery second or third pylon of the
bridge, and I do remember fearing that I would never reach it, of being
unable to see where it was, and of being sucked under the water.
Before my father died in the 1950s, he owned a cattle property that
was around Mackinley, east of Cloncurry, and I know he struggled on this
drought stricken property he loved until he died when I was a small
child. I will never know, but it is quite possible that his cattle
station was under water in this flood, part of the inland sea. Perhaps
this land is now starting to bound with new life – all the grasses and
pretty flowers bringing butterflies and birds on the breeze, something
that he would never have seen in the droughts of the 1950s. I never saw
his property. It is only a place of my imagining and did not give a lot
of meaning to our childhood, but now, strangely, an imagining of its
life under water, is similar to many of my dreams of marvellous watery
wonderlands.
I imagine the land green as far as the eye can see, and the flood
water pouring into the Lake Eyre basin in another inland sea for the
pelicans and other birds that will flock to the area. There are
thousands of ghost butterflies with pastel coloured iridescent wings
that each span the size of a human hand now swarming in my dreams. They
are being flown through a dry wind circling around decimated drought
stricken fruit trees languishing in red earth dust. Was this an
extinction flight? The last doomed emergence of an ancient butterfly
from wetter times in this country thousands of years ago, before the
climate changed?
***
How do you find the words to tell the story of the environmental
emergency of our times? No one in this country escapes the realities of
this manmade global warming catastrophe that is creating before our eyes
unprecedented heatwaves, out-of-control fires, immense slow-moving rain
systems, freakish cyclones, floods creating inland seas, warming seas,
coral bleaching, and the fast pace of losing necessary ecosystems
through the demise of native flora and fauna that cannot keep up with
the changing environmental conditions. All in one year?
But it is not only Australia. This environmental catastrophe is
global. The UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has just released a frightening
1,500-page official report on the state of biodiversity on Earth. The
report, the UN’s first global assessment of the natural world in 15
years, was written by 145 authors from 50 countries and it sums up
15,000 scientific papers on the threats against life in the age of
humans.
It is a chilling report warning us that as many as one million of
Earth’s eight million species of all kind – mammals, birds, amphibians,
insects, plants, marine life and terrestrial life – are at risk of
extinction within decades, and will be disappearing at a rate tens or
hundreds of times faster than in the past. The report lists five major
threats to biodiversity, including conversion of forests and grasslands
into farms and plantations where half a million species on land now have
“
insufficient habitat for long-term survival”. A third of the
world’s fish stocks overfished, and the dumping of extreme amounts of
waste into the world’s oceans and rivers and killing many parts of these
water systems. Add this to the damage caused by climate change,
pollution and the spread of invasive species. The risk of an “
annihilation”
of one eighth of the world’s biodiversity is due to human activity that
risks putting the planet on the “tipping point” of no return.
All the governments of the world need to act now and act urgently to
turn this planetary nightmare around before it is too late, because this
warning of the magnitude and acceleration of biodiversity loss is a
global crisis with dangerous implications not only for one million
species but for human health and long-term survival.
***
In this country there are sacred places holding enormous powers
throughout this continent and reaching far out in the seas. But most
non-Aboriginal people do not understand the powerful nature of this
country and the forces of nature, or how the ancient law stories
associated with each of these sacred places contain vital knowledge
about the deep history of this land and caring for it.
The Aboriginal caretakers of their traditional country have always
understood its power, and why it is so important to care for the land
through developing an important system of laws that created great
responsibility for caring for the stories and powers of the ancestors.
These narratives of great and old wisdom are the true constitution for
this country, and urgently need to be upfront in the national narrative
in understanding how to care for it.
After the manmade catastrophe of a million dead fish in the Darling
River – which was all about horse-trading at the expense of the
environment – the elders came from different parts of the river system
to the Walgalu high country, the birth place of Australia’s major rivers
high in the Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales. There, they
performed a water ceremony, a Narjong, “
to invoke the sacred duty of caring for the river systems, a tribal responsibility for thousands of years”. Perhaps
this ceremony has existed for more than 120,000 years since there is
new scientific evidence in southern Victoria suggesting that we have
existed in our country for as long as we have always known, since time
immemorial. The elders called the rivers – their relative, their
relation – by their traditional names. Dear broken rivers that may
respond to their caretakers calling them, and speaking to them gently.
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| Hundreds of thousands of dead fish in the Darling River. Photograph: Graeme Mccrabb Handout/EPA |
Just as we see our people work hard to take great care of country on
our traditional lands, and much good work being done by people in this
country, there are people across the world who are taking great ethical
steps to care for their relatives - the rivers and mountains, the
animals, birds and the natural world. In China, crops will be grown in
the south-western province of Yunnan in a habitat area of Menghai county
to feed the elephants, so that these animals might stop raiding the
crops of local farmers. In Thailand and Cambodia, the monks find the
oldest and largest trees in the forest to ordain and wrap in the
traditional orange robes of a monk to save the trees from loggers who
will not commit the taboo of harming a monk, even if that monk is a
tree.
India’s courts in 2017 ruled “
that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers have rights to exist, thrive, and evolve”.
In New Zealand, the government granted the same legal rights as a
living person in 2017 to the sacred Mount Taranaki, as it also did in
2018 for the sacred Whanganui River, and as well, in the 2014 granting
of legal personhood to the Te Urewera forest, and giving the local Māori
tribes
shared guardianship with the government. In America, the people of
Toledo recently granted the same rights as a person to Lake Erie, to
recognize the rights of the lake and its watershed to have the right to a
healthy environment. All of these ideas begun with Ecuador’s 2008
constitutional acknowledgment of the Rights of Nature to
exist,
persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles. And we – the people –
have the legal authority to enforce these rights on behalf of
ecosystems.
These are all special acts to protect holy places and creatures.
This is the only planet we know that supports life.
We would do well to see the world as a sacred site that is holy, speak to our planet with kindness, and protect it as such.
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