<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/31/our-sky-turned-red-in-black-summer-australia-stepped-off-some-kind-of-precipice>
"As New Year’s Eve rolled around in 2019, my social media feeds were choked
with people demanding the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, cancel the city’s
firework display. With smoke thick in the air in Sydney and our screens full of
images of people crowding on to beaches as they fled the conflagration in
Mallacoota and elsewhere, many saw a celebration of any kind as disrespectful,
and one featuring fiery explosives as doubly so.
Because as the fires spread across our continent, consuming millions of
hectares of bushland and driving firefighters to the brink of collapse, it
became clear we had stepped off some kind of a precipice. Our cities and towns
were blanketed in smoke, turning our skies red and suffusing the air with the
stink of cinders that clung to our skin and clothes. At schools, our kids were
no longer allowed to play outside at lunchtime. At the hospital where one of my
oldest friends works, surgery had to be cancelled when smoke got into operating
room air-conditioning. In regional and rural communities, people lived on high
alert for months, terrified a change in the wind might bring catastrophe. As
Christmas and new year arrived, we witnessed previously unimaginable scenes of
children on boats in masks, fleeing fire; whole towns on beaches, awaiting
rescue.
Five years later that little eruption over Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebration
seems oddly significant. The desire to halt the fireworks was symptomatic of a
larger need to register that what was happening was not normal, and that we
needed to somehow give shape to the scale of what was taking place.
That need has not gone away: if anything it has increased. In a very real
sense, black summer and the rolling series of disasters that washed over us in
its aftermath remain unprocessed.
Seen from the vantage point of late 2024, it is clear black summer marks a
hinge point not just in our politics, but in our reality. Prior to 2019, it was
possible to pretend the climate crisis was not real.
In the five years since, the pace of change has only accelerated, with a
cavalcade of disasters overwhelming communities here and overseas. In the
Amazon the rainforest is burning. In Africa, South America and across the
northern hemisphere forest fires have consumed billions of trees and devastated
ecosystems, while floods and storms have left great tracts of Africa, Europe,
the Caribbean, Asia and communities in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania in ruins.
It seems every day brings news of some fresh disaster.
Combined with the dislocation and disruption wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic,
the world we knew is gone."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
