As the fires rage, we glimpse the evolving abnormal

This has been the summer when we have been forced to see what we have collectively sought to avoid.

We are losing our dreams. Before our eyes they are going up in smoke.

According to an Australia Institute survey, half of all Australian residents have been directly impacted by the fires that have been raging since June 2019.

The most obvious impacts have included:

• people have died or faced death defending their homes
• trauma of fighting the fires
• loss of familiar landscapes
• deaths at a conservative estimate of a billion native animals
• the angst of the Indigenous custodians of the land
• evacuation from towns and holiday locations
• over 2,700 homes lost
• over 12 million hectares of land burnt
• ongoing threats of nearby fires
• lack of food supplies and temporary and inadequate accommodation for survivors
• enduring prolonged poor or hazardous air quality
• curtailment of health promotional activities, such as outdoor exercise
• anxiety about whether homes and businesses have been burnt
• cost to economy expected to exceed $4.5 billion.
• loss of business premises and employment
• loss of income
• loss of farms, crops and animals
• fear of further fires erupting
• loss of sense of safety
• loss of trust in government

The fires are a major national trauma that has been seen and felt globally.

The smoke from our fires has been detected byNASA to be circling the globe.

Australia is being cited internationally, as the canary in the coal mine. (pun intended)

Our insane stance on coal has made us the climate change laggard of the 'developed world'

I am writing after the weekend of the celebration of 'Australia / Invasion Day'

This is a tragic irony that cannot be ignored. The devastation and massacre of the original inhabitants, due to colonial invasion is now recurring albeit in a different guise.

As I was about to write that the current crisis is the greatest trauma our nation has ever experienced, on this land, I was struck by the parallel with what our first people have experienced.

This has been done before.

These fires are climate change on the march. Denial of the seriousness of climate change is a crime against humanity and the planet.

Climate change is a crime of denial, theft and the massacre of future generations. It is the potential destruction of all we hold dear. For the older generations, it decimates the hopes of leaving a worthy solid legacy. For the young it shreds their imagined or hoped for future.

"He who has a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'," said Viktor E Frankl, psychologist and survivor of Nazi prison camps in Man's Search for Meaning.

So what does our "why" we should live become, when the old dreams are brutally annihilated and incinerated. For some it becomes about immediate survival. For others a defiant declaration of a determination to rebuild.

The city of Warsaw in Poland was resurrected from old plans, paintings and memories after the war. It had been pounded to rubble by merciless bombing. When I visited the old quarter of the city it had an aura of untouched preservation. Some scars were visible. The deeper wounds remained. A false Jewish quarter of restaurants, a remaining Jewish theatre.

Will we leave a token few, koalas, kangaroos and platypuses, in zoos, shrinking reservations or museums.?

I am filled with rage when the prime minister declares, as he stands in a dry field or in those rare moments he spends in the Parliament, 'we will rebuild.' How will old growth forests be resurrected and semi extinct native species be brought to life? How will lost communities be retrieved? Should we even seek to rebuild in high fire danger zones? Will the towns running dry be abandoned as in a surreal parallel universe the water is sold off bottled, or gifted to coal mines? Will the inconvenient inhabitants of burnt out small settlements be purged? Will the avaricious diggers (like Clive Palmer) of the sequestered carbon - touted as the great wealth of this country - be given free rein?

The big rebuild is a great lie. Is this another version of the false claim of Terra Nullius; where the mining barons and their profiteers can lay claim this land? Are we all to become the new dispossessed?

You lack food and water?

Swallow my slogan says the advertising man come Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister now called "Scotty from marketing" and the "crime minister" is trying to sell us a worthless insurance policy. Even as coal and gas become stranded assets.

How good is Australia. I will burn (coal) for you every single day.

I will fix the dearth of tourism, in this burnt land, with a slick video.

This is clearly not what we need now or long-term. Those in the immediate firing line of the fires-that continue, need crisis support. But much more will be needed over the coming months and years.

We are now in the new abnormal.

Of course we must adapt but unless we end the use of fossil fuels our life in Australia will deteriorate exponentially.

What will change this trajectory?

1. Immediate steps:
   • No new coal mines
   • End deforestation
   • Listen to Indigenous voices on land-care
   • Heed the young climate activists – lower the voting age to 16
2. End all fossil fuel subsidies and political enmeshment with coal. Rapidly transition to renewables. – we have left it so late-
3. Put political pressure on all parties, for genuine action.
4. Vote on the basis of genuine effective climate action.

We must all wake up to this emergency. To say it's a giant problem that we can do nothing about, is the way to despair. It's what climate scientist Michael Mann terms the sixth stage of denial. From climate change is crap to, the science is not settled, to its not caused by humans to it's real but it's too late to fix.

The antidote to despair is to search for what you can do and get going.

The human brain is inclined to focus on immediate needs. Climate change requires us to think ahead, to what once seemed a distant threat. The fires are showing us what an increasingly warming world will become.

Since the election of this Government of climate deniers, I have felt depressed and in despair. This Government was elected on a platform of no effective climate action and the vigorous promotion of coal mining.

The fires had brought me so low I had wondered what the point of life was. I have emerged from a period of intense grief, with renewed energy to continue the fight.

I am asking the questions we must all ask.

How can I bequeath this horror of succumbing to the sixth mass extinction to my loved ones and the new generations?

Ask this as you contemplate your children, the koalas, this land and all that you love.

Each and every one of us has to do our utmost to contribute to saving this planet

What if we saved ourselves?

What will you do?