How then shall we speak of what is to come? It’s time to start talking about Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE).
It is the most momentous moment of our species, our swansong, the end. No more living or writing for posterity; that vanity is dust. Homer, Virgil, Dante, the older classics from the earliest recorded stories, will be consigned to the winds, along with all other human arts. And with us, so much other animal life, so many ecosystems, entire forests of life, wiped out. Let’s try to chew this down in bite size chunks, because i have had it marinating for a while, and i still can’t figure out how to talk about this in one hit. We’ll get to the nightmare scenario of 450 nuclear reactors popping because we won’t have the time or resources to decommission them safely later. And the new era of industrial flotsam and jetson, as entire cities scour the shore where once clean ocean passed by. Let’s cover that one later too.
For now, let’s stick with societal breakdown, the need for deep resilience as a minimum standard, the testing of all our mores, no matter how well rehearsed.
The floods smashing south eastern Queensland and north eastern NSW right now are off the scale. The megafires that threatened my home and torched billions of animal lives a couple of years ago were unknown until recently, too, Aboriginal Australians even saying they have no story for this scale – a sure sign it has not occurred for tens of thousands of years, for the length of their oral history.
This isn’t just anthropogenic climate change – this is ecosystem collapse. When the methane burps and so much more of the polar caps slips into the ocean that we see sea level rises in metres, we will know it is coming for good this time. The ocean wants us back and it keeps the lowest elevation real estate on the planet. That’s where we’ll end up. In the Deep.
Let me know what you think, what you want to talk about, how we’re going to process this together. Are you relieved someone is finally telling this story, even though it is about to end? Frightened, avoidant, carefree, devastated? I’ll add chapters, if you let me know how this conversation might unfold. We’re going to need a level of understanding we’ve rarely displayed before. I want compassion, empathy, spiritual generosity to lead. There’ll be plenty of nastiness to go around, without us adding to it. Let’s go.
What is the future you choose for your children and grandchildren?
Guest post by my friend Dr Michelle Hamrosi, Climate Reality Leader, DEA member, AP4CA Eurobodalla coordinator, Bushfire affected community GP
What is the future we choose for our children?
Our current path is leading to deepening intergeneration inequity.
We must face the uncomfortable truth: by staying silent we are complicit in stealing our children’s future. Despite decades of increasingly alarming evidence based scientific information about our planet’s heating, our governments continue to fail us. Our country burnt to the ground last summer, with 33 lives lost and three billion animals killed or displaced; more than 17 billion hectares burnt, with communities destroyed. Our Great Barrier Reef will be gone in a generation. Successive governments fail to recognise climate change and consequently lack policies to deal with this crisis. Instead they have been subsidising and propping up these polluting industries to the detriment of our community .
Extinction Rebellion Eurobodalla. Yeah, there are not many of us 🙂
Let’s take a look at one, of many, recent examples – gas.
Instead of taking in the political spin, let’s listen to the experts. As Atlassian CEO, and renewable energy proponent, Mike Cannon-Brookes recently summarised on Twitter: Australian Energy Market Operator (AMEO) says? More gas generation not needed. CSIRO says? Gas generation is expensive electricity. Economists say? Gas extraction creates very few jobs. Scientists say? Gas is incompatible with our climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. Investors say? Gas has bad returns. As a doctor, I’d add an important point. Doctors say? It’s polluting the air we breath and harming our health.
But what do our politicians say? More gas!
“We see your corruption” … “Renewable Future”
What’s going on, you may ask? With what we now know, the question is perplexing. I have two words for this: vested interests. They’re crippling our democracy and blinding our politicians to act in our best interests.
As a doctor, it’s against the law for me to accept gifts or donations from pharmaceutical or other medical industries – these are safeguards for us, and for you, as patients. These rules make doctors a more trusted profession.
So, how is it that politicians and political parties can receive donations from polluting fossil fuel industries? According to data from Market Forces, In 2018-19, fossil fuel companies donated (a minimum of) $1,897,379 to the ALP, Liberal and National parties. Our major parties continue to vote against a Federal Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). The (unelected) head of the ScoMo-appointed National COVID Coordination Commission, making recommendations on billions of dollars of recovery spending, is gas company executive Nev Power.
Let’s call this like it is – out-and-out corruption. It directly undermines our democracy and it has eroded action on climate and other health and environmental policies.
I’m increasingly distraught by the situation we face. At the future our children and grandchild face, if we don’t face our current predicament – and do everything we can to change it.
I ask you, sincerely, to imagine our children’s future, if we continue on our current trajectory. My daughter, Lucinda, is two years old. I imagine her future, if we continue on our current climate trajectories – and it fills me with dread.
It’s 2050 and we are on well on the path to a hot-house hell. We missed the small final window, presented to us in 2020, on which to act decisively on the climate crisis. We had the solutions to act – the thinking, the economic modelling, the technology – but we were thwarted by policy paralysis; political parties beholden to donors; and an apathetic and panicked voting public.
Lucinda is 32.
She has not married or had children, as the future her generation faces is too precarious. When she leaves her share-house accommodation, which isn’t often, she first checks the Climate App. What is the air quality? Are there any extreme weather alerts? Are there any fires near her? Extreme storms and floods, along with a bushfire season year-round are now the norm.
She grabs her backpack, which stows away emergency survival gear, including a P2 mask. She usually goes out early morning or late evening as air is too hot and heavy with pollution. Winter is the only month where the climate is bearable these days. Heatwaves last for weeks – both day and night. Hospitals are unable to cope with the swell of presentations this leads to and suicide and violence skyrockets. In 2020, the age of pandemics began. Outbreaks of infectious diseases steadily increased. Over the past decade, life expectancy has reduced significantly. Food shortages are common and water contamination occurs regularly.
It doesn’t have to go like this. We can change overnight, with will power.
It’s more a decade since the Great Barrier Reef was officially labelled as a dead zone. The unprecedented mega fires of 2019/20 have only become more unpredictable and more ferocious and frequent. Many forests succumbed have never recovered, and dozens of communities across Australia, once thriving tourist hubs, are abandoned. Many of our iconic beaches have been lost to rising seas, destroying our coastal communities.
Lucinda has witnessed the massive decline of all living creatures – including the much-loved koala. When the age of year-round fire season began, in 2020, she was just a toddler. There was a photo, that year, of her, with me, at a ‘Fund Our Future Not Gas’ protest, her beautiful little face full of happiness and hope. She looks at this image, as I do, and wonders: ‘Is this the moment when we squandered our last chance to take the right path?’
Let’s not understate this – and let’s not fail to understand it. Our children’s future safety, prosperity, happiness, and perhaps, survival, is at stake. Are we happy to hand them a world that is significantly worse than the one we grew up in?
Each and every one of us must speak up – NOW. We must demand the end of the corruption, the end of the vested interests. We can no long sit on the fence, and hope for a better future. We must be play an active part of creating the better future.
Please join me in calling on the government to #FundOurFutureNotGas. Raise your voice. Write to and meet with your local member; talk to the media; spread the word with friends and family. We must speak up, and work together, before it’s too late.
*Many thanks Michelle for penning this passionate plea for affirmative action in the face of increasingly alarming inaction on climate change and the obvious corruption decaying Australian politics.
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And do whatever you can to support positive change in our environment!
A new type of seaweed, I thought. Black – I haven’t seen this here before. But it isn’t seaweed, washed up on the beach this morning. It’s ash. We’re 25km south of the fire that has just ravaged over 70,000 hectares of forest between Batemans Bay and Bawley Point, where I first lived when I moved to the coast. I drove 35km through that forest every weekday for 6 months. But the numbers don’t add up. The forest is dead. The buildings are protected, the human homes saved. But the trees are gone and with them the nests, the birds and the insects, the lizards and wombats, the life. And its dust is washed up on the tides, carried away by the ocean, deposited here to let us all be reminded – a great fire is coming and we are all in line.
At first it looked just like seaweed …
I’ve gotten used to the Shearwater carcasses lining the shoreline by now. But this is new – a colourful parrot, strewn across the beach, and then a magpie. Charred by the fires and thrown into the waters, to be spewed up here by the ocean. We can only imagine the horror of its last moments, its world incinerated by a monstrous explosion of fire, its feathers burning crisp as it crashed into a death spiral and the waves below.
There have always been fires, like floods and droughts, in Australia. But the ferocity, the intensity, the extent of their devastation is new. This is what scientists warned us about 20 years ago and this is what fire chiefs reiterate now. Now we reap what we sow. Centuries of farming for what we could get, on this land, and millennia of profiteering across the globe, behind it. The relentless logic of capitalism, built out of the greed that drove colonisation since the age of agriculture began, turbo boosted by the machine age of industrialisation and now the exponential skywards march of the digital age. Straight up, go the growth figures; and straight back down, they will come. This is timeless wisdom, dressed up as prediction, made easy by the stupidity of our ‘leaders’.
I still swim in the salty sea waters I love. The ash isn’t too bad once you’re in. The scent is off-putting, though; not as bad as burnt hair, but a whiff of death is in the air for sure. The sun glows an eery red but the surfers are still out too, looking for a wave. I still go to work. Life goes on. But it’s changing, this year, and it’s going to keep on getting worse while we fail to face, let alone act on, the realities of anthropogenic climate change. The crisis is washing up on our shores, just as it is lapping at the feet of the Pacific Islanders, melting glaciers, extending deserts and torching even rainforests. While our ignorant PM waffles on about the cricket and anything but the emergency, the only ashes that matter this summer are already here.
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Being trained to read mythic symbols, i have sometimes erred on the side of caution when it comes to the classic “End is Nigh” predictions. I’ve often felt i was in a similar boat to the IPCC: if we warn people that it’s the end of the world as we know it, we get ignored, for doing crazy talk. Knowing how many times eccentric fundamentalist crackpots have predicted the end of the world makes it hard to join the ranks. But, in an attempt to be true to the times and to assert the sanity of mythic end times warnings in an era when they have finally become realistic, i present to you … How Come Dire Warnings that the End of the World is Nigh are finally to be filed under Current Affairs instead of under the Rantings of Religious Lunatics. Please read on if you think this might be of interest to you, fellow sane person …
The idea that this world is doomed is as old as fundamentalist cults themselves. Basically, a very confused God/dess sets up the world then decides it is just not worth the trouble. Humans turn out to be too evil, usually, as in the Noah’s Ark story, or simply too numerous and noisy, as in the Mesopotamian myth of Babel and its tower. Anyway, send in the Flood, or the Plague, and wipe them out! You can see how an outraged mystic with a vindictive and misanthropic streak could run with such a fantasy – wipe the slate clean, scream the freaks! How satisfying.
But carrying that sign is no longer the job of those disappointed in humanity en masse; it has now become the job of the sane, those who recognise that it is science that offers the signs today, not the entrails of a sacrificed bird or the vagaries of ancient scripture (endlessly open to new misinterpretations, which is why they persist as creeds). Ironically, it is now reason that alerts us to our existential, planetary danger, not mysticism. The true ‘myth’ of our times – the powerful story that carries us along in its wake, even though we know it isn’t rationally true – is unrestrained capitalism, which convinces us it’s OK to keep consuming as if life will continue like this forever.
This is the great reversal of our times: now, the raving lunatics own mass media/propaganda platforms and are accepted as model corporate citizens, as they tout the mantra of the fossil fuel fat cats (keep burning!), big pharma (stay stupidly unhealthy, we’ll cure you!), big tobacco and other drug lords, dealers and purveyors of beer and skittles (or bread and circuses). Meanwhile, those listening to well reasoned arguments, massive amounts of data and incredibly convincing climate modelling, are labelled as freaks, and scapegoated by the powers that be for threatening their profit margins.
That this reversal is itself a tactic of the capitalist lords should be obvious by now. I just wanted to point it out, in case it helps others bothered by the fact they seem to be on the side of lunacy when they are, in fact, on the side of well reasoned argument. We need every ally we can get, and explaining how we are on the right side of history and should not be befuddled by ecocidal disinformation designed to weaken our righteous anger, indignation and activism at the state of the world is just another string needed for the bow and arrows of truth today. Go forth, be alarmed at the direction of the world, and know that you are not a fanatic but a sane citizen of an insane world; because you are also an intelligent being capable of discerning truth and calling bullshit.
A simple three point defence of climate action in the face of current conditions:
The drought is biting so deep in New South Wales, that even this nice patch of rain we are now having (at least on the south coast) hardly keeps the dust down. The whole south east of Australia is drying out, just as the climate scientists warned us it would. That means running out of water in towns, as well as for plants and animals – everyone suffers, not just the humans. It also means increased fire danger – not just more bushfires out of control, but more wild and dangerous ones than ever.
This is a result of increased greenhouse gases, a term we don’t hear as much anymore: more carbon (and methane and more) in the atmosphere, as we burn more fossil fuels, cut down more forests, and let the profit motive hold sway.
We cannot let this continue. It’s not just about this drought, or that fire, or the other superstorm: it’s about the way we treat the planet. Support your local environmental action now, as groups like Extinction Rebellion up the ante against vested interests, politics beholden to the power of filthy lucre, apathy and mean-spirited conservatives.
Thanks for listening and sharing. Take care out there and keep fighting the good fight!
Here is a letter that is less than 1 page long and is designed to gather support for the Global Climate Strike on Friday 20th of September. Please feel free to adapt, sign as your own, share widely and use to initiate a conversation in your workplace or with anyone.
On Friday the 20th of September, we have an opportunity to show our support for a movement that is focussed on building a new way of life for humanity: one that does not take our planetary home for granted and works to protect it for future generations and for other species. Without this transformation, we will continue to do irreparable damage to the environment, to our soils and rivers, seas and fellow creatures.
This is just one day of the year, dedicated to the biggest issue facing the entire human race. No matter how important our work is, we can find a way to strike in support. If we work in a caring field, or anywhere that safety is an issue, we can suggest that those who don’t want to strike are rostered on to work. Management may be open to this, if they recognise the unparalleled danger that we face. If not, we can apply for leave. But however we do it, we have to strike. We have to show that business as usual is a death sentence for life as we know it.
The devastating impacts of human-induced climate chaos are increasing daily. Animals and plants are becoming extinct in frightening numbers. We are involved today in a struggle that is no longer ideological (about beliefs or ideas), or historical, but scientifically validated as an existential threat to living species on this planet right now. This is the most important moment to be alive in the history of humanity. No longer do our actions only matter to our local communities – although they still do. We must now give in to the call to “Think Globally and Act Locally”, for this emerging crisis affects us all.
On Friday the 20th of September, we are being asked – by leaders in the environmental movement, by school students who can see their very future crumbling before them, by climate scientists and communicators the world over – to strike for climate action. I call upon you now to
commit to this action and to make your commitment public;
talk with your colleagues about how to keep everybody safe (rostering staff who are prepared to stay on at work to ensure public safety while others strike);
make a statement of support for the general strike’s aims, which are to call upon world leaders in politics and industry to support serious and immediate climate action such as complete transformation of energy to a carbon neutral world; and to
enable your organisation, department or corporation to professionally and compassionately manage this day in support of climate action, as meaningful participants in the most important movement of our times, in ways that promote the transformation of our own work practices in alignment with a carbon neutral global society.
Yours in civil disobedience, Geoff Berry [*NB: adapt and sign your own name here freely!]
