Hard Words. Harsher Reality.
Feeds filled with pictures of never before seen snowfall levels may be a delight of intrigue for some but those on the climate front feel the dread.
In preparation for chairing three significant sessions at Byron Writers Festival I've been reading Joelle Gergis's Highway To Hell and JM Field's The Eagle and The Crow. Two very different books but at their essence - how to not blow up this beautiful planet we call home. One through the very obvious action of ending the fossil fuel industry and the other through kinship systems that create non-negotiable binds of relationship between humans and between humans and non-human entities (external environment).
On Saturday I had lunch with Joelle and despite having other plans, afterward all I could do was come back home, back to the regen project and take the weight of the world's ludicrous self-destruction into hours and hours of weeding, planting, nurturing as many of the thousands of trees we've planted here on the edge of the Richmond River (the most wounded in NSW) as I could.
Each day I sit here in this space and many others and I listen as people talk about all kinds of things - some amazing, some banal - but mostly, futile. Futile in the sense that whilst by no means planetary collapse is guaranteed because we are the species that can change the trajectory - on our current trajectory, it is an absolute. The data sits there in full view. The data is written in books and research papers. It is spoken at conferences by people who's lives are underpinned by the factual commitment of objectivity, the very same people who carry the weight each day of knowing where we're headed but are expected to remain un-emotive so as not to sully the data they've been collecting and sharing for decades but falls on the painted on ears of political deafness.
Some days I feel like I'm sitting in a cinema watching a movie play out or have that feeling of being in a dream and you're trying to get somewhere but you can't. You're somehow caught where no-one can hear or see you. You watch people move about unaware of some terror that's right there in their midst and no amount of yelling can grab their attention.
As the sun set on Saturday and I was out on the plain uncovering trees from vines and grasses that had overtaken in the 6 months of an Autumn so wet we couldn't access our own project and my friend sat just two hours away trapped in a snowstorm where no such thing should exist, alone in her car as darkness came, I couldn't help but think - how much 'unprecedented' will we hear before we realise that we have arrived at the place that scientists have been warning us about for years and that everything else we are doing that's not an attempt to turn this ship's heavy course, is otherwise just a party at the end of the world?
We think it's uncomfortable to make change, to make sacrifice now, what we can do today that's hard to bring about change, is nothing to the discomfort to come if we don't.
All these brilliant minds - we can do better. We must do better.