Dread...
In this episode, we explore the feelings that can arise as the reality of climate-change hits home
It looks so idyllic, doesn’t it? - that mini-forest with its carpet of green, just beyond the garden-fence at this place?
But the reality is that right now I’m looking at it with dread…
Why?
Oh, there are plenty of everyday reasons, of course. This is south-east Australia, so there’ll be bugs, snakes, spiders, potholes, rocks, plenty of tetanus-inflicting old barbed-wire and more all hiding away out there. Y’know, the usual stuff that we have to be wary about down here.
But no, that’s not what’s worrying me: I’m used to that by now. No, what is worrying me is that when I look at that view with bushfire-aware eyes, all of that idyllic scene is fuel - lots and lots and lots of fuel. And we’re heading into what’s likely to be one of the worst bushfire seasons in decades…
For the past few years we’ve been on the La Niña side of the southern-Pacific weather-cycle: cooler, and wetter. And all that rain has made a big difference with huge amounts of new growth: the grass is growing like crazy, I have to cut it back down again every couple of weeks, even though we’re not yet properly out of winter, let alone into the spring. That swathe of green on the forest-floor in the photo above? - none of that was there last year. It looks lush right now, but as of earlier this year we’ve switched over to the El Niño side of the cycle: dry, dry and hot hot hot. And when that warmer weather turns fully on in a month or two from now, all of that hypergrowth will turn into tinder that can ignite at the smallest spark. All of that sits on top of many year’s-worth of twigs and tree-litter; and most of the trees here are eucalypts whose leaves can be up to 20% oil, just waiting for the right moment to explode into a roaring blaze.
Just to make it even more fun, that’s an upslope facing towards this house, and all exactly in line with the prevailing winds here. If it does spark off, it’ll hit fast, and hard: bushfires here can move fast, up to sixty miles an hour or more - faster than you can safely drive, even on good roads, when you can’t see a darn thing because of all of the smoke.
And the temperature of those fires? Take a look at the surface of this tree that’s down beside the railway-line a couple of hundred yards from here:
That weird angular blob is sap that’s been extruded from inside the tree. In normal times, that kind of sap is thick, heavy, like treacle or glue - it barely moves at all. But here, it must have all but flooded out from beneath the surface; the shiny surfaces are where it’s melted, the little globules are where it’s boiled. You’ll see the burn-marks just below and around the blob: a grass-fire hot enough to set the tree on fire, but not enough to hit the crown. And it’s the crown-fires - when the flames hit those oil-filled leaves, then spread out for miles in a literal rain of fire - that cause the real devastation.
That tree was burned about thirty years ago. Here, along this road, they were lucky: it didn’t become a full crown-fire, so whilst there was damage, there was no real destruction, no death. But just two miles to the south of here, the same fire hit hard. Hundreds of houses destroyed. Dozens of people died. All in a matter of minutes. And those flames can even become hot enough to melt steel: twenty years ago, in the Dandenong fires in the leafy outer suburbs of Melbourne, some people were literally cremated in their cars as they tried to flee - nothing left but ash. There’s an all-too-real reason for that dread…
We’ve already been warned that this bushfire-season is likely to be not just bad, but worse than anyone has ever seen before. Sea-temperature off the south-east coast has already gone beyond historic records, and the summer hasn’t even started yet. A leaflet from the Red Cross in the mailbox this morning, listing contact-details, websites, phone-numbers, emergency resources, reminding us to check whether we have our escape-plan ready. Out here, away from the heartland or the coast, there’s a fair chance that the real dangers won’t arrive until around Christmas-time: but if and when it does hit, there won’t be any time to spare. By then, I’ll need to have a ready-packed grab-bag ready by the door, and the car fully loaded and ready to go at a moment’s notice, because that moment’s notice could well be all the warning I’ll get. If I’m lucky.
Part of what makes it so scary is that it’s so capricious: whole regions can be devastated, sometimes, yet all around those places there’s maybe nothing happening at all. In the Dandenongs, the fire blasted down the length of a street, destroying everything in its path; yet halfway along the street, the flames bizarrely jumped right over one ordinary unprotected house, leaving it almost completely unscathed. In the Mount Macedon fires, thirty years ago, a friend’s house survived only because he’d happened to re-paint its white walls just a few days before.
That capriciousness is also part of what makes it so dangerous: it invites complacency, an attitude of ‘it might happen to others, but it won’t happen to me’. And it’s a classic kurtosis-risk: for each individual case, there are real costs in preparing for something that may never happen, and the apparent danger is small - but if the risk does eventuate, the consequences of not being prepared can be devastating. I’m prepared enough now that I should be able to get away in time: yet if the house does go up in flames, not only would I lose everything here, but I wouldn’t know where to go. There may be nowhere to live, for anyone around here, for quite some time. That’s enough to fill anyone with dread…
Yet we can quieten that dread somewhat by taking action instead. Acknowledge that the risk is real, yet also be realistic about it. Do just enough: in my case, it’s a rental, so I can’t do anything major, to make the place more defensible, but I can at least keep the grass well-mown to reduce the risk of a grass-fire, weed the beds of succulents that provide a shield-wall here, clear any clutter from around the house, all the usual stuff like that. Yet there’s a trade-off here: I can’t let it eat all of my time, I have to keep up with all of the other everyday-stuff that still needs doing as well. It’s sometimes hard to find the right balance between being over-complacent on on side, versus over-obsession on the other.
And proper planning also helps to keep the panic at bay. Right now, we do have time to prepare, to plan, to take action to mitigate the risk. But we need to do that now - because in three months’ time, if it hits, there won’t be any time to spare.
Yet the bleak reality is that, for all of us, much of this could have been avoided, if only we’d taken heed about all - or even any - of the warnings that we’d had about climate-change. Yes, I know that there are still arguments about whether it’s natural or human-caused, or how exactly it will play out in practice - but none of those arguments matter, compared to the bald fact that the climate is changing, in ways that are fast approaching an existential threat for most if not all human life on this planet. Not A Good Idea…
We’ve had had at least half a century’s-worth of the scientists’ global-scale equivalents of that Red-Cross warning-leaflet, and collectively we’ve basically flat-out ignored them for the whole of that time. If we’d taken more notice of those notices, then yeah, we would have had plenty of time to plan, prepare, take mitigating-action and all that. But at this stage, we’ve pretty much run out of time for any of that, and the only option we have left is to deal with the consequences as best we can, with nowhere else that we can go.
So yeah, sure, that prospect is probably enough to fill anyone with dread… But it’s what we have, and we need to learn how to work with it - starting from the kind of changes that we’ve been exploring on this Small Changes Substack over the past couple of years and more. But best get ready, folks, ’cos whichever way it goes, it’s gonna be a bumpy, stormy, smoke-filled ride…