Smoke and mourning. Where do we go from here?
Shared by SUSANNAH CLEMENT
Smoke and mourning. Where do we go from here? Cities in a toxic smoke haze. Children staying indoors, sport cancelled. It still seeps through buildings. Masks don’t work against particles we can’t see. Ash on the ground.
New Year’s Eve brings more devastation. Mass evacuations. Our holiday plans have changed, it’s not safe to travel.
Our ancient Country is burning. Half a billion wildlife have perished. What’s the count for the trees, grasses and mosses?
Hottest days on record. All the worms in our worm farm died on Tuesday. It was 45°C in our backyard in Western Sydney.
Anger swells and spills out, towns and lives now in ruins. Arguments rage over who is responsible, whilst volunteers take on responsibility.
My words do not justice to what has and is happening. I keep coming back to Lesley Head’s book Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene. She writes:
Grief is a manifest across society in our denial of the scale of the necessary changes to our socioeconomic underpinnings. In a sense this is grief for what we understood as our future – hitherto a time and place of unlimited positive possibility. (p.5)
I am aware that the past is not a stable and pristine place. But in this moment, it still deeply hurts.
References
Lesley Head, 2016, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-conceptualising human–nature relations, London & New York: Routledge.