Dystopian films and books a sign of our climate fatigue: Mark Wakeham

Illustration in The Age by Andrew Dyson.

When we think about the word pollution, it conjures up images of black smoke belching from factories or old cars. But for this election it's a different kind of pollution in the spotlight again – the invisible greenhouse pollution driving global warming.

I suspect climate change both terrifies and dulls Australians. We watch with horror and despair as the coral gardens of the Great Barrier Reef bleach and die. We can't quite believe the loss of a favourite beach town in an early summer bushfire. And while we look forward to summers, there's also fear we'll be hit by another heatwave more ferocious than anything we experienced growing up.

Scratch the surface of Australian attitudes about the future, and deep inside we worry that our kids won't have it as good as we do. They absorb this bleak prognosis, which perhaps partly explains the resurgence in dystopian films and books for teens.

But we brush these fears aside or bury them within, and collectively devote more of our civic energies and political focus to more local or easily comprehensible issues: public transport, job security, house prices and retirement incomes.

Read the piece by the CEO of Environment Victoria, Mark Wakeham in today’s Melbourne Age - “Climate fatigue is the biggest threat to our future.”

(Climate fatigue, as Mark Wakeham describes it, is patently obvious as any useful response to it is simply too hard; demands too much of individuals; puts them under pressure to change their way of living from work through to leisure; insists on a restructuring of world governance and the economy; mandates a change in human relationships ending the strident individualism of capitalism and bringing on cooperation and collaboration between people and nations; yes, viewed through existing prisms it is simply too hard.

Each of us has defined pool of worries, brought on mostly by the individualistic and capitalistic ways of modernity and so to concern ourselves with climate change simply cause that “pool” to overflow and so while climate change, particularly for those unaware of the realities and implications and complications of what is happening, becomes an issue too far, too complex, beyond the concerns of our “instant” world and so we simply can’t be bothered anymore and fatigue sets in – Robert McLean.)