Nature has called our bluff, but we continue to ignore it

Illustration: Glen Le Lievre

Two images haunt me from the storm – a busted pool on a busted beach, a boy leaping into broiling waves. They tell me I don't get Australia. I love it, but do not understand it. Do you, honestly?

We're small creatures on a dangerous continent in increasingly dangerous times. Yet we act like we have totally got this. Like we can build in incendiary bush, unguarded flood plains and active beach-zones and everything'll be just fine, like yesterday and the day before. We think nature's a toy and we're the big kids in the sandpit now, making the rules.

I mean come on. Join a few dots here. Last month atmospheric CO₂ passed the 400ppm point-of-no-return. It was autumn, but we were still in the longest, hottest summer on record. Tasmania's world heritage forests burned for the first time in history and UNESCO reported the Great Barrier Reef is 93 per cent bleached, 50 per cent dead.

Then, right at summer's belated end, one of the strangest and most damaging coastal storms ever. Houses collapse, people die.

Yet our government heads into an election on a platform of cutting climate science by 30 per cent, blocking renewables investment and supporting one of the dirtiest roads in history.

Read Elizabeth Farrelly’s story in The Sydney Morning Herald - “Nature's called our bluff and we can't keep ignoring it.”