From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t strativarius; Another moan for a dying planet…

Climate grief is real – and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet

David Shearman
Wed 5 Jul 2023 01.00 AESTO

Our leaders’ addiction to economic growth and its consumption of environmental resources has me paralysed with fear and solastalgia

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In some, like Queen Victoria, the loss of a partner may cause lifelong grief with self-imposed withdrawal and solitude.

I have now realised that I have a grief disorder which has arisen slowly over the past few decades and is likely to remain prolonged.

My brain suddenly came to the diagnosis when I tried to watch Tim Winton’s series on Ningaloo Nyinggulu, one of the Earth’s last truly wild and intact places. I use the word “tried” because it hurt to watch, and I had to turn it off. After many years of working on environmental issues and being steeped in the wonder and beauty of the natural world I had realised it would inevitably die soon.

Now I cannot watch these images of a dying partner.

I suspect that this grief had probably festered in my brain since the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 in South Australia and Victoria, which caused 75 deaths and enormous structural and environmental damage. I was able to externalise my distress by painting the beautiful new epicormic leaves of rejuvenation. The 2019-20 bushfires overwhelmed me when at least 33 people died, with smoke pollution killing many more, and more than 3 billion native animals died or were displaced.

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We are slowly coming to realise that grieving for country is always with Aboriginal people and probably increasingly as the encroachment on their environment has advanced over the 200 years since our invasion. It must be aggravated by their realisation that their 60,000 years of sustaining an environment is mostly dismissed by a so-called advanced civilisation which takes little notice of their experience and knowledge.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/climate-crisis-grief-is-real-solastalgia-dying-planet

The part which really got me is the inference that the Ash Wednesday bushfire was bad, that it was somehow an encroachment on the land custodianship of traditional owners.

The Ash Wednesday fire was bad, around 75 people lost their lives.

But the truth is Aboriginals before white men arrived lit more fires than anyone.

… Saw several smooks along shore before dark and two or 3 times afire in the night. we lay becalm’d driving in before the Sea untill 1 oClock AM at which time we got a breeze from the land with which we steer’d NE being then in 38 fathom water – At Noon it fell little wind and Veerd to NEBN, we being than in the Latitude of 34°..10’ and Longitude 208°.27’ Wt and about 5 Leags from the land which extended from S-37° Wt to N1/2E. In this Latitude are some white clifts which rise perpendicularly from the sea to a moderate height …

Source: The Journal of Captain Cook, 26 April, 1770

Aboriginals claim they set lots of fires because of their cultural land management wisdom, though all the free BBQ food left behind by the fire might have been an additional bonus.

To be fair, the fires lit by Aboriginals were likely a lot less damaging than the Ash Wednesday fire, because they lit fires so frequently. Frequent fires reduced the fuel load, which reduces the intensity of fires. So maybe there was some wisdom involved.

So why expose you, the WUWT audience, to yet more public climate grief?

Because I believe a response has to be made. A very experienced politician once explained to me that you have to challenge every point, otherwise that point stands. Because such pieces sometimes reach people.

None of us will ever be free, if we completely ignore such appeals, if we always let such appeals to public sympathy go unanswered and unchallenged.