Delia Falconer - Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss

Delia Falconer

Scintillating Rebecca Giggs

Signs and Wonders

Brave, beautiful, and breathtaking James Bradley

Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss

I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present I want to gather them, like somebodys grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.

Diana Arbus, grant application to the Guggenheim Foundation, 1963

Here, at the edge of extinction, is the place to begin, when the worlds that one loves are being trashed.

Deborah Bird-Rose

A few years ago, I found a birds nest on the footpath, a beautiful thing of loosely woven she-oak needles lined with pale grey fur. I held it cupped in my hand as I continued onto the train from our inner-city suburb and walked through the long pedestrian tunnel to the edge of Sydneys central business district. The joyful attention it attracted surprised me. Thats a little noisy miners nest youve got there, a woman told me as she passed. Lovely, another called out. But when I reached the university and showed it to my student, a man my own age, his face fell. This meant a bird had lost its home, he said. Did I know, he asked, that when the Harbour Bridge was first built crows made their nests on its high trusses? But when they went out to search for food, the architecture was so repetitive that even these clever birds couldnt find their way back to their chicks.

I smiled a little to myself at my students tragic cast of mind. Recent high winds had blown down this nest a small drama innocent, as far as I knew, of any human interference. Yet I was all too familiar myself with a sense of wonder that flipped over quickly into apprehension about our impact on the natural world. Were the still evenings of a gloriously prolonged summer reason to rejoice or evidence of disrupted climate patterns? Was it great good fortune, while driving in a remote part of the country, to have seen a koala bundling along by the roadside with her joey on her back, or an indicator of distress? Over the last few years, these trains of thought have multiplied. Is what I am witnessing normal or abnormal? A good or a bad sign? And above all is it due, somehow, to us?

These days, the most beautiful things, whose perennial loveliness once sustained us, carry the weight of an apprehension that has come upon us with terrifying speed. Could it have only been 2014 that I first heard the word Anthropocene, which denotes the astonishing concept that weve entered a new human-made geological epoch: that our signature will persist, stamped into the earths strata, for longer than its possible to imagine? Though the term is contentious, theres a broad scientific consensus that our activities have acquired the geological force to push the atmosphere, geology, hydrology and other processes of this twelve-thousand-year epoch out of their predictable patterns and variability. Around the same time I watched, with dismay, in a fuggy Canberra lecture room, as Australian environmental historian Tom Griffiths projected twenty-four graphs of the Great Acceleration, which tracked the trajectory of human activities and their tolls on the planets systems, such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and ocean acidification. They had been rising steadily since the industrial revolution. But around 1950, every single graph began to surge toward the vertical and head off-scale.

The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme had only plotted these trends until 2010. I dread to think how they will look, once they are updated to include the last decade. And yet, as devastating as they are likely to be, these graphs may already be losing their power to predict the future, at least a future in which change is consistent. Our fossil fuel addiction may already have moved us beyond even the small comfort of the linear or gradual and into a chaotic territory of unpredictable feedback loops and tipping points. Some scientists have suggested the hundred years to follow 2100 will be the century of hell, perhaps even if we manage to keep global heating below 2 degrees Celsius.

Such knowledge brings its own vertigo as we try to reconcile such dire warnings with our ongoing daily life. We find ourselves authors of a story we may not be able to escape, and which is increasingly difficult to look at objectively. In the words of French philosopher Bruno Latour, there is now no distant place anymore.

And yet the world seems more beautiful than ever to me these days, more intensely lovely, as if these qualities were also undergoing an exponential feedback effect. It is often sublimely beautiful, in the classical sense of exciting emotions and thoughts beyond the ordinary. On any given day, a fleeting cabinet of wonders passes through my phone: ancient tardigrades (or water bears) under intense 3D magnification, like pouchy little taxidermists armatures come to life, which can survive freezing, radiation or the blast of a supernova; the warped green beams of the Aurora Australis; the flight of a hummingbird caught in slow motion; a dinosaur tail the size of a sparrows, with chestnut feathers, preserved in amber. More recently, there has been the disconcerting vision of some of the worlds most polluted cities Delhi, Bangkok, Bogota, So Paolo their skies transformed in the midst of the human suffering of pandemic lockdowns from smog to a lambent blue. Its as if our feeds have become our prosthetic heightened senses, allowing us to see even if only casually the uncanny beauty in everything.

As we grapple with the awe-inspiring concept that we are now making the worlds systems pitch and wobble even the most humble things seem radiant with this knowledge. How can we comprehend that the fate of species that preceded us by millions of years is now tied to ours or, in the case of creatures like the nautilus and horseshoe crab, even preceded the coal we burn which now seem more precariously precious? How can our daily lives be changing the movement of the Gulf Stream, causing heated subterranean gasses in Russias Arctic to blow like a bottle of champagne, or melting the permafrost so that it has started to spit out the more than ten million mammoths thought to lie within it, causing a gold rush of ice ivory? How can we even imagine these shifts we are causing will last for many thousands of years into the future, like the light of stars? It is one thing to experience what the Japanese call mono no aware, melancholy at the passing of things, like the brief blooming of the cherry blossom, but it is of another order entirely to think of the grand overturning of the stability of time and place as we know them.

To confront the epic scale of these events can feel, paradoxically, as if we have been plunged back in time, out of a scientific era and into an age of myth and wonder. For as they come under more threat, we are also learning more almost daily about the fantastic complexity of our ecosystems and the miraculous self-balancing of our Earths fragile atmosphere, which, as writer Lyall Watson notes, serves the same function for the planet as the fur on a fox or the shell of a snail but is a strange and beautiful anomaly maintained by living beings. Sometimes it seems, as if in a fairy tale, that as science discovers more about the worlds intricate agency, we are seeing everything we intuited as children now coming true: that a solitary tree in a paddock feels lonely, that the winds are alive, that animals talk, that fish feel pain.