Scott Ludlam - Full Circle: Power, Hope and the Return of Nature

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they dont have any.

ALICE WALKER

fireground

A wind change occurred late in the afternoon, with the easterly coming in. This has caused a few spot fires in open country 2 graders are currently en route to assist.

In the terse language of the Rural Fire Service, thats bad news. On the map the fire reads as a little grey polygon, tractable and neat, drawn from direct observation and satellite hotspot mapping. On the ground its the opposite: roaring, lethal and formidably out of control. A blaze sparked by a lightning strike days ago is being fanned into a monster. Now eight hundred and fifty hectares of unceded Yuin lands are on fire in difficult and inaccessible escarpment country. While the RFS are bulldozing containment lines across its path and calling in water bombers, this easterly is sending burning embers out in advance of the front, igniting spot fires. They post photos to social media, footage of the thing they are trying to contain mesmerising walls of ash pouring slow-motion into the sky. From this distance, the bombers look like tiny fireflies against the face of it.

Weve been watching that polygon for days, hitting refresh while charred leaves drift to the ground in silence. Every twenty-four hours its a different shape, extending, elongating; other polygons appearing alongside it, still dwarfed by the giants burning to the north.

Hit refresh. Its been a pretty difficult day for fire crews on the fireline today. RFS, Forestry Corporation crews, 3 dozers, 2 graders, 2 bulk water carriers and 1 helicopter all worked to try and establish more containment on the north, south and west divisions of the fire. They were plagued by spotfires starting new fires outside control lines, while also trying to hold existing control lines.

Under a nightfall thats come too early, we pack some essentials just in case and confer with our neighbours. The air has a different timbre to it, acrid and sharp against the dead ambience of ashfall from the Shoalhaven fires weve been breathing for weeks.

While we sleep, a gusty norwester hits and it makes a run. Today was meant to be a birthday party. Waking, disoriented, to Flick banging on the door. We have to go. Fumbling, hit refresh; the polygon has grown two hideously outstretched rectangles, temporary placeholders for a thing moving too fast to map. EMERGENCY WARNING The fire has moved quickly. If youre in Cobargo or Coolagolite, it is too late to leave. Shelter in place. Fuck, its close. It has already crossed the highway just to the south of us. Up and moving now, to throw our stuff into the car, assuring Sirius that although this isnt the walk he was promised, it will happen soon now get in the car. An hour before dawn, the wrong horizon is aglow, deepest red. Get in the car.

The twilight highway is empty of traffic but for two tankers speeding towards us, directly into the path of the thing were fleeing. The sun wont rise this morning; well see it days later as a flat orange disc behind the smoke. The quiet holiday town of Narooma is abuzz, headlights of caravan traffic queuing for fuel; rumours that Cobargo is burning. Coffee from a nervy little cafe just before the power dies across the whole town. Silence falls. Its begun. Lesson one: when it hits, a power grid made of exposed wires and wooden poles will immediately fail, taking out traffic lights, water pumps, petrol stations, refrigeration, whole categories of amenity we wont realise are gone until we try to call on them.

Our phones are serving up a glitchy pastiche of destruction: beach evacuations, tortured wildlife, a freeze frame of Cobargos main street alight. Its killing people now, in vapour fires and kilometre-high firestorms. I cant bear it; hit refresh one last time before the phone network goes down. Our polygon is taking its place among the other giants; they are merging and combining into a 2000-kilometre-long fireground stretching from East Gippsland all the way to the Queensland border. We withdraw to the little park on the estuary which normally has sweeping views back towards the mountain. Today its a sombre carnival of bewildered dogs and campervans, kids on swings and this impossible, shifting half-light. Lesson two: life continues, flows around, makes a way.

Under a blackout that will last for days, we dial up the national broadcaster on AM radios, share information with people we have only just met, make a plan thats good for the next few hours. Sirius makes a dozen new friends, gets his walk like its no big deal, the weirdo.

Recent projections of fire weather suggest that fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be directly observable by 2020, wrote Professor Ross Garnaut back in 2008.

Sitting on a park bench at the end of the world, the air a dead colour, visibility down to about a hundred metres on the last day of 2019, can confirm: the effect is directly observable. Even without a phone signal, I know the timeline is awash with a thousand examples like this right now; reminders of the warning signs and reports and red flags stretching back decades. This one feels personal, I guess; Garnauts draft report was tabled four days after Id climbed up, wide-eyed, onto the privileged soapbox of a Senate term. Finding myself somehow in this benighted park twelve years deeper into what people have begun calling the Anthropocene; record drought, record temperatures, record fires, all of them predicted to several decimal places.

A bloc of transnational resource sector investors control the ministerial wing of parliament and hold absolute majorities in both chambers. One of our major political parties is wholly owned, the other is divided, traumatised and compliant. A tenacious green insurgency is holding the line in there, but in a building where numbers matter we dont have enough of them yet.

Garnauts work is a demonstration of the credibility and accuracy of our scientific institutions, side by side with the near-total capture of our political ones. Hes asked by a journalist for his reaction to seeing his report, twelve years on, circulating in news feeds and social media posts amid the falling ash. Its one of sadness, that I was ineffective, he says. Having been given the opportunity to talk to Australians on this issue, that I was ineffective in persuading Australians that it was in our national interest to play a positive role in a global effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Mate. Same. Hes had the grace not to drop a passive aggressive I told you so, but where does this leave us? On the strength of his report and the work of thousands of others, backed by resurgent social movements and some adept parliamentary work, we won clean energy reforms and saw the ship begin to turn. Those laws lasted for exactly 730 days before coal and gas investors had them repealed, by 39 votes to 33.