Woke up this morning to the smell of fires again. Having lived in the Blue Mountains for so long I have learnt it is never a good thing. So when I get that first identifiable wif I start to worry.
After the regularity of it for the past few weeks, I may have thought I might start to become desensitised to it, at least a little. But no.
Fires here scare me.
It isn’t even summer yet…. omg so we have three or four months more of this, and the prognosis is for worse fire conditions than we have just experienced and hotter weather. There soon won’t be much left to burn.
What we just experienced, what we are still experiencing are the worst fires we have had, ever, here in Australia. Unoquivically.
People are quick to blame. Apparently the greens stop hazard reducing burns. I love that one. The greens don’t have many seats in parliament and don’t make the decisions. They don’t have a policy on stopping hazard reduction burns. This just doesn’t have an ounce of truth in it. Yesterday I read that every national park worker is a greenie. Omg what crap people say.
So, some facts. NPWS did more hazard reduction burns in the past year than ever before. The fires have burnt through these areas with unexpected ferocity, that they didn’t act as fire breaks at all. The conditions were so bad that nothing we could have done or did do made an ounce of difference.
The current fires have never been like this before.
We can’t blame the rfs for not doing enough hazard reduction burns because the government dropped much of thier funding. As it is clear, that regardless of what we did or did not do, these fires are still coming.
All we can do is struggle with the consequences of what humanity is doing to our planet because of its greed.
I have known for most of my life that we can’t sustain the continued growth we are experiencing. Our planet has the same resources it always has had. It’s a finite pool. When we take without concern things inevitably run out.
Burning the carbon sinks that store the poisons, that make our air safe, just doesn’t make logical sense. Turning them into worse poisoning gas as we did with cfc’s that caused holes in the ozone was scary. Did you know that cfc’s were effectively removed from production around the world and those holes in the ozone have started to repair.
We can fix this mess. We can reverse global climate change. We can stop this tireless growth. Stop breeding. Over population is one root cause, but not the only one. Stop using fossil fuels, obviously. We can reforest. Trees can absorb these poisonous gases again. We can undo what we have destroyed.
The only thing stopping us is our desire to change. Each and every one of us, will have to give up things, change our lives.
The global momentum on this grows daily. It’s getting so close.
The writing is on the wall for those that are stopping us changing. We have had enough.
Autumn, I long for cooler weather again. Ink series. Mount Wilson. Photograph and text copyright © Len Metcalf 2019