"I want people outside Australia to know" [AU, climate crisis, curr ev]

[siderea]

Another via the same source: Josh Wyndham-Kidd, FB, Jan 3, 4:16am:

Existing on the internet in Australia right now is beyond imagining. I'm going to try to describe it for my overseas friends, who are seeing the horrors but outside of our context.

Friends have lost their family homes, and are updating their profiles to let us know that their relatives made it out safely and are grateful to be alive. Friends have lost their whole hometowns. Friends of friends are commenting that they know people who have lost their lives. Other friends are asking for donations to their state fire service for their birthdays, and it's not just one friend, and it's not just one state, because the fires stretch so far.

Sydney, where I grew up, where I spent my first twenty years, has been under smoke for months. Canberra, my gorgeous home for the eight years before this one, has been under smoke for weeks. It had the worst air quality of any major city in the world for much of this week; our beautiful valley traps smoke from hundreds of km away. I know this because every photo I have seen of my two hometowns for months has been obscured by so much smoke that they hurt to look at.

Paihia, on the Bay of Islands in Aotearoa New Zealand thousands of km to the east, is currently smelling the smoke from our fires. I know this because Tobias moved there after we lived together for years. Glaciers south of there are turning pink and brown, from the ash of the burning land here.

Tomorrow will be Canberra's worst fire day this season. So far. Mum has escaped to Sydney after locking her most important belongings in a fire safe. The small home we built together when we moved to Canberra is three blocks from the bush. She messaged me tonight safe, but scared. Friends in Canberra are preparing their evacuation plans for tomorrow, when conditions will be catastrophic. Again. I know this because I looked at my news feed.

More than half a billion animals have died, and the ones who haven't died are walking up to my friends' homes dazed and confused and seeking water, miles from any fire front. I know this because I saw the photo my friend took of the exhausted koala next to his tap. Canberra ran out of face masks that make it safe to breathe there right now, so yet other friends organised to bring hundreds to town to distribute for free to people who need them. I know this because I saw the tweet.

Magpies are mimicking emergency vehicles, they've heard so many. Entire towns are walking into the ocean to survive the firestorm. There are children who will have as some of their earliest memories the smoke, the fire, and the sky turning red and black at 9.30am as they fled their homes. We know these things because our friends are sharing these articles and photos as part of an unending stream of unprocessed grief. Our whole world online is only grief. Angry grief, sardonic grief, just grief. That's what we do now. Grieve.

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Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I have been reading alot about all this -- I''m in the US and it's just dire!

I feel so bad for all of you. I am so sorry. Words fail me.