I hardly ever watch the news, but I often overhear it on the TV when I’m at home. I remember the last time that I overheard the news when the floods happened in Australia and I felt an impetus to write something about it. That time, I felt like writing a poem, and it went like this:

Whilst watching the news,
I see emergency crews.
People being rescued,
yet I feel so removed.

It’s easy to do,
to think it’s taboo.
At the end of the day,
what can we say?

The baseline is shifting,
we must start admitting,
that our extraction,
is causing destruction.

Imagine yourself sitting in their shoes.

No place to call home,
not even someone to phone,
as people are dying,
because we’re denying.

Wake up to the world,
this is not absurd.
This is real,
the biggest deal.

Now, hearing about wildfires in France, something not so common, is driving me to write something else. When it comes to climate change, there are different things that we can do to try to deal with its effects. Two of them are adaptation and mitigation. That is, we can develop ‘solutions’ to help us adapt to the effects of climate change, or we can try to stop in our tracks so that we avoid further climate collapse.

Adapting sounds great, but I have a suspicion that we cannot adapt quickly enough nor predict accurately enough climate change’s effects - or at least enough to know how we should adapt. Seeing these wild fires on TV struck a chord inside me. When living in Portugal at the start of the year, the place that I stayed at was at risk of wildfires - lots of super spreader eucalyptus trees all around; an issue when you are living in the middle of them. Past wildfires had come close to the house, but, luckily, they hadn’t reached it. To try to adapt to the future, when staying there, we felled some trees that were close to the house to avoid them potentially falling on the house during a fire.

This is all well and good, but it’s not as pretty of a picture as it seems, and I can’t begin to imagine how it feels to be living and dealing with the real consequences of climate change. But, recently, it’s starting to hit home more and more because these disasters - and they are real, scary disasters - are starting to become the norm. This piece of news brought a few things to my mind: fear, irony, and luck.

Fear

There’s no doubt in my mind that, during the hottest months of the year, some fear will be felt by homeowners living close to regions susceptible to forest fires. Fear that their home, their shelter, will be engulfed by roaring flames. I’d struggle with this. I’d struggle to sleep. But it’s hard for me to put myself into someone else’s shoes. I think it’s always hard for a person to do this. It’s why, despite the destruction that we’re causing - often in areas of the world far removed from us - we cannot get our act together and change how we’re doing things. It’s why, when there’s a wildfire in France, the emotions that I feel are perhaps superficial - maybe even to make me feel good, somewhat humane. But time is ticking. Soon, some event - be it a flood, fire, or fight - will shake us to our core. Yes, us, here in the UK. And, maybe, only then will we view this as a call to action - a warning that we must change.

To be all doom and gloom doesn’t help all of the time, but I think that trying to think about and to intentionally feel all of the events that are happening across the world might encourage us to do something. Psychologically, fear is an interesting concept. Often, we hold back from doing something due to fear - of failure, of embarrassment, of falling short. Other times, we are driven by fear to do something - running away from problems, perhaps behaving in a certain way. I now propose that we use fear to our advantage. That we deeply contemplate and consider what’s really going on because of climate change. To do this until at least an element of fear is felt, because it should be scary - what’s happening is not normal. It is real, and it could be us. With this fear, we should face it head-on and charge towards it - driving for change, justice, equality, and action. We won’t be perfect along the way, but we might just start to fight climate change and injustice at once.

I’m part of the problem, so I will accept that I must play a part in addressing things, not offloading any fear that arises.

Irony

So what’s the irony in all of this? It’s this: if we mess with nature, then it will start to mess with us. It’s a metastable system that does not like to be perturbed beyond a certain point. One that also contains tipping points - points beyond which a big change occurs. The IPCC defines these as:

“critical thresholds beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly.”

For example, if we crank the temperature of the oceans and the atmosphere up beyond a certain point, all of Greenland’s ice sheets might melt. This would be game over.

The family that I lived with off-grid were essentially a microcosm of people that are affected by the effects of climate change - rising temperatures driving more forest fires in their local area. But, for them, their off-grid lifestyle is not even remotely comparable to the traditional, Western lifestyle that so many of us live. Do you see the small injustice present here? For them, us messing with nature causes it to bite them. But for us, we continue to follow highly polluting lifestyles, thinking that technocratic ‘solutions’ can be found to address any repercussions that we may face. I see some irony in this. Consider this example: we see an increase in forest fires, so we cut down trees, but by cutting down trees, we are reducing the carbon sequestering potential of these forests that are so vital to keep the planet stable, increasing the CO~2 concentration in the atmosphere, which increases the global temperature even more… The issue is that we think that we know better than nature. We think that we can continue following the model that has caused this catastrophe: Growth at all costs. Economics prioritised over ecology. The management of home taking priority over the knowledge of home. Profit maximisation. It’s a very, very slippery slope.

My point is that nature is complex and so multivariate that it’s very difficult to reduce it down to things that we believe we can ‘control’. The simpler option is to accept that we should instead live within the planet’s means. Lastly, irony lies in the fact that the effects of climate change are now being felt closer to home - sometimes even at home now in the UK. Floods in Paris at the start of the year and now fires on the French-Spanish border. It won’t be long until hillsides of heather go up in flames and coastal towns - like my hometown - start to recede.

Luck

The final word that came to mind when I overheard the news story about the forest fires was luck. How lucky we are not to be in the middle of a forest fire (at least not in the literal sense anyway) - to be able to observe from a ‘safe’ place. But I’m not sure if I, or many others, truly appreciate just how lucky we are, but also just how real these things are. It is difficult to comprehend the severity of such big things - to bring it down to a personable, human level. But one thing is true. We’re running out of time. And luck. There are only so many more times that we can poke the bear that is the Earth’s climate before it starts to fight back. In fact, it’s already fighting back; we’re just lucky that it hasn’t reached our patch yet. But it will, eventually, unless we start to change. And for those patches that have already been affected - let’s be better at supporting them, empathising with them, and learning about the impacts that such events are having. Not only economically, but socially and ecologically too.

To close off, for some reason, Gandhi’s quote always comes to mind when I think about the effects that climate change is having.

“Live simply so that others may simply live.”

Personally, I can’t unsee these things once I see them, which is irritating at times, and maybe it would be easier if I could follow the saying “ignorance is bliss”. But that’s not how I’m wired, and I’m happy about that. This fire has ignited another fire inside me - one that wants to continue to try to drive for change. To try to make this world a better place.