<
https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-mourning-cannot-be-an-endpoint-james-bradley-on-living-in-an-age-of-emergency-224641>
"One morning in September 2023 I leave my home and drive to the beach. Although
it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from
hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.
Despite the weather the beach is quiet. Walking to the water’s edge I wade out
and dive, then stroke outwards until my breath gives out and I surface with a
gasp. Although I have not swum all that far, I am already out past the break,
so instead of heading on I turn back towards the beach and tread water slowly.
Closer in, a few people are waiting for the waves that roll in now and then,
behind me three or four swimmers are stroking their way across the bay, but
otherwise I am alone.
There is something very particular about looking back towards the shore from
deeper water. When I was younger, and my friends and I would slip away from
work in the late afternoons to surf, I always loved drifting out beyond the
break as evening approached – the way the colour would bleed out of the world,
until it was just you and the movement of the swell. Today, though, it seems
enough to just float here.
I suppose that in some part of myself I am taking stock. The past few years
have had many challenges, not just the disruptions of the pandemic and its
effects on my children, but also other losses, in the form of family illness
and death, all of which have left me older, less confident, more aware of the
constant proximity of disaster.
The world has also been transformed. Amid the convulsions of COVID, a hastening
wave of calamity has made it clear that the first stages of climate breakdown
are upon us. After three years in which floods, heatwaves, fires and storms
devastated communities and ecosystems around the world, July and August 2023
were the hottest months ever recorded. In Asia, Europe, North America and North
Africa, records have been shattered over and over again.
Sanbao in China hit 52.2°C; near the Arctic Circle in Canada temperatures
reached almost 38°C; and in Phoenix in the United States, where temperatures
exceeded 43°C for 30 days straight, hospitals were crowded with people who had
suffered burns from falling onto the pavement.
Fires consumed tens of millions of hectares of forest in Canada, Russia,
Greece, Spain, Algeria and even Hawaii, while floods and storms have devastated
communities across Asia, Europe and North Africa. Meanwhile, ocean temperatures
have also moved into uncharted territory, rising half a degree above previous
records in the North Atlantic and reaching more than 38°C off Florida, with
catastrophic implications for corals and other marine organisms in the region.
Some have taken to calling this wave of rolling disaster the new normal. But
what the world has experienced over the past months and years is not a new
normal – it is just the beginning. Combined with the legacies of centuries of
colonial violence and extractive processes, the reckless burning of fossil
fuels has pushed the planet into a dangerously unstable new state. We now live
in an Age of Emergency that will not end in my lifetime."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
