"Nature's Revenge": Umair Uses 'Australia Burning' As A Paradigm For The Rest Of Us

“Nature’s Revenge”

Umair, January 3, 2020

In case you haven’t by now, Australia’s burning. Wait — let me try that again. 2020 began with a…continent..on fire. Yes, really. Go ahead and think about that for a second.

The pictures and stories coming out of Australia are as surreal as they are tragic and horrific. A firefighter and a koala, standing side by side…watching their worlds burn. People trapped on beaches, fleeing to the edges of habitable land, for a chance at survival. Ash falling from the skies as far away as glaciers in New Zealand. Entire towns burnt to cinders…in hours. And the new now familiar red sky. The crimson haze of a world burning. The red sky is by now the first international symbol of an age of climate catastrophe. We see it, over and over again — Brazil, Australia, California, and we instantly know what it means. Things are not like before anymore. Things are different now. The sky itself can turn blood red, as the flames touch the sky. Are we living in a biblical apocalypse? Burning continents and crimson skies?

Australia should be the wake-up call the world needs on climate change. It’s a tiny, perfect portrait of just how devastating even minor warming of this abstraction called “climate” really is. Just how fragile and precarious this thing called “civilization” and “modern life” within it really are. Just how fast life can destabilize and turn to ashes. Australia’s staggering tragedy should be teach us all a lesson in the terror and horror of a warming planet. But…will it be?

Not least because — as I’ll come to — Australia was one of the nations which torpedoed international climate change talks just a month ago…accused of literally trying to “cheat”…and here it is, just weeks later, burning. Wait — LOL — what? Can you even process that? And so.

**The first aspect of climate change that Australia burning exemplifies is the stubborn persistence of human stupidity. Australia’s Prime Minister for much of the teens…was a…literal climate denier. Therefore, while towns and cities and regions and people might have made contingency plans, Australia as a whole didn’t, and couldn’t. Why? Because Australia’s economy depends in part on coal. Exporting it, in particular, to feed the insatiable appetites of China’s”growth.”

 You know what they say about a man’s beliefs and his paycheck? Hence, because Australia’s economy depended on selling cheap coal, Australia’s PM then was a climate denier, and that trend continued, more or less, right down to now, when, as the fires that engulfed a continent broke out, the current PM was…on vacation…in Hawaiii…fishing. LOL — what?

Australia is a perfect example of how human stupidity emerges in the age of climate catastrophe. I don’t mean to condemn Australians. They are wise and gentle people. Many of them have become my friends. They are funny and curious and smart. But enough of them grew to be something like blinded by their own narrow, blinkered, short term self-interest — even when that was ruinous for all. Hey! The climate can’t be changing, and if it is, it’s not because of humans!

When your economic prospects are based on selling coal, to admit that climate change is now setting in would make for too much cognitive dissonance to happen. Guilt and shame and fear would have to be felt. Who wants those? So the psychological pain was too great — and denial was too easy — and Australians continued on their merry way — enough of them at least — pretending they lived in a fairy tale world, where the climate would never change. Until — savagely — it did. Will this tragedy wake them up? Or will the same cycle of cognitive dissonance fueled denial, married to extractive resource economies…simply continue? If a nation as rich and smart as Australia can’t learn from literally going up in smoke…what chance is there for the rest of us?

The second aspect of climate change’s tragedy you can see playing out in Australia is that it leads to economic depression and stagnation. It does that by way of what economists call “human capital flight” and “liabilities”: in plain English, people suddenly fleeing, as things go up in smoke. Which things? Homes. Hospitals. Schools. Universities. Roads. Airports. Shops. Town squares. Everything, in short, that makes up what we think of as modern civilization.

Now see, for a moment, the economic impact. All those things are going to have be rebuilt (either where they burned, or elsewhere.) But what does that really mean?

That net new things — hospitals, schools, universities, roads, town squares — aren’t built. We are just spending all our resources — time, money, energy — rebuilding old things that were destroyed. The true upshot? A society’s standard of living stagnates. We had 100 hospitals. 50 burned down. We rebuild 50 — instead of having 150. Do you see the logic?

We don’t quite understand yet that climate change is a severe economic threat because it will lead to a strange, bizarre, vicious cycle of endless stagnation. Things will burn down, flood, be torn apart a hundred different ways by nature. We rebuild those things. But we never develop new things that way. Yet standards of living rising depend not just on rebuilding the same hospital over and over again — but on having more hospitals, schools, dams, roads, etcetera, for everyone, on having more doctors, on having newer technology, on having healthcare for all.

Call it nature’s revenge. The more that we are trapped in the vicious cycle of rebuilding what nature wrathfully, laughing, destroys — the more we have to do it, faster, quicker, or else…the less there is left to invest in more, newer, better things. Think of a dam. It used to break once a century. Now it shatters once a year. We have to rebuild the dam, the pumps, the town, drain the valley. So what resources are left over for everything else…like healthcare, retirement, education, childcare, transport, etc, for all? Do you see the point? Climate change is going to implode our economies faster than anything else in history. And that cycle is just beginning.

The third aspect of the tragedy that’s a microcosm is ecocide. Do you know the estimate of how many animals died in the fires? 500 million. Think about that for a second. Five hundred million living things. Do you have a dog? A cat? Think about hundreds of millions of them…being incinerated.

30% of all koalas. Countless kangaroos and wallabies and so forth. I’m not a wildlife expert. I’m just an economist who turned renegade because he had a beating heart. So take a moment. To imagine. The fear and terror of all those beings. Five hundred million of them. The birds began to imitate the cry of the sirens. Nature itself cried out, screamed, to the heavens, in terror.

Isn’t that a genocide, too, by any other name? Why don’t we call it that? Because we don’t really have a good word for “the genocide of millions of helpless beings”, beyond “ecocide.” Now, these animals provide what ecologists call “support systems.” They nourish the soil and trees and rivers and so forth, just as they are nourished by them. So mass extinction in that way threatens us, too. It pushes our ecosystems closer to the brink of collapse, in many, many ways. What happens when there are less bees to pollinate the flowers which turn the soil? When there are fewer insects to spread the seeds that become the forests? When there are fewer fish to purify the rivers so the water is sweet?

We must, if we are thoughtful people, mourn the loss of these creatures for so many reasons. They are intelligent. They are sentient. They feel sorrow and joy, just like us. They are beautiful. And they nourish us. Who are we to destroy them, on such epic scales? Who would kill their own neighbours, for no good reason? 

What does that make us?

That brings me to my next aspect of climate change’s unfolding tragedy: we hit our emotional limits, and regress backwards like traumatized children.Can you take all the above — continents burning, hundreds of millions of beings perishing people fleeing — in? I can’t, and you can’t either, unless you’re a saint or the Dalai Lama. Nobody can process tragedy on the scale of hundreds of millions of deaths. It is simple beyond the capability of the human soul to grieve for. It leaves us numb with horror and cold with sorrow the instant we come close to even genuinely understanding it.

As the world begins to burn, my friends, we reach the limits of empathy. Do you even remember all the destruction in the Amazon just a few months ago? Barely — and I don’t blame you. Nobody can feel all this pain. Nobody can remember all these tragedies. Nobody can bear witness to death and destruction on a planetary scale.

We are left in shock, in other words. Disasters of this magnitude are unprecedented. The only things in history which come close are holocausts and world wars. When else have…hundreds of millions of living beings…just…perished? How are we to feel about that? But because these tragedies push us beyond our emotional limits, they leave us twisted and crippled, too. Some of us double down on our denial — because the pain becomes even more unbearable. Some of us stagger around like the walking wounded. Very, very few of us aren’t hurt or wounded emotionally.

As our empathy is pushed to its limits, we stop functioning like adults. We’re more likely to retreat into the infantile-narcissistic obsessions for which this age is famous — looking at pet pictures on Facebook, shouting at people on Twitter. But people who’ve regressed to those behaviors can’t really…change anything. Climate change regresses us right back to being wounded, baffled, terrified infants — at the precise moment we need to be mature adults, capable of acting with wisdom, courage, truth, beauty, empathy.

That brings me to my penultimate aspect of climate change’s tragedy: it makes us less likely, not more likely, to cooperate — at the precise instant cooperation is the only thing which can save us. There’s a romantic myth when it comes to climate change. We’ll see the world burning, and heroically, magically, nobly…do the right thing. We’ll all come together, and…fix it. More likely to be true is the opposite. We’re frightened so badly that we’re left obsessed with self-preservation. We become little survivalists, unwilling to lend anyone a helping hand, treating everyone else with paranoia and suspicion — like Americans are now, having lived in a brutalizing society for too long, where they are treated like commodities.

The result of living through severe trauma — whether America’s insanely brutal capitalist society, or a world which can burn, flood, or quake — is that we end up even more focused on our self-preservation than before. The world around feels more hostile, more dangerous, more threatening. There is even less reason for us now to cooperate with anyone — but only to think of our own survival first. That is how Americans turned into the kinds of bizarre people that build bunkers stocked with canned food and gun closets — instead of simply giving each other healthcare. They were traumatized into a vicious cycle of self-preservation.

You can already see the death of cooperation playing out on the global stage. At this precise instant we need global cooperation — climate change talks fell apart. Why? Because many countries are now beginning to think only of themselves. China’s worried how it will keep “growing” without using more coal. Australia was worried how it would keep “growing” without selling more coal. America, of course, now run by lunatic fascists, wants the world to burn. And so on.

International cooperation is decreasing — not increasing. Precisely because as climate change becomes a true existential risk, something like panic is beginning to break out. What happens when we panic? Think of a stampede. We think of ourselves first — and the result is chaos and disaster for all. That is the story of what climate change is doing at the global geopolitical level. Nations are panicking.A stampede is breaking out. The first to the mountains might survive — everyone else, go up in smoke. Nations are thinking of their own survival first — but of course, not a single element of a warming climate can ever hope to resolved that way.

Australia, sadly, stupidly, funnily, is a perfect example the lack of ccoperation by way of narrow self-interest that increasingly defines an age of catastrophic climate inaction. Do you know what it’s climate preparedness score at the recent Madrid talks was? Zero. And so Australia was one of the nations that effectively torpedoed the talks, along with China and America, asking for dodgy accounting — using “carryover credits” from a decade ago — to substitute for genuine action and investment and cooperation.

Hence, Australia helped sabotage the global climate talks…just weeks before it was to literally be engulfed in flames…pushing the vicious cycle the world in in one step further, faster. What the? my friends, is a society steeped in denial, unable to act with courage, holding the world in contempt — even while it burns down catastrophically.

That is what I mean by nature’s revenge. She isn’t just tearing down the trees and incinerating the animals. She is revealing the darkness in our hearts, too — the stupidity, selfishness, ingratitude, and desire to reign supreme, even if its only over a world of ashes. And unless we find our way back to the light, my friends…the simple fact is that we don’t have much of a future.

Umair

January 2020