The Constant Climate Calculator

I’ve been a member of the Australian Conservation Foundation for maybe 35 years. I admire the rigour with which they pursue their advocacy; I applaud their recent move to mobilise members to speak up and speak out and to take responsibility as citizens, to get over this awful Australian cringe away from the critical and political, as if it is not nice to think critically of business-as-usual, or in some way not our place to speak up.

A few weeks ago I was one of thousands opening an email from ACF inviting me to share my climate change story, the better to make climate change central to the coming Federal election. I got the strategy, but found myself weary of the urgent, earnest tone, and I put the email aside. The call for stories seemed to me destined to elicit only stories of extremes and to dump more persuasion into a discussion where we don’t need more argument as much as a lot more taking responsibility.

But I kept thinking about that invitation. As a consultant and facilitator working between government and community, I have behind me a 40 year trail of bold attempts to improve the way people work together. Despite the generous support of sponsors in government and commitment of time from the people on the ground in agencies and communities, standard operating procedure in government agencies has changed very little.

Like many in this space between government and community, the new gloss of web presence and cute stories about agency success doesn’t fool me. I’m still waiting for the behaviour to match the rhetoric of partnership and engagement. There's been a terrible failure of nerve on the part of government to take up participatory approaches, the tools for which have been around for decades, terrible because we have wasted time as a society and because government has lost credibility.

Now we’re up against the cliff face of the exponential curves we’ve had pushed in front of us for 30 years. I’ve been mulling over Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Published in June 2018, Google shows it posted in quite a few places, getting a bit of attention. 

Bendell’s proposition is that we’re in denial of the social disruption about to erupt in our happy lives. I read Jonathon Franzen’s The end of the end of everything last year, and now accept a 5 degree rise in average temperatures. I accept it intellectually, but social collapse, probable catastrophe, possible extinction, Bendell’s trifecta? I don’t know how to come to grips with that.

But I feel the climate changing. I know it in my bones. I am a gardener living for 10 years now with five acres of ‘rural lifestyle’. I track the climate locally, mainly so I know how many layers to put on before going out to work on the property. When it’s cold, it’s sometimes really cold, and wet, and the damp seeps in unless you’ve got the right layers. When it’s mild and balmy, I’m in heaven, and I’m out early clearing weeds and breathing in the morning. When it’s hot, it’s really hot, and I fret about the veggies.

I’m out in all those weathers, sensing the world through my skin. 

At the edge of my veggie garden, the world looks pretty good

I credit my vegetable garden with teaching me to attend to the weather not as a minor nuisance to be skirted around, but as a big thing that shapes life itself. Five or so years ago, the man from the Daffodil Farm said in passing, at the local Farmers Market, that Spring was now consistently 2 or so weeks early, and that fitted with something that had been accumulating deep inside me. 

I realised then that I carry inside me a kind of constant climate calculator, like those pressure-sensitive devices my parents had on the wall, which as kids we would tap to see if the pressure was rising or falling.

Each morning, I look at my phone to see what the weather will be today, and I go outside to feel what’s actually happening. But there’s another instrument ticking over, at the edge of my awareness, that compares now to what was before. The Constant Climate Calculator.

I don’t need to be persuaded that climate change is happening, but how do I hold in my imagination a world of significant social collapse? As a species, says Blendell, we have no precedent to go to. We are in totally new territory.

Imagine this: it’s Friday morning, mid-January. I’m driving to my local pool. Outside, a blustery, maddening wind from the north buffets the car. We are headed for 43 degrees today, after 40 yesterday. After a blessedly mild start to summer, the hot weather and the fire season are upon us.

I can feel the throb of the Constant Climate Calculator.

I count myself lucky with the air-con, lucky with petrol at low cost, lucky to live in the country. I’m listening to Arvo Part choral works, performed by Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices, and I keep replaying Track 4 of Da Pacem, a soundscape of reverence and rapture, and of darker tones too, like some kind of melancholy. Part’s tones aren’t familiar - they’re smoky, misty, wreathed with a European sensibility. We’re not in Hollywood here.

Unbidden, I find myself thinking of midshipman George Raper, 21 years old, arriving in Sydney with the First Fleet, full of the adventure of his life, in a strange new land. He walks away from the improvised settlement that will become Sydney, into the bush, following the birds. He looks around at the plants. He is in a state of rapture at finding himself in Australia.

George is getting ready to paint.

Midshipman Raper settles himself to capture the Common Bronzewing. His commitment is to paint what he sees. He concentrates for long hours, and in the background is the song of the paradise he has entered. I don’t know how it sounded to him, but I think it was strange to his ears, just as Arvo Part’s tones are to mine, glorious and beguiling.

Somehow, a collection of George Raper’s watercolours survived in good condition in the family archive, and were passed on a few years ago to the National Library of Australia. We bought the book First Fleet Artist a couple of years ago, and it hasn't come off the shelf that often. over the Christmas break, we had a guest staying from La Perouse in Sydney, and we talked about the French presence there at the time of settlement, and that led us to the difference between the pictures made by the early French expeditions and those of the British. We opened the book of Raper’s watercolours.

There is the Common Bronzewing, that sits in the sun on the dirt tracks around here, bursting away in a flurry of wingbeats when disturbed. And there is the Glossy Black Cockatoo, yes that same one that comes shrieking up the valley where I live to rummage amongst the pines.

Driving to the municipal swimming pool, I remember all this in a moment, but thinking about it now, I can't help but notice that while I share with Midshipman Raper a rapture in finding myself in Australia, that rapture is now fractured by the very settlement he brought with him. We’ve ruined the country, and we’ve no idea how to handle the future we have created. 

Raper was 21, in the midst of a bold adventure. As a young man, I sought the experience of stepping into the unknown, for the worlds it opened and the waking up that happens when you’re out of your depth. But I'm older now, and at the back of my daily round is something I don’t think Midshipman Raper had. There it is again, as summer heats up, a deep pulse of disquiet that accompanies me everywhere. 

In the dark, falling notes at the close of Track 4, I sense that unknown unease. Falling into grace, falling from grace: I can’t tell the difference.

This is my climate story—living in a valley outside Melbourne. I’m looking after a bit of land, a member of my local Landcare group. I’m taking responsibility for the place where I live. I’m working on my next projects. But amongst all that, and particularly in the garden, I find myself taking more time to stop and think about the world, in the dwelling on kind of way that comes with working in the garden.

I am find I am slowly turning towards what my body feels and knows. “To grasp the problem, we have to slow down. To respond to it, we have to act fast,” says Dan Zak in a Washington Post article titled ‘Everything Is Not Going to Be Okay’: How to Live with Constant Reminders That the Earth Is in Trouble.

I don’t know how the disruption will play out, but I know now that it will come, and sooner rather than later. And because I have been complicit in this vast change to life on Earth, and have the privilege still of a life where I can drive 12 kms to swim at my local pool, I try to keep the disquiet of the Constant Climate Calculator in the foreground. 

I let it upset me, trouble me, so I stay turned toward this unknown future, to make sense of it, and to make my contribution as we all prepare for what is to come.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com

For how the seasons are changing, listen to this at RN's Blueprint for Living.