South Wind

There has to be a novel in this somewhere. A writer awarded a large sum of money for a book which among many things touches on nature in crisis learns that that part of the prize is profit from fossil fuel investments. At the same time fossil fuel interests are wrecking a global summit set up to lessen their impact on nature.

With humanity struggling to get its collective head around the Anthropocene, the present man-made geological epoch marked by the double-headed climate and extinction crisis, some of the best insights are coming from contemporary fiction writers including our own Richard Flanagan.

A couple of weeks ago Flanagan’s book Question 7 was awarded the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, worth nearly $100,000. In his words, Flanagan delayed taking receipt of the prize money until the sponsor, Scottish investment company Baillie Gifford, put forward “a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuels and increase investment in renewable energy.”

I had not read Question 7, published last May, but the fuss around the prize pushed me into it, and once in I couldn’t escape. Wondrously conceived and crafted, it’s an engaging and deeply moving meditation on connected daisy chains of historical events and personal and family memories.

Question 7 is not fiction, but Flanagan has said it was written “in the spirit of a novel”. Questions about the meaning of love and life are teased out in vivid glimpses of his parents’ lives, in the effect on those lives of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and in the shaping of the bomb’s history by a love affair between the futurist HG Wells and an emerging feminist writer, Rebecca West.

Woven through the narrative is what is happening to the natural world that nurtured us. Industrial activity has seen what were perpetually wet Gondwana-remnant rainforests surrounding Flanagan’s childhood home in Rosebery transformed in recent decades into yet another fire-prone landscape.

At the heart of the book is the question of the title, from a story by the 19th century Russian writer Anton Chekhov, in which a puzzle about train timetables, apparently an exercise in rational thinking, ends with the startlingly incongruous question, “Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” Or as Flanagan reinterpreted, why do we do what we do to each other?

Rationality defeated by what we do, by life. There is no answer. There are just questions, one after the other after the other.

Questions like: Knowing what we know about environmental degradation, why do Tasmanian leaders keep blocking proper regulation of industries endangering our seas and aquifers and forests?

Why, facing a crisis that threatens to engulf humanity along with its natural life supports, are we going backwards while pretending to go forwards? Why are we unable to take the essential step to save us and leave fossil carbon where nature put it, in the ground?

Why did delegates at the recently-ended Baku climate summit, in Julian Cribb’s memorable words, vote “to cook their children and grandchildren alive”? Why has this rational UN process to save the natural world become hijacked by petro-states, with the apparent collusion of Australia, still claiming to be a leader in conservation diplomacy?

Given all that science has told us, why is Australia a leading coal and gas exporter? Why did the WA government lock in billions of tonnes of emissions by approving Woodside’s 50-year North West Shelf gas plan?

And in the dying days of this parliamentary year, why did the Albanese government effectively sanction native forest logging and Woodside’s 50-year licence by setting aside plans years in the making to strengthen weak, long-neglected environmental laws?

There is nothing rational in any of this. If the house is burning down you don’t quibble over family disagreements or neighbours’ attitudes or what might happen to the property’s value – and you certainly don’t keep adding fuel. You put the fire out. It’s what we call common sense.

Putting out the global fire demands above all that having delayed hard decisions for decades we stop using fossil fuels, now. But governments refuse even to declare this as policy, while colluding with corporate greenwashers and diverting attention with talk about targets.

As the archetype company leader put it to shareholders in a classic New Yorker cartoon by Bob Mankoff, “While the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.”

Using an ancient doctrine that God gave us the right to dominate nature, leaders are signing up to a suicide pact. Can God save us? That’s another question.

This is about a groundbreaking science meeting at the University of Tasmania in Hobart last week. But before we get to that, some essential background information.

Independent analysis by both Berkeley Earth (US) and Copernicus (Europe) says 2024 is all but certain to be the first calendar year with a global mean temperature above the 1.5C safe limit of warming. October was the sixteenth consecutive month above that danger line.

Meanwhile, the World Meteorological Organisation reported a month ago that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are higher – and critically, rising more quickly – than at any time since humans evolved around 200,000 years ago. The most conservative estimate of where present emission policies by all countries are taking us puts the world on track for a catastrophic 3C of warming by 2100.

Using science that pinpoints the source of CO2 molecules in the air, WMO identified burning of coal, oil and gas as the main reason for this. Yet Australian governments subsidise their extraction and facilitate their export – and prohibit dissenting actions such as the attempted Newcastle port blockade at the weekend.

Last week’s Australian Antarctic Research Conference described itself as “an emergency summit for Antarctica’s future”. That is surely an understatement.

Like their scientific mentors and elders, early-career scientists at the conference had well-founded views about the state of the planet. These people are typically less than a decade into their careers with a lifetime of discovery ahead, but their general and postgraduate studies have already equipped them better than anyone in government to understand what is happening in Earth’s Deep South.

Veteran scientists featured among presenters, but those early-career scientists, making up about two-thirds of conference participants, also made their presence felt. As the conference was winding down on Friday, they released their own take on the state of play.

Under the heading, “Make Antarctica cool again”, their communique pointed out the critical role of the Antarctic region in regulating global climate. “Nowhere on Earth is there a greater cause of uncertainty in sea-level rise projections than in East Antarctica, in Australia’s backyard,” they said, with enough water locked up in its ice sheet to raise sea levels by 50 metres.

The statement concluded with a stark warning: “Runaway ice loss causing rapid and catastrophic sea level rise is possible within our lifetimes. Whether such irreversible tipping points have already passed is unknown.”

Far from an extreme, ambit claim, this is well-founded in existing science. Conference presenters pointed to warning signs along the Antarctic coast south of Australia, including record-low sea ice coverage, incursion of warming seawater beneath glaciers, and extreme heatwaves more than 40C above average temperatures, highlighting huge uncertainties about ice melting and glacial fracturing.

More than 100 posters by emerging scientists explored hypotheses across many disciplines and topics. A small sample of their analysis: the twists and turns of ocean circulation, the diet of Antarctic krill as an indicator of Southern Ocean health, the role of sea ice in circulating ocean water and why it’s disappearing, the physics of retreating coastal ice, what drill cores of ancient ice tell us about weather, and the quality of scientific advice to politicians and diplomats.

Conferences like this used to be annual or biannual events, often featuring leading international players. But a decade or so ago they stopped happening, thanks to changing politics and shifting priorities.

Whether they’re back to stay only time will tell. A feature of this conference, at the University of Tasmania’s Sandy Bay campus, was cost-cutting. Past gatherings were in big hotels, but this year’s event would not have happened had not the university made its lecture venues and facilities available free of charge.

University Vice-chancellor Rufus Black’s eloquent opening address alluded to this, focusing on the role of science to foster the “unique collaborations and unprecedented action” required to prevent all life on Earth from being overwhelmed by climate change.

“We gather here in a university because universities were born as places of hope… They are places that have held out against the black tides of history and where even today the values we share with colleagues unite us when our countries are divided,” he said. Young people come to universities “with a belief that better is possible; we owe it to them to keep that flame alive.”

All of us, young and old, owe it to each other to hold out against that advancing black tide of history, a tide that right now is swamping considered, expert warnings about the state of the planet for the sake of personal or partisan agendas. Hats off to our young scholars.

Australia’s master storyteller timed it well. This year of chaotic weather and soaring temperatures – exceeding for the first time science’s safety limit – is also the year of Juice, Tim Winton’s new novel about our overheated Earth.

A recurring thread in Winton’s writing has been the complex relationship between people and nature, including awareness of a changing climate. But this is the first time he has confronted head-on this all-encompassing issue, and it’s been well worth the wait. Juice is a book for the ages.

A year ago Winton described to a Melbourne audience how his old view of writers like himself as “priests of culture” had been changed by the growing climate crisis. In a world “where every decent thing is in danger of being commodified, and all human potential is now in jeopardy”, he now sees an obligation to deliver meaning and beauty to his readers. 

Both are present in the book, but they’re hard and harsh, in a fire-scarred Ningaloo landscape a few centuries in the future that’s too hot to sustain much life. Residents of a hamlet and scattered homesteads, forced underground by a scorching summer sun, scrape by on food grown in the still hot winters, and on precious “juice” – energy from sun and wind.

The desolate setting suggests a story that’s tough going, but Juice is classic page-turning Winton, utterly absorbing from start to finish. The nameless protagonist, a weathered, ageing man, is on the run, having lost his family, abandoned his uninhabitable home and taken a child into his care. He meets another fugitive, who at the point of a crossbow forces the pair into an abandoned mineshaft.

Under some duress, the man tells his life story, recounting how his hard life on the land became harder still when he joined a global resistance force tasked with taking revenge on those who had enriched themselves from fossil fuels, now living in luxury in remote fortresses. 

As a warrior he gains access to archives that tell the history of preceding centuries. He discovers how the failure of today’s generations – ours – to stop burning gas, oil and coal damned him to a life of sorrow and ashes.

The story moves at a cracking pace through his training and multiple missions to distant parts of the planet, interspersed with the travails of producing food in a deteriorating climate, a tender love story, and the birth of a child. 

In public appearances Winton, a professed pacifist, comes across as a gentle soul. But in a podcast for The Monthly a couple of weeks ago he confessed to feeling, over the seven years it took to write the book, a raft of new emotions – “incandescent fury, deep foreboding, sorrow, alarm” – at the damage being wrought by business-as-usual.

With worse to come, says Winton, current trends will render Australia’s top half unliveable within a lifetime. “Where are all these people going to go – white fellas and black fellas alike? They’re going to come to Geelong, and Canberra, and Melbourne. It’s all very well to stand around in parliament and gloat about the fact that you’ve stopped the boats. How are you going to stop the utes?”

Winton is scathing about the response of Australian authority to climate protest, referencing a young Perth mother arrested at her home in front of her children for writing three words in chalk on a public walkway “as if she’s a terrorist… a war criminal will get a better rap than a climate protester.”

Neither the market nor technology will save us, says Winton. What will save us is solidarity, decency, the genius of collective humanity. “Everyone needs to answer the question, whose side are you on – the side of life, or the side of money?”

Winton’s bottom line is this: “We live on a miracle… a world infused with creativity and the miraculous fact of organic life.” Optimism is for him a discipline serving to make life bearable, based on his “determined belief… that the people who were made by the world are essentially good and want to do good”. Hence the book’s surprising, uplifting end.

Winton’s international reputation in general fiction coupled with his powerful voice for the downtrodden, familiar to any reader of his wonderful 1992 novel Cloudstreet and infusing most of his work since, makes Juice a special addition to the growing global cli-fi canon.

CLIMATE signals from the far south are central subjects of a major Antarctic research conference at the University of Tasmania from today, covering research on climate extremes and tipping points in the Antarctic system. See the program here.<https://leishman.eventsair.com/aarc/program>