Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t strativarius; Another moan for a dying planet…
Climate grief is real – and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet
David Shearman
Wed 5 Jul 2023 01.00 AESTOur leaders’ addiction to economic growth and its consumption of environmental resources has me paralysed with fear and solastalgia
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In some, like Queen Victoria, the loss of a partner may cause lifelong grief with self-imposed withdrawal and solitude.
I have now realised that I have a grief disorder which has arisen slowly over the past few decades and is likely to remain prolonged.
My brain suddenly came to the diagnosis when I tried to watch Tim Winton’s series on Ningaloo Nyinggulu, one of the Earth’s last truly wild and intact places. I use the word “tried” because it hurt to watch, and I had to turn it off. After many years of working on environmental issues and being steeped in the wonder and beauty of the natural world I had realised it would inevitably die soon.
Now I cannot watch these images of a dying partner.
I suspect that this grief had probably festered in my brain since the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 in South Australia and Victoria, which caused 75 deaths and enormous structural and environmental damage. I was able to externalise my distress by painting the beautiful new epicormic leaves of rejuvenation. The 2019-20 bushfires overwhelmed me when at least 33 people died, with smoke pollution killing many more, and more than 3 billion native animals died or were displaced.
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We are slowly coming to realise that grieving for country is always with Aboriginal people and probably increasingly as the encroachment on their environment has advanced over the 200 years since our invasion. It must be aggravated by their realisation that their 60,000 years of sustaining an environment is mostly dismissed by a so-called advanced civilisation which takes little notice of their experience and knowledge.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/climate-crisis-grief-is-real-solastalgia-dying-planet
The part which really got me is the inference that the Ash Wednesday bushfire was bad, that it was somehow an encroachment on the land custodianship of traditional owners.
The Ash Wednesday fire was bad, around 75 people lost their lives.
But the truth is Aboriginals before white men arrived lit more fires than anyone.
… Saw several smooks along shore before dark and two or 3 times afire in the night. we lay becalm’d driving in before the Sea untill 1 oClock AM at which time we got a breeze from the land with which we steer’d NE being then in 38 fathom water – At Noon it fell little wind and Veerd to NEBN, we being than in the Latitude of 34°..10’ and Longitude 208°.27’ Wt and about 5 Leags from the land which extended from S-37° Wt to N1/2E. In this Latitude are some white clifts which rise perpendicularly from the sea to a moderate height …
Source: The Journal of Captain Cook, 26 April, 1770
Aboriginals claim they set lots of fires because of their cultural land management wisdom, though all the free BBQ food left behind by the fire might have been an additional bonus.
To be fair, the fires lit by Aboriginals were likely a lot less damaging than the Ash Wednesday fire, because they lit fires so frequently. Frequent fires reduced the fuel load, which reduces the intensity of fires. So maybe there was some wisdom involved.
So why expose you, the WUWT audience, to yet more public climate grief?
Because I believe a response has to be made. A very experienced politician once explained to me that you have to challenge every point, otherwise that point stands. Because such pieces sometimes reach people.
None of us will ever be free, if we completely ignore such appeals, if we always let such appeals to public sympathy go unanswered and unchallenged.
I live opposite some land which is now “Aboriginal” land, but was once a “State Forest”
Walk the dog there for about 5km every morning.
It is 250 hectares of scrubby bushland, just waiting to burn like a tinderbox in the next dry spell.
Trails are now rutted and washed out. I doubt any fire fighting vehicles could use many if any of them.
Invasive lantana all over the place.
At least 7 rusted out dumped cars.
And nobody does anything about it.
So much for “custodial care” !
—–
Oh, and where have all these bushfires been since 2019.. .. not a peep about the lack of bushfires.
It was floods. If you haven’t got bushfires, well you’ve got the La Nina floods over the last years. Too busy persecuting the catastrophic climate case, using the rain. Don’t worry, wait until we get more bushfires this summer, then the rhetoric will be fever pitch.
Fire, flood, fire, flood.
But remember, the green fairy will sprinkle the pixie dust, and once all the ruinables are built, and all that naughty fossil fuel is never used again, well it will be climate nirvana. Floods and bushfires will magically disappear altogether or be such a rare event we won’t even notice.
Why don’t you take steps to improve the situation?
I regularly clean up loose rubbish when I’m out on walks, rubbish which I can carry.
Have drawn attention a couple of times to the local council, but nothing happens.
Nothing I can do about the general condition of the area, though.
What do you suggest? ‘The Bush’ is trees and forest not a local footpath in downtown Sydney. Besides it is illegal to pick up fallen trees unless you have government permission.
“Besides it is illegal to pick up fallen trees unless you have government permission.”
That doesn’t stop people around here doing the occasion “fallen-timber-clean-up” for home use. 😉
The real problem at the moment is the amount of long grasses and small eucalypt, wattle and other shrubs. When they dry off, the place will be a tinderbox.
“Besides it is illegal to pick up fallen trees unless you have government permission.”
I know that applies in Victoria, but I don’t think it does in NSW.
Over the last 40 years, I have watched the Guardian steadily deteriorate from a somewhat trusted newspaper to utter dross. The decline accelerated sharply after the Guardian bought into the cagw religion. I only read the Guardian occasionally now to keep tabs on what the loonies are thinking. Some of the articles are utterly deranged, like the one featured here. The horrifying thing is that the rest of the British media is going the same way.
Not GB News, which the establishment and the loonies are trying to close down.
And TalkTV, Richard Tice has the courage to go against the establishment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcwFGBAWl4o&t=1800s
From around 25:00 to 42:00 mins.
GB News did not cover themselves in glory in the case of Mark Steyn
Quite the reverse!
GB News’ response to Ofcom’s illegal attack of free speech in general and Mark Steyn’s brave and logical episodes was revolting!
Disgusted that some of the other presenters who had been well worth watching, meekly sucked up GB News’ new ‘Party Line”.
I’m torn on this one – Mark Steyn knew the conditions and boundaries when he signed up to GB News and chose to break them, putting the entire GB News brand at risk. Mark had little to risk, having a successful career away from the news channel, GB News could have gone under. Yes they could’ve supported him better but he could’ve respected GB News and the strict conditions they have to work under as well.
Covid did funny things to some people
Very true. And Ofcom regulations are funny things unless your entire business is at stake.
If you aren’t paying for something, then you are the product.
The Guardian sells its readership to advertisers. The readership is generally well-off and young enough to not have fixed purchasing habits. They are very attractive to advertisers.
But… so were Levi Jeans, once. Then the buyers got old and they became less cool.
The Guardian needs a way to kick readers out as well as to get readers in.
How to lose readers at a certain age?
Devote lots of attention to something that cannot be bought into by those with busy careers and a family to look after. Expensive follies are fine for children but there comes a point when people grow up.
Climate Change action is an expensive folly. It’s perfect for curating the Guardian’s readership.
“The readership is generally well-off and young enough to…”
Have been fully indoctrinated.
Quite a few of them are particularly unhinged, a trait easily viewed in the comments; especially in the Environment section.
And under the evil Bill Gates’ ownership it can only get worse. Not to mention polluting other legacy media via his Foundation slush fund.
I’m ashamed to say I used to read The Guardian in the 1980’s and 90’s. It was pretty bad even then, but nothing like what it has become. If the paper told me the sky was blue and the grass was green I’d go outside to check.The only consolation is knowing its circulation is dropping steadily.
A little anecdote: my local newsagent tells me he can’t give the paper away.
perhaps a good psychiatrist might help.
Sustaining their environment? By doing what exactly? They burned to make it easier to walk and hunt. The rest of the time they sat under a tree. Where does the sustaining part come in? They used the environment for their own purposes. Then they moved on. That’s it and that’s all. What happened to reality?
They couldn’t move on far, and they moved back again soon enough; Australia was pretty much at the long-term human carrying capacity for the existing flora, fauna, water supply and technology level. Each tribe had its own area within their nation’s territory, and woe betide them if they encroached on somebody else’s without good reason and plenty of prior negotiation.
By the time Europeans arrived, things were reasonably well optimised. That included the managed fire ecology of much of the country.
Put in a few nuclear powered desalination plants on each coast and they could dramatically increase the population of flora, fauna and humans.
Australia likely has uranium ore, but lacks the will to use it.
Yes, water supply was by far the limiting factor in most areas. Sinking artesian and sub-artesian bores to provide a permanent water supply opened up the inland to grazing.
“perhaps a good psychiatrist might help.”
NO!!!! A psychiatrist would almost certainly exacerbate the fool’s mental condition.
Most are just as climate-mentally-deranged.
Yes Mike, they burned it because there were huge areas of rainforest that they could neither sleep nor hunt in.
Aboriginals told me when I was young and apprenticed to an Aboriginal rainmaker that as they had no clothing they had to paint themselves completely in fire ash and clay to sleep at night in the dirt, and that was in dry country. They could not sleep in rainforest because of the ticks, leeches and other blood suckers.
So they constantly set fire to dry forest close by when the wind was blowing towards the rainforest and they gradually removed a lot of rainforest.
Also, bows and arrows work in rainforest but not the weapons they had, ie spears and boomerangs.
The rainmaker I was apprenticed to, used to often tell me that the best thing he got from a white man was a shirt and a swag.
Captain Cook mentioned in his log that while sailing up the Oz east coast that not a day went buy without seeing smoke from one or more fires ashore.
My response is to throw up. How bonkers are they?
“”I stand alone in the howling, blistering Australian desert, and my Munch-like scream is lost in a shriek of wind.””
Best place for it.
Looks like the author have not ever been in the Australian desert.
Howling??
Shriek of wind??
I give up on there wannabes..
As a movie once posted, modified:
“In
Spacethe Outback no one hears you scream”.For the Guardian, nauseating is editorial policy. Unfortunately there is a market for it. Whether it also caters for people who merely wish to be aware of the boundaries of human foolishness – well many of us do click to find out where those nauseating boundaries currently are.
Not really since if Bill Gates had not funded them, the Guardian was steadily heading for much-needed bankruptcy as sales income was not covering costs.
Solastalgia: Solastalgia is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium and the Greek root -algia, that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change.
One wonders how someone suffers from this since it hasn’t warmed in over 8 years.
A better description might be obsessive compulsive disorder, a mental and behavioral disorder in which an individual has intrusive thoughts and feels the need to perform certain routines repeatedly to relieve the distress caused by the obsession, to the extent where it impairs general function, such as buying lithium batteries to save the planet.
Delusional behaviours and an externalised persecution complex. Pitiful to see but this person needs psychiatric help.
Don’t make the mistake of downplaying the accumulated local knowledge of a small group of people with oral information transfer. They were keen observers, and had worked out the “what” fairly well, but with their own version of “why”.
There are two main ways to pass on information – telling and doing. We call it theory and practice 🙂
The cultural land management is some of the “telling”. The information passed on was relevant to the area, and the men and women had different yarns, songs and dances. It could be wrapped up in various garb, but it largely boiled down to passing on necessary information relevant to one’s role in the tribe and nation.
When it’s all said and done, being a hunter gatherer in a highly variable environment is bloody hard work, and the more you know about it the longer you’re likely to live.
Once you get a fair way inland, droughts can last for 10 years, followed by a massive flood. You need to know how to be prepared for both extremes, along with the inevitable fires.
A man or woman may have only seen one moderate flood in a lifetime, and major floods may have only occurred every 3 or 4 generations, so there was very limited scope for the “doing”.
Paleontologist Tim Flannery has naturally fallen out of favour with the Dreamtimers-
Future Eaters Ep.1 – Taming the fire -The thesis and responses from critics (abc.net.au)
Truth is aboriginals used fire to flush out game and perhaps from that some tribes learned that it created grasslands for increased game productivity.
As hunter gatherers in a very harsh environment there was some cannibalism practices observed by newcomers although nothing like Pacific Islanders. What was widespread was infanticide with twins or offspring too close together to be carried by their mothers in their travels seeking food. Life was harsh brutal and short just as it was for 150000 odd convicts that had no choice in joining Australia’s 300000 odd indigenous wandering tribes after 1788.
If that’s a shock to certain sensitivities and their new ‘noble savage’ meme don’t forget that in 1789 The Terror of the French Revolution would begin and end in mass slaughter (2.5-3.5 million?) in the Napoleonic Wars up to 1812. If you’re really interested in the ignominious start of a modern Nation here’s a good place to start to slay some myths and the new mythmakers-
A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (gutenberg.org)
Should be compulsory reading for schoolchildren learning about their own Nation of wandering tribes kicking off again in earnest in 1851 with the Victorian gold rushes and so on and so on with 400000 new immigrants in the last year alone.
Apparently its snowing in Johannesburg for the first time since 2012.
Doesn’t South Africa know that it’s the hottest July eva and global heating is out of control?!
Reminds me of this Monty Python bit…
Charles goes political – naughty
Biden gets confused and…
“”What we need are company chief executives looking to the future and investing in that future and accelerating the transition to that future,” Kerry told the BBC.””
“”The king’s confab with Joe Biden was an outrageous political intervention.””
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/10/charles-should-butt-out-of-the-climate-debate/
I heard he asked Charles, “How’s your mother?”
You dare introduce some logic..
Shame.
Story Tip ?
Not completely off topic, at the time Climate Change was the culprit, now not enough firefighters made things much worse
Firefighter shortages meant 39 fire engines were not available to help tackle the wildfires that burnt across London last July, a new report reveals.
The fires saw 16 homes in Wennington, Havering, destroyed in one of the blazes on 19 July 2022.
A major incident review of the London Fire Brigade’s (LFB) response was published on Monday after a Freedom of Information request by the BBC.
BBC Article
Once upon a time the Guardian attempted to present a wide range of opinion which allowed the reader to investigate further and make up their own mind. Now the Guardian’s output is a tabloid pushing propaganda using the word “EVER” in headlines whenever it hasn’t been used for an hour or so. Today it is Japan’s turn to have the neaviest rainfall ever …
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/11/heaviest-rain-ever-causes-deadly-floods-and-landslides-in-japan
Once upon a time the Guardian like most of the press had some great journalists. Say up to the end of the 70s.
Now they employ hacktivists who faithfully report whatever anybody – save for the ‘right wing’, or those who disagree – tells them.
Poor ol’ Doc David, he’s such a mess. Look I’ll send him a note and get him in touch with Ms Keluskar, this person, I’m sure she can help him…
Just send a link to this video… 😉
Save on the psycho-ologist.
https://youtu.be/rRZ-IxZ46ng
Just more propaganda from the MSM branch of The Dead Earth Society.
“The Dead Earth Society.”
Surely you mean the Dead Mind Society.
After reading about this Gloomy Gus, I reread the Wikipedia article about Earthrise. The Earth we live on is a pretty nice place and on average it is getting better every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise
https://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/earthrise.htm
Step back for a better perspective.
He needs to get out more. Start with a visit to Antarctica. Wild and Intact!
Shows you how good things are, that liberals have nothing to worry about except imaginary things like CC and imaginary oppression.
“I was able to externalise my distress by painting the beautiful new epicormic leaves of rejuvenation.”
I’m appalled that he’s using all these horrible events to further his economic advantage, even if it’s just a lame copy of van gogh’s work. I’m appalled he’s using a newspaper article to try to point people to his paintings (even if they’re bad van gogh knockoffs) for his economic advantage so he can earn and consume more.
I looked at his so-called art on his web site..
Looks pretty ordinary, trite, and “prescriptive” to me. YUCK !
The myth of the Noble Savage still persists whereby the noble savage lived in harmony with nature. Total rubbish. Suggested reading: Steven Pinkers epic The Blank Slate, The Nobel Savage and the Ghost in the Machine.
The real problem is the lack of men who are strong INDIVIDUALISTS unafraid to think on their own two feet instead they want to be a part of the conformity sheep herd thus freeing themselves from decision making it is a form of a cowardly act that is hurting all of us.
I have now realised that I have a grief disorder which has arisen slowly over the past few decades and is likely to remain prolonged.
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Sounds as though somebody has a difficult time thinking critically and looking objectively at the world around him.
Admitting to a disorder demonstrates a need for him to make an appointment with a psychologist ASAP. Going through life with a grief disorder is no way to live.
Climate grief? More like Climate Hysteria. They could take Ambien, or Prozac. Or they could JUST STOP IT!
Eric says… “So why expose you, the WUWT audience, to yet more public climate grief?”
To give us a good laugh ??
That is certainly what I was doing while reading this dolt’s comments.
And as if the Guardian are not dystopian enough, what about
https://www.energylivenews.com/2023/07/11/uk-explores-locational-pricing-to-green-grid-and-lower-energy-bills/
It seems the green blob will now make you love renewables and surround your local community in them, or, you’ll pay more
As I’ve said before, I believe The Guardian, the BBC, the CBC and a variety of other leftist media outlets are having a contest to see which of them can disseminate more climate alarmist propaganda. WUWT needs to keep track and post a daily list of standings just as is done for the various sports leagues.
Here is the ‘tell’: David is so full of himself. This is a sophomoric ploy to vaingloriously display his oh so intellectual artwork (save obvious attempts to plagiarize Van Gogh skies and flowers). Just in case we didn’t get it, he let’s us in on his mind’s alignment with the innermost thoughts of the native people. An empty vessel without self-awareness showcased in a fallen news organ.
Same a happened in nearby NZ. The arrival of the first humans, Maori came much later than Australia and the evidence of increased fire over larger areas is clear from the presence of charcoal which can be dated not long after.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/fire-and-agriculture/page-1
“and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet”
sheesh- what a wuss!