The conversations we need

It’s a difficult thing, being a modestly well-informed global citizen these days. Wars and financial upheaval, the bizarre politics of other nations, cyclones, floods and fires: how does a body handle all the bad news? Short of shutting down the radio, TV and YouTube entirely, how does a person come to terms with the quiet dread that some things are changing for the worse?

2024 was the warmest year in the last 125,000; the drop in reflectivity in the last decade means the planet is holding more heat; the Antarctic ice sheet is getting smaller. 1.5C is here now, 2C a certainty, 3C highly likely, and sooner than we care to think.

We can’t keep living the way we are living, but here we are, busily consuming the planet, and that’s our normal lives here in Australia, at least for most of us. Where to put the inconvenient truth that the promise of progress is emptying out, that were feeling unhappy and lonely, that science can’t keep the world green, that our politics avoids the hard questions, that money always wants even more?

For the last ten years, I’ve been part of an environmental philosophy reading group. We’ve been looking for ways of understanding the world and our place in it that can underpin a wise and respectful relationship with the natural world.  Last year, we read books on water and rivers. This year, we’ve just finished ‘Dreaming Ecology’, by Deborah Rose Bird, an anthropologist who lived with the indigenous peoples of the Northern Territory’s Victoria River, sitting and walking with her teachers, absorbing the way they understood the world around them.  (Get the pdf at ANU Press)

It’s an accessible and nuanced account of a way of living locally. After the last chapter, it crystalised for me: 'this might be how we will live, locally.' And I thought of Joe Brewer, and went and listened to some of his youtube videos.

And what to read next? I'd read 'At Work in the Ruins' 9 months ago, and it had stayed with me. I wanted to read it again, so I pitched the idea to our group. My brother was the same: had read it, wanted to read it again, and talk about it. So that's what we're doing.

Dougald Hine went from speaking out about climate change to deciding one day that he just couldn’t say yes to the next invitation to sit on another panel at another climate change conference. ‘At Work in the Ruins’ is his story of how he reached that moment. ‘Solving ‘the problem of climate change’ suddenly seemed a dead end, only with science as the source of solutions. He started looking for another path.

As a modestly aware citizen of this planet, I'm interested in his decision, How do you live with the awful knowledge that our future is going to be a lot different to our past?

One way I handle that tension is to take a walk into Barrm Birrm, to see how things are. I go as fully credentialled BB weeder, grubbing out the occasional weed as I go and noting what will need attention with tools I don't have on me. I'm also following the season in this bit of bushland. How is the cinnamon wattle coming along? (I can't wait for the flowering!)

These walks keep me sane, but so too does sitting down for a close read of someone like Hine, and our reading group gives me a reason to put aside the time to read our chosen text. Then once a month, I get to talk with people who have similar questions and interests. I’m always up for the challenge of putting into words the sense I made of the text, but recently I've become very interested in the different things we have each heard in what we have read.

We don’t find solutions - mostly we simply get to appreciate more comprehensively the trouble we’re in and its roots in the way we think and feel and value the natural world. But it’s a relief to speak with people who don’t run from that.

It’s one of the conversations I need, another way to say alive to our strange times.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare