I can still hope…

After a year of being on the road, I can tell you that our country is full of awe and wonder. There have been many times, I have shed tears over the beauty of a place, crying with gratitude and thankfulness that I have been privileged to be able to experience these moments.

But there are times and places that I was weighted down with agony. The devastation of some places has brought me to my knees. My son asked me a few days ago, mum why have you not written about it, why haven’t you told anyone about it. He has created a page for his own writing, and he was determined share his voice, the passion for our planet sitting innocently alongside his list of favourite websites (my business page and Sam’s business page), and his latest electronics project.

We are travelling across the country and everything is burning. All the beauty that we have seen has been marred by black smoke rising or the remains of blackened tree trunks. On our travels we have also experienced floods in NSW, snorkeling reefs full of bleached corals, seen forests slowly being killed by rising underground salt lakes, witnessed logging in areas where once old growth forests stood proud and strong, joined concerts to save the Kimberley’s that are threatened by fracking, watched miles and miles and miles of agricultural land pass us travelling in our (sadly, diesel powered) car.

When I sat dipping my feet into the waters of the Ningaloo Reef, I wondered if my children were part of the last generation that would ever get to experience something so beautiful.

In 2020, human made mass exceeded Earth’s total biomass. I had to research it further – surely it couldn’t be true. But devastatingly it is – human-made things now outweigh plants and all other living things - from bacteria to whales. By itself, the mass of plastic is double that of animals.

As a family, we are talking about the book Humanity’s Moment by Joelle Gergis – lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, who heartbreaking says, ‘It’s extraordinary to realise that we are witnessing the great unravelling; the beginning of the end of things.’

She also says ‘even if it was geophysically possible to achieve the most ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5%, we will still see the destruction of 70 – 90% of coral reefs that exist today. With 2% of warming, 99% of tropical coral reefs disappear.’

I realised that my fears, of my children being one of the last generations of seeing the beauty of the Ningaloo or Great Barrier reef, is founded.

While I sit here with a heavy heart, thinking about all the human-made ‘stuff’ we have surrounded ourselves with and strived for in our lives. Of our disconnection from our natural environment and how much we have moved away from the indigenous model of caring for our land. I have been learning that this is more than treating nature as a lifeline that provides us with shelter, food, water, and clean air, but as an intimate or even a family-like relationship. If we thought of trees as part of our extended family, would we be as quick to cut them down?

Part of me harbours a hope that it’s not too late. Surely, it can’t be too late to save the reefs? But we all need to be all in right now. I can still hope.