The New Year's Eve red sky in Victoria, Australia, coloured by wildfires burning. Photo / AP
The New Year's Eve red sky in Victoria, Australia, coloured by wildfires burning. Photo / AP
COMMENT:
It's hard to know how to greet this New Year; the usual rote phrases seem uncomfortably inappropriate when the sun is a ball of bloodshot orange hanging baneful in an ash-tinted sky.
A gravid date, 2020. Evocative of clear sight and clean values, yet neither is demonstrably present inthese tumultuous and sombre times.
Leaders who are guilty of the worst abuses of power, brokering their nation's security for personal gain; companies which falsify meaningful change, continuing to act with callous disregard behind greenwashed facades; whole peoples impoverished and brutalised, slaughtered and imprisoned, with no one seeming able to lift a finger to aid them.
Bruce Bisset: "Having never seriously thought I'd make it to my pension year, I now find myself wondering quite why I've bothered".
How is it we can see all that is wrong, yet do nothing to right it?
As unpalatable as the truth is, the sixth mass extinction event has begun, and the future looks incredibly bleak.
Yet even in these haze-darkened days, there is hope. For slowly, grudgingly, here in New Zealand we are beginning to take action.
In response to protest group Extinction Rebellion's call, around half of all local and regional councils declared a climate emergency last year; collectively their regions are home to more than 70 per cent of the country's population.
Central government has yet to embrace the idea, but at least managed to enact a bill that aims to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Yes, the legislation has serious flaws, not least a too generous timeframe and a softly-softly approach for agriculture, but it's a start.
Of course declaring emergency or aiming for net zero carbon is one thing; achieving meaningful outcomes quite another. And, as climate critics like to point out, New Zealand only emits a fraction of a percentage of total ghg's in global terms.
But a majority of countries are in the same "one per cent or less" club, yet collectively emit over half total global ghgs. So as part of a movement to reduce man's impact on the climate, what New Zealand does is as significant as most other nations.
Besides, size is no excuse. We're all responsible for the state of the planet, just as we're all needed to save it. Especially as it's the only one we've got.
However, the thing that gives me most heart and promises some happiness in the year ahead is the knowledge that, at last, a majority of my fellow Kiwis seem to be getting the message. That we are in trouble, and that we need to get serious about redressing our failures.
Indeed, on the back of robust, unequivocal, and all-but-unanimous scientific evidence, it would be fair to say a majority of the world's population now has come to that view.
What we as citizens need to do is find ways to strengthen the resolve and encourage the fortitude of our leaders in tackling the problem.
And a big part of that work is countering the "business as usual" spin certain industries and sectors put forward to attempt to downplay the crisis and minimise the reality of their effect on our future.
This decade is going to be a telling one. Unless we start to move with urgency to effect dramatic societal and system change, by 2030 the present troubles in Australia will become the norm world-wide.
And children born today will think it natural to wake up to a red sun.
