The End of Australia As We Know It

[marmar]

SYDNEY, Australia — In a country where there has always been more space than people, where the land and wildlife are cherished like a Picasso, nature is closing in. Fueled by climate change and the world’s refusal to address it, the fires that have burned across Australia are not just destroying lives, or turning forests as large as nations into ashen moonscapes.

They are also forcing Australians to imagine an entirely new way of life. When summer is feared. When air filters hum in homes that are bunkers, with kids kept indoors. When birdsong and the rustle of marsupials in the bush give way to an eerie, smoky silence.

“I am standing here a traveler from a new reality, a burning Australia,” Lynette Wallworth, an Australian filmmaker, told a crowd of international executives and politicians in Davos, Switzerland, last month. “What was feared and what was warned is no longer in our future, a topic for debate — it is here.”

“We have seen,” she added, “the unfolding wings of climate change.”

Like the fires, it’s a metaphor that lingers. What many of us have witnessed this fire season does feel alive, like a monstrous gathering force threatening to devour what we hold most dear on a continent that will grow only hotter, drier and more flammable as global temperatures rise. ........(more)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/world/australia/fires-climate-change.amp.html

[Pachamama]

1. Devastating what is happening in Australia and it's warning to the World

It is the Canary in the Coal Mine and there needs to be action now worldwide or it’s too late...

[marybourg]

2. "Where the land and wildlife are cherished"?

Puleeez. Shooting ‘roos out of car windows?

[SharonClark]

5. Agree. Destroying koala habitat with development.

Bringing animals into the country and then culling them because they overpopulated.

New Zealand's south island is worse - it's one big abattoir.

The US is right up there, too.

[MontanaMama]

3. I spent a month in Lilydale, Victoria.

The birdwatching was so wonderful. At sunrise and sunset flocks of cockatoos and parrots of every color would swarm over the hotel where I stayed...there was a wooded area next door and the trees were awash with the white cockatoos, red king parrots and pink galah’s...the noise was deafening and exhilarating the same time.

[CrispyQ]

4. Andrew Romanoff, who's vying to be the democratic challenger to Cory Gardner,

put out a 4 minute apocalyptic ad that he's been praised for and taken heat for. I haven't watched the entire thing, but the first 30 seconds are pretty powerful, narrated by a little girl, who lives in a bunker in Colorado, and she can't go outside to play because of poor air quality and extreme heat. (+120°F) She says she misses the sun most of all.

"Stop What You're Doing and Watch This": Intense Praise for Apocalypse-Themed Climate 2020 Campaign Ad
"It's a catastrophe of our own creation—but it doesn't have to end this way," says Andrew Romanoff, a Democratic hopeful for U.S. Senate running in Colorado.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/16/stop-what-youre-doing-and-watch-intense-praise-apocalypse-themed-climate-2020

Antarctica, and perhaps some northern regions as well, will become a refuge for the rich while the rest of us bake and drown.