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Here in the Australian capital of Canberra, it feels like the apocalypse has come. A national catastrophe is unfolding, with each day bringing new shocks. And we have yet to reach Australia’s usual peak fire season, which typically doesn’t arrive until late January.
The wildfires have been burning now for three months, across a landscape already parched by drought and through vegetation wilting from fierce heat waves. So far, more than 12 million acres (some 5 million hectares) have been reduced to ash, an area 10 times larger than the lands burnt by the 2018 California fires. Historian Bodie Ashton estimates that if the fire front were a straight line, it would stretch from Los Angeles to New York and back again with hundreds of kilometres left over.
The south coast of New South Wales, usually packed at this time of year with families on holiday, was evacuated last week as one town after another was razed. In Victoria, thousands were trapped on a fire-ringed peninsula; the navy had to be mobilised to rescue them by sea.
At least 25 people are dead at the time of writing, and the fires are expected to keep burning for weeks. Almost 2,000 homes have been consumed by flames, with more lost each day. We Australians always imagined climate refugees would arrive by boat from sinking Pacific islands; now we have thousands of internally displaced persons from our own home-grown climate change disaster.
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https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/letter-canberra
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