If I were a columnist for the New York Times (which I’m not) I’d have been proud as pudding to write as well as Australian Lisa Pryor did today:

“The summer barbecue talk was all cognitive dissonance. “Aren’t the fires terrible? And so many animals lost; it’s heartbreaking. We need to do more about climate change. But anyway, how was your trip to Japan? We are thinking of taking the kids next year — was the snow OK?” Conversations of a country driven off a cliff, suspended in the air for one moment before the fall”.

This is definitely a thing.

After the bushfires, smoke, military evacuations of tourists on beaches:

“Then came the floods and the heaviest rainfall in 30 years. Rain blew sideways, and the house creaked. We carted buckets in the opposite direction, bailing out our small lawn as it drowned in several inches of water. And it struck me that this — a sudden and opposite problem after months of drought — illustrated the impossibility of simply “adapting” to climate change".

“How do you adapt when the changes coming are not simply new patterns but the very loss of a predictable pattern? How do you adapt to chaos? How do you affordably prepare a home simultaneously for drought, wind, rain, smoke, dust, fire, blackouts, rising sea levels, falling trees, floods, hail and record-breaking temperatures?”

Adaption is a slimy word. One which was floating in the air at a suburban Columbus Coffee corner table meet-up this afternoon in Auckland between three (also slimy) political operatives that I eavesdropped on. They were brainstorming around the lack of scientific consensus and other nonsense.

Tools.

But I digress. Back to more coherent Lisa:

“So far, our national government has shown itself to be unequal to the task of taking climate change seriously. Its failures have revealed glimpses of the worst flaws of our national character, if such a thing exists: the stolid selfishness of my money, my holiday, my family, my right to burn coal. We need to feel international pressure to do more, and we deserve consequences for not doing as much as we should”.

To be fair, these seem to be planet-wide flaws.

For anyone wanted to feel personally targeted today (including yours truly), here’s her paragraph to you:

“While we are fighting for political action, we also need to ask ourselves hard questions as individuals and communities. The question I have been asking myself is, what does it matter that I accept the science of climate change if I continue to live my life as if climate change were a hoax? Who cares how many people accept the data if we are still consuming, traveling, investing, eating, dressing, voting and planning for the future as if global warming were imaginary?”

That hits home like a smack to the face, doesn’t it?

Since the bushfires Lisa has started using recovered shower and washing machine water to water the garden, composting, challenging herself to only buy second-hand clothes, and looking for more ethical places to invest retirement funds.

Of course, it’ll take more than that, but owning the problem is a useful initial step before moving on to greater things—like incessantly pestering the pushers of the growth-driven planet-destroying CO2-generating horror show we call modern life.

Meanwhile, a whiff of civil disobedience is in the air, tucked in there between the CO2 molecules.

Can you smell it?

[Image source: S. H. Chambers]