For the love of trees

Dear readers, I’ve been absent for a long while again. I think like many people I know, most things felt just too trivial to post about over quite a period this summer as our country felt the impacts of climate change through widespread severe drought, low rainfall, above average temeratures, and then–overwhelming bushfire. I wrote this post at the end of December with a broken heart and evidently didn’t post it. Here it is now.

The current period in this dear land brings to mind fiddling while Rome burns. Instead of violin playing, we have governments authorising new oil, gas and coal mining over the protests of First Nations, scientists and activists while so much of this continent is on fire.

As summer really begins here, with temperature records already broken several times (in our city, 46C) I am like most people I know–worrying for those who have already lost so much; thinking of those living now in fear; full of gratitude and awe for those fighting the fires. We have friends who have already defended their homes, others watching and waiting and ready to leave, still others evacuated from catastrophic fire danger zones. My friends are grieving one of those who has died, someone I did not personally know. Other friends are grieving the loss of landscapes in which they spent years of backbreaking bush regeneration work.

In a time of such heartbreak, I offer the love of trees.