Scott Morrison is trying to scare people about economic policy but seems
blithely unaware people are already scared – about climate change
Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us
As I write this, fire is 500 metres from the largest King Billy pine forest in the world on Mt Bobs, an ancient forest that dates back to the last Ice Age and has trees over 1,000 years old. Fire has broached the boundaries of Mt Field national park with its glorious alpine vegetation, unlike anything on the planet. Fire laps at the edges of Federation Peak, Australia’s grandest mountain, and around the base of Mt Anne with its exquisite rainforest and alpine gardens. Fire laps at the border of the Walls of Jerusalem national park with its labyrinthine landscapes of tarns and iconic stands of ancient pencil pine and its beautiful alpine landscape, ecosystems described by their most eminent scholar, the ecologist Prof Jamie Kirkpatrick, as “like the vision of a Japanese garden made more complex, and developed in paradise, in amongst this gothic scenery”.
Scott Morrison sits in parliament with a lump of coal during Question Time
in February 2017. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
You have plants that look like rocks – green rocks – and these plants
have different colours in complicated mosaics: red-green, blue-green,
yellow-green, all together. It’s an overwhelming sensual experience
really.”
Five years ago I was contacted by a stranger, Prof Peter Davies, an
eminent water scientist. He wanted to meet because he had news he thought
would interest me. The night we met Davies told me that the south-west
of Tasmania – the island’s vast, uninhabited and globally unique wildland, the
heart of its world heritage area – was dying. The iconic habitats of
rainforest, button grass plains, and heathlands had begun to vanish
because of climate change.
LEARN MORE
CLIMATE CHANGE STRIKES
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