Richard Flanagan - 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”.
“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.
I was shocked. I had
understood that climate change’s effects on Tasmania would be significant but
not disastrous; the changes mitigated by Tasmania being surrounded by seas that
were not heating as quickly as others: the island’s west would get wetter, the
east a little warmer and drier, but compared to much of the world it didn’t
seem catastrophic... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/05/tasmania-is-burning-the-climate-disaster-future-has-arrived-while-those-in-power-laugh-at-us