As a kid I liked to play with microscopes. My favourite thing to study was drops of water from dirty ponds and puddles. I was amazed at the many tiny creatures that could be found in a single drop. There were little oval-shaped protozoa that zoomed across my field of view, various wormlike organisms with different methods of movement, things that looked like flowers that sucked water in and squirted it out again and numerous other creatures. Mostly they were translucent. You could see inside their bodies, watching the mysterious structures in there moving and pulsating. It was spellbinding to me.
I couldn’t help but notice as I watched that the droplet in which they lived was slowly drying up. The warmth of the light I was using to view the creatures evaporated this minute ocean which shrank from the edges and grew ever smaller, a process that speeded up as it went. The more mobile creatures naturally moved to the centre where there was still plenty of water to move around in, but the less mobile ones were caught on the drying edges and died there.
Later, when I started using little square glass slide covers to squash the droplet flat (mostly to assist in focusing) the drying process took much longer, but the demise of the droplet community was no less inevitable. What has stayed with me all these years is the image of those creatures in the still-viable centre, swimming around oblivious to the carnage at the droplet’s edges, just millimetres away. They did what their DNA had programmed them to do – swam and fed – until the looming new circumstances made those activities impossible and all they had left to do was die.
It’s often struck me as a metaphor. Here’s me, enjoying life and carrying on as usual in a world where tremendous changes are making things very hard for a great many other beings. Just this week I read an article by a woman in Canada, describing the horror of this year’s forest fire season: the crazy heat and and the dense smoke that makes a mask necessary outdoors. Then I read a piece by a woman in Lapland, north Sweden, where temperatures have been hitting 36 degrees Celsius. Next I read how melting arctic permafrost is liberating ancient methane – a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – and how this methane is reacting with deeply buried minerals to produce bright orange acid leachates that are destroying life in northern rivers and bringing important fisheries to an end. Another writer noted the collapse of Himalayan glaciers, the waters from which are creating tens of thousands of temporary high-altitude meltwater dams which, when they collapse, wash away villages, farms and hydroelectric plants, usually with no warning at all.
No doubt you’ve been following the news of the deadly heatwave that has cost thousands of lives in Europe over the past month or so. Heat intense enough to buckle tramlines. Hot enough to warm rivers to the point where their waters are too warm – under current environmental laws – to be used for cooling nuclear reactors, which are being shut down as a result.
Meanwhile, in Australia, governments are bending over backwards to help fossil fuel companies expand mines and exports, throwing subsidies and tax breaks at global corporations. In the Hunter Valley, where I live, a joint venture between Chinese Yancoal and the notorious Swiss-based enviro-vandal Glencore is applying for what will be the biggest coalmine ever approved under NSW planning law. The ruin of the valley and the river will be more or less complete, and the addition of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases to the global load over the mine’s 20 year life will make the prospects of recovery from our present climate disaster even more remote than it already is. Nevertheless I have little doubt the government will ensure the approval.
And our governments are bending over even more, it seems, for the corporations clamouring to build more and more data centres to suck up scarce water, to burn still more energy and to pump more grime into the air. It’s like a death wish.
Apart from protozoa under a microscope, other images that sometimes haunt me are those astonishing views of the surface of Mars, transmitted back to Earth by the robotic probe Perseverance. Like the now-familiar image of Earth from space, these pictures of Mars are views that no other generation of humans can ever have seen. The Martian surface scenes haunt me because they feel so familiar. Every time I’m in some barren rocky place, on some bare stone-littered roadway, I think of the dead planet Mars and it gives me a kind of existential chill. I wonder if that is where we are heading. Are those idiots who say the future of humanity lies on Mars right, but in a perverse way?
Honestly, there are days when I feel like asking the mega-corporations and their puny puppet governments to just get it over with. Hurry up and achieve your goal, which seems to be to turn Earth into a lifeless rock. Save us the stress of imagining we might be able to stop you. But then I realise that they are going as fast as they can, so it would be – like this blog post – a pointless rhetorical exercise.
