By Kate Grenville
Ten years ago I nearly made headlines for all the wrong reasons. I was having morning coffee with a group of people who, like me, were regular researchers at the National Library. There, in the sedate surroundings of the Book Plate Cafe, the conversation turned to climate change. It quickly became clear that one of the group was a denier, writing a book proving climate scientists were all wrong. I said my piece – something about coal being the ultimate carbon capture and storage – and he turned on me a look of the most supreme contempt. Oh, he said, or snarled, Oh, you’re a believer!
Suddenly, the two of us were on our feet. I think a chair might have gone clattering to the floor. I’ve never made a fist and hit anyone in my life, but by golly, I came close at that moment.
I’m ashamed to say that what stopped me wasn’t the wrongness of physical violence as a response to a difference of opinion. It was the headline I suddenly pictured: Author Assaults Elderly Researcher.
What I should have done, of course, was just say yes, and I’m a believer in gravity too. Touché!
So, you could say I’ve been an activist – though not a very effective one – for climate change for a long time. I’ve done the rooftop panels, gone on the marches, and handed out the how-to-vote cards.
Toilet paper was stripped from the shelves early in the pandemic.Credit:Steven Siewert
But until recently it was a head thing, not a heart thing. I could see the logic of what would happen if we uncaptured all that carbon by burning coal, and like everyone else, I could see the droughts, the fires, the floods. But for all the years of my life until recently, the grim future of a world of runaway climate change was a bit unreal. Like most of us, I think, my ability to imagine the future didn’t go much beyond my own possible lifespan. I could believe I’d die, but what I couldn’t truly picture – not really – was a world without me in it.
When my grandson was born two years ago I did some casual sums. With luck, I’ll be around, even if doddery, until he’s 10 or 12. But I mightn’t know him as a teenager, and I certainly won’t know him as a young man. That reality gave me a nasty hollow feeling. But the next thought took me by surprise: yes, I’ll die, but he and all his playmates will still be here, getting on with their lives. Believe it or not, Kate, the world will go on without you.
From the perspective of old age, I find a certain bittersweet comfort in that. I’ll come to an end, but the world I’ve loved so much will go on, and others will have their turn at life, the way I did. That includes my children and grandchildren, of course. But I’d feel the same way if I’d given no hostages to the future. It’s not about my own little clutch of genes or the love I have for those particular young folk. It’s about everyone’s children, and everyone’s beautiful one-off miracle of a planet Earth.
Novelist Kate Grenville.Credit:Leah Jing McIntosh
Scientists have been warning us for decades about the physical aspects of a future without climate action, and in the last two years, we’ve had a kind of sampler of what to expect: drought, fires, floods. Unprecedented is a word that now trips off everyone’s tongue. It’s also becoming clear just how unevenly climate change will damage lives so that the privileged and the lucky will be able to protect themselves for longer than others without resources.
Now the pandemic has shown us another side of that future: how we’re going to behave. The hoarding, the rejection of the idea of community, the fisticuffs in the supermarket aisle over the last roll of toilet paper: they’re like a small-scale model of what lies ahead. What we’ve learnt over the last two years is how little it takes for people to behave badly. When natural systems go awry, human behaviour quickly follows.
It’s the image of the breakdown of order – even more than the image of fires and floods – that fills me with horror for all those two-year-olds, and all the kids yet unborn. If the last roll of toilet paper is worth coming to blows over, what will happen when it’s about the last food, the last water?
In the face of that reality, what a feeble thing it seemed, to start a group called Writers for Climate Action. But there’s still time to pull back from climate disaster, and this was a chance to do something positive. The idea of the group is to have a public list of writers who support real action on climate change. The hope is that people – our readers – will be more inclined to do what they can for action if they know their favourite writers are doing it too.
Some 80 of Australia’s best-loved writers have put their names to an online list that includes Booker Prize winners, mass-market bestsellers, Young Adult favourites, and beloved children’s authors. Just a few of the names: John Coetzee, Mem Fox, Helen Garner, Toni Jordan, Andy Griffiths, Matthew Reilly, John Marsden, Di Morrissey. It’s an impressively high-powered and varied list, including writers from every niche of the literary ecosystem. (Check it out at writersforclimateaction.com).
Who knows, maybe that list tipped a few voters in the right direction. In any case, there’s hope in the air now for the first time in years. Hope for a new kind of politics: not a game – win or lose – but the reality: wickedly complicated problems that need nuanced answers. And hope for fast, effective action on the climate. It’s the message so many voters sent to Canberra. Let’s hope the politicians listen: after all, in three years’ time we’ll be speaking again.
Many of us on that list of writers are of an age where we can hope to avoid the most brutal effects of climate change. It’s not for ourselves that we’re hoping our collective voice might influence our readers, but for the people who’ll come after us, and for that gorgeous, fragile world out there.
Kate Grenville is an award-winning author whose books include The Secret River, A Room Made of Leaves and The Case Against Fragrance.
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