Will the Australian bushfires spark climate action?

Seeing the impacts of climate change on a screen is one thing. Experiencing its impacts is another.

If the devastating spate of these bush fires showed one thing, it is that to survive the looming impacts of climate change disasters, we must move past responding after-the-fact. We must integrate with the reality of what’s happening on the ground.

The heating climate is an ominous sign for the future of our planet — another sign that climate change is a global problem requiring urgent action and adaption. As one of the highest carbon emission releasing countries, Australia will likely keep getting hotter, and bush fires only intensify.

Both extremes of anger and inertia are being felt across the globe with a lack of movement on climate change policies. With technology, better systems are possible and the tools we use to communicate around it position us.

The difference between mediated and direct experience matters in the climate change conversation. Next door in New Zealand, when the windswept smoke turned our skies a murky yellow, the world changed in a very real way around us. Watching the fires on a screen was scary enough, but stepping out into the direct experience of those overcast skies surrounding us was even closer to home.

The interconnected social media world is fuelled by instant global commentary, making it both easier to be involved in supportive communities but also — scarily — to become isolated in echo chambers where the lives of others matter less. In tracking and shaping our social efforts, social media’s endless flow of associative linking in social media is designed to keep us engaged but not to encourage us to act. Conversations spread fast and, while physically separate, marginalised groups or those with less platform will gain less traction, and counter ideas — ones not based in science — may take over.

For all the speed of social media, its dulled plastic and glass is only an imitation of the sensory awareness that comes with actual experience.

Here in New Zealand, as the unsettling muted tones dissipated, many of us blinked and returned once again and ever as willingly to the reassuring blues and greys and greens. But, for others, when the sepia hue hit our skies, we opened our eyes that little bit more to a changing world. And we did so that little bit more unsettled; with a new sense of concern that hopefully will this time stick.