We should not have to live in fear of bushfires. It is becoming all year round now, the possibility of losing our home and our life in a bushfire.
Katoomba, NSW
I live in Katoomba in the Upper Blue Mountains, NSW. Every year we are anxious about bush fire season and we have evacuated from our home on at least two occasions. Once to friends living in Sydney and once (Xmas 2019) to a hotel that was pet friendly in Sydney. We stayed there 4 days to avoid severe conditions and fear of going up in flames along with our house. Our 1/2 acre garden backs onto bushland. It is getting worse. Climate change is an emergency. We have so little time left. Do something.
We ourselves are acutely aware of climate change and have changed our power source to all electric, with solar panels and a Tesla battery. Our water is electric as is our stove top and oven. We spent a fortune converting from gas to electric. Please help people who wish to change to solar to do so. Not everyone has the money to spare and with some people renting, landlords need help to do the right thing too. We should not have to live in fear of bushfires. It is becoming all year round now, the possibility of losing our home and our life in a bushfire. We cannot afford the cost of living anywhere else.
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We have spent a summer trapped in our home with heatwave after heatwave hitting our city in the longest and hottest summer of my lifetime (and indeed the city’s lifetime). I have had to stop my three year old son playing outside day after day and we have all had to stay in the same room as it is the only air conditioned one. Summer used to be a time of fun, of outdoor barbecues for dinner, of freedom. Now it has a feeling of containment and dread. My job requires me to confront climate issues and victims of bushfire and other disasters and their experiences and the flood of climate information leave me feeling deep grief, distress and helplessness. My little son loves animals passionately and i dread the day I will have to tell him about climate change and about how so many of the creatures that inspire him are threatened by mankind’s very existence. I fear he will grow into an adult in a time of increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, in a country weakened economically and fragmented socially by these disasters. That by the time he grows up the Great Barrier Reef we describe to him will be dead and gone. Having him despite my fear for his future was an act of hope and defiance, but that hope is hard to maintain when our governments will seemingly not act to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with renewables with the speed that will give my beautiful child the bright future he deserves. I hope and pray that this case changes the situation. And I thank these elders for bringing this action.
Read my storyPeople all across Australia are being harmed by climate change. These are some of their stories.
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