As a high school teacher, I experience first had the climate anxiety. After the Black Summer, I consoled so many students who struggled to come to terms with what they saw happen in our state.
Blackwood, SA
The Black Summer bushfires had a devastating impact all throughout South Australia. Specifically, Kangaroo Island was almost decimated; nearly half of the island was burnt- if it gets any more severe, the entire animal presence on the island could be wiped out. Speaking to locals when we visited was heartbreaking; wineries couldn’t use any of the grapes they were growing that year – if these become yearly events, it won’t be sustainable to run a vineyard. Locals were terrified about the cost to recover; if it weren’t for all of the government incentives (which we can’t keep offering for every natural disaster), Kangaroo Island wouldn’t have had the tourism to recover. It wasn’t a pretty site to visit that year; it was a local duty to keep the economy alive. Not sustainable.
My family, who live in Port Vincent on the Yorke Peninsula, had soot appearing on their front porch for weeks, gradually settling after the intense fires hundreds of Kilometres away on Kangaroo Island. It was a tangible reminder of the devastation, not to mention the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from those trees burning, undoing all of the carbon reduction South Australia has achieved as a state. Carbon credits and carbon capture become insults to us every day Australians when hectares can be decimated in a matter of days.
As a high school teacher, I experience first had the climate anxiety. After the Black Summer, I consoled so many students who struggled to come to terms with what they saw happen in our state. Students wrote stories and articles about the people whose lives were lost as they were caught in the bushfires. The loss of human lives is very real, very frightening and unacceptable. These teenagers are petrified of the future they are growing up to inherit and heartbroken that their perspective is not considered by our politicians with their heads in the sand; these children know that they are inheriting a world with a more unpredictable climate and more frequent loss. It is crushing their and my spirit.
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As a young person who has little following over social media and lives in a small community it is hard to feel like we are actually making a difference with our small changes.
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