Jesse

Rowan

Bushfire Survivor, Gilmore, New South Wales

Six months after the Clyde Mountain bushfire raced towards our Malua Bay home, I still wake up in the middle of the night. Initially it was a jolt of worry about my family's safety, thinking that bushfires are still burning nearby. Now it's a sense of despair about the dangerous future ahead.

On New Year's Eve we had a detailed fire plan, so we stayed to defend our home. With our fire hoses joined together, we managed to keep the fire away. But the terror of watching the flames appear over the ridge, knowing the fire brigade was elsewhere and our communications were cut, remains.

It was an ordeal that stretched over many days and nights, waking every hour to check that the flames in the bush weren't coming closer. Several times, my partner and I had to drag the fire hoses down to the forest to bring the flames back under control.

In the following days, I drove around our community taking photos of the devastation before it was cleaned up. I wanted people to see what had happened to us.

In between taking photos, I'd sit in my hot car and desperately scroll through the news on my phone, hoping I'd see, at last, an announcement that the federal government would finally take meaningful action on climate change.

I saw plenty of headlines from former fire chiefs, scientists, and other experts saying that climate change had fuelled the unprecedented bushfire conditions, and digging up and burning fossil fuels like coal and gas was making it worse.

Even after so many people and animals have died, and thousands of homes have been destroyed, we are not seeing enough action to tackle the root cause of rising bushfire danger.

But the announcement from the federal government never came. Instead, they excused Australia's emissions as too small to matter - when in reality, we are a major polluter and fossil fuel exporter - and have since waved through new coal and gas projects like the Adani mine and a gas facility in Narrabri, to name just two.

Just last week (June 2020), the NSW government released its Strategic Statement on Coal Exploration and Mining that greenlights more coal expansion and mining. We're greenlighting the destruction of our own communities at the hands of climate change.

This lack of leadership fuels a sense of anger and powerlessness, and I feel so abandoned by the people who are supposedly elected to protect everyday Australians. While my family survived the New Year's Eve fire, a safe future feels out of reach, as long as our elected officials knowingly allow climate change to worsen.

We've been through this once before, when we were caught up in the 2003 Canberra firestorm. Fleeing through the flames with my babies, then 10 months and five years old, while my partner stayed and defended our home left me with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Australia's emissions from producing and burning fossil fuels have increased since then.

We moved to Malua Bay three years after the Canberra fire, in search of green nature spaces for our children. There I joined the local Rural Fire Brigade to feel safer and more prepared for bushfires. I did what I could, but had to stop active duty after a spotted gum tree almost fell on me during a hazard-reduction burn - the third time this had happened.

Unable to face the thought of my kids, then in primary school, losing their mother on the fireground, I became inactive. They're young adults now, and they feel pessimism that the federal government will act credibly on climate change. My younger son even quit school recently, seeing no point in learning for a future that looks scary due to climate change. What can I even tell him, given the leadership failure that surrounds us?

I want my children, and future generations, to know that I tried my hardest to fight for their future.

From marching in the streets to going to a firefront with hose in hand, to delivering handwritten letters to my local politicians, to practising how to defend our home, I have done everything I can. I will continue to do so along with thousands of other Australians dreading worsening future fire seasons.

Despite my trauma and exhaustion, I try to hold on to "active hope". It helps to know that every day, more Australians are calling for climate action, and that there are proven solutions to bring down emissions while invigorating our economy.

These include quickly scaling up large-scale renewable energy and battery storage, and ecosystem restoration through land rehabilitation and reforestation. We know what needs to be done; our safety depends on our local, state and federal governments actually doing these things, and fast.

Right now, we have a unique chance to solve two crises at once. Both the post-COVID-19 economic downturn and the climate crisis could be tackled by investing in low-carbon solutions. We can create thousands of safe, stable jobs in these sunrise industries, revitalise regional Australia, and lock in a safer future for our children and grandchildren.

Politicians absolutely cannot afford to waste this opportunity by waving through more fossil fuels, which will make bushfires even worse while exposing us to economic shocks as global demand for fossil fuels declines.

As climate change cranks up the fire danger, they are our front line. They're holding a hose, and it has water in it. They just need to turn it on.