Karl Puschmann: This week the asteroid hit. We need to look up

Leonardo DiCaprio in the environmental satire Don't Look Up, streaming on Netflix.

This week the asteroid hit. Some people had seen it coming. Tried to warn us. A small portion of people listened and began separating their plastics and their paper and drinking out of cardboard straws. A much larger group sneered and labelled them as “green crazies” or the “loony left” or “woke” before hate-tweeting at a 16-year-old girl who had rightly pointed out that humanity had the globe by the short and curlies and was increasingly crushing the life out of it.

Our asteroid was measured in millimetres. 260mm in Albany. 150mm in the city. Doesn’t sound like much. The devastation these millimetres caused will take years to resettle, rebuild and reimburse.

It began with a cancelled concert. A spot of rain wasn’t going to stop fans from heading to Mt Smart. But it was going to stop the show. As the rain pounded down on the city like millions of tiny fists, dear old Elton John was forced to call off his gig at the last minute, leaving tens of thousands of punters to flood out of the stadium and into the increasingly flooded streets.

Flooding at Elton John concert on January 27, 2023. The concert was cancelled following heavy rainfall. Photo / Tanya Young

As Auckland began to resemble Atlantis, the mayor was quick to address what he described as “the main issue”.

“We need the rain to stop,” he said displaying all of the wisdom, business nous and sharp thinking that saw him elected last year.

Unfortunately for Auckland, he was not as quick to declare a State of Emergency. The rain fell and fell and people lost their houses, their possessions, and even their lives and the rain just kept falling. When pressed the next day by media drongos as to why it took so many hours before this obvious call was made, this old, wet fart of a mayor was quick to display true boardroom leadership by blaming as many other people and agencies as he could.

Twitter users have reacted to Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s performance at the flood press conference. Photo / Supplied

But even if Auckland had an effective mayor, one armed with a bucket and reassurance rather than a tennis racquet and an unpleasant demeanour, how much different would things have been? We needed the rain to stop. And still, it persisted.

Until recently, I’d lived in Auckland all my life, bar the obligatory couple of years OE. I’ve never seen anything like what I’ve seen in my hometown this week. The images have been horrifying and surreal. They have, I dearly hope, been a wake-up call.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about last year’s satirical film Don’t Look Up. It starred Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as nerdy scientists who discover an asteroid comparable to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs barrelling straight towards Earth. They try to alert the world of the incoming catastrophe but are laughed at and called downers. Instead of banding together in the face of certain doom, humanity divides. “Don’t look up” becomes the slogan used to discredit them and their science. And the asteroid continues to hurtle closer and closer.

Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio star in Don't Look Up.

This Netflix film is not exactly subtle in its themes and metaphors. I enjoyed it and think it’s worth a watch, but many critics didn’t. It was accused of being heavy-handed and preachy. I think it was purposefully obvious. When you read about yet another disastrous “One in 100-year event” happening someplace in the world or find yourself wading through waist-level water in your lounge you can’t afford to be subtle in your messaging.

So, let’s cut the subtleties completely. Climate change is real. It’s happening at an accelerated pace. All you have to do is look at Auckland, Northland, the Coromandel and the Bay of Plenty right now. Having a whole summer’s worth of rain dumped on your head in a single day is not normal. It’s insane. We are f***ing up the planet we live on and we need to do something other than having cardboard tags on our single-use plastic bread bags and taking out our overflowing recycling bins once a fortnight.

Slavko Snjegota outside his Belmont home after flooding hit Auckland. Photo / Brett Phibbs

We need action. We need climate change deniers to go the way of the dinosaurs because honestly, that’s what they are. We need the focus, emphasis and expectation to shift off us little people trying to save the world with our reusable coffee cups and onto the big businesses causing irreparable damage on an industrial scale every day. We need bakeries, sushi joints and takeaways to stop using plastic containers. We need shops to dramatically rein in their waste. We need to start listening to the experts. We need real, meaningful change. We need to look up. And we need to do all of that now.

Climate change is not a right or left issue. This is an issue of survival. Global warming is an equal opportunity destroyer. Smug ideology will not save you.

This week the asteroid hit. The damage and destruction were unfathomable. When the next one hits we may not be so lucky.