By June 2020 Siberia was engulfed in wild fires. In August California's mega fires still featured as major news, while a third of Bangladesh lay under water. People still lived in these places when you were 3.
Only the climate scientists seemed to understand abrupt climate change and most of them were too afraid to speak of it. The feedback loops, most frighteningly the Arctic methane belching out of melting permafrost, were accelerating the chaos.
But we in the climate movement weren't about to sit by. We were a tiny bunch of ragtag lawbreakers in 2021 but as the year progressed our numbers swelled until people seemed to finally wake up. I can't put my finger on it. All that blockading of coal, boarding of oil rigs, all those marches and strikes by Greta Thunberg and others. When the lawyers and academics finally got on board, a motivated population were ready to fight for their future. We started moving, thinking and acting more like a swarm than a disparate bunch of self-centred consumers. The corporations were losing.
The last coal mine closed a year later. Everyone helped as farmers transformed to regenerative ways of making a living from the land. A liveable income was available to all and despite cries from the libertarians we didn't all sit home watching Netflix. We wanted to work and learn and be part of the great transformation to save our future. We got smart. City kids learned to plant potatoes, farmers learned to surf. City councils handed their budgets to citizens' assemblies. Emissions slowly, slowly began moving downward. Top of everyone's list was fairness and Ardern's biggest legacy, kindness.
We stopped flying. In between weather events we explored a tourist-free Aotearoa by electric train or charging our shared EVs all the way from Cape Reinga to Stewart Island.
My climate grief has never left me. I grieve daily for the creatures lost, for the humans dying in unbearable heat and 400km/h cyclones.
You will never know the old world in which I gashed my leg on living coral, but I can say with pride that I did my best to help save this one, a fairer, harsher, but liveable world, for you.
Rosemary Penwarden is a Whanganui born and bred grandmother now living on approximately 4ha of food forest and regenerating bush near Dunedin. She is a member of Coal Action Network Aotearoa and other climate activist groups.
