I used to work as a pool lifeguard. So when I hear that the Wilson River in Lismore peaked above fourteen metres during the recent catastrophic floods, I think of the ten metre diving tower, above the five metre pool. It’s an unfathomable amount of floodwater. Alongside many others this week, while grieving the loss of life and property in many flood zones across New South Wales and Queensland, I am left wondering: how can we live in this climate changed world?
Confronted with another socio-ecological crisis, Australia has recently moved from policies that aim at suppressing or eliminating the virus to “learning to live with COVID”. At its heart this phrase signals the recognition that, while we can take measures to manage our lives in this pandemic, the virus exceeds our control. It demonstrates a certain humility towards the non-human world that has become all too rare in our time. It also contains a hint of determination — the sense that, despite our lack of control, we must not give in.
This is in marked contrast to the pervasive climate denial that so many of our political representatives continue to peddle. We are told that the changing climate won’t really affect us, because even if climate change is real, we’ll handle it. Business as usual will insulate and insure us against anything that the climate system could throw at us.
How arrogant such sentiments sound in the face of fourteen metres of flood water! Residents of Lismore, along with many others along Australia’s east coast and those still trying to recover from the Black Summer bushfires, know that “business as usual” offers no insurance (in any sense of the word) against the ravages of climate change. The multiple and traumatic forms of loss — of life, of loved ones, of home, of place, of community, of livelihood, of identity, of security, of a future — are ones from which we cannot (fully) “rebuild” or “recover”.
As we have been forcefully reminded over the past two years, human beings cannot control the world, and we cannot escape climate change. In its many manifestations, it is seeping into our homes, our lives, and our bodies. These are the lessons that the climate crisis is teaching us.
So could — or should — we “learn to live with climate change”?
Notwithstanding the hint of humble determination contained in the notion of “learning to live with COVID”, this phrase has also been used to victimise and then victim-blame those whose bodies and lives don’t fit the mould provided by the logic of aspirational capitalism. “Learning to live with COVID” fits all too easily with the save-yourself rhetoric of our conservative leaders: “If you have a go, you get a go”, and if you happen to be living in a place that is now inundated by unprecedented floods because successive federal and state governments let people build there and were complicit in fuelling the climate crisis — well, what were you thinking?
This self-interested and unjust ideology is easily translated into the language of “resilience” and “adaptation” — terms that offer important strategies for survival in the climate crisis, but which have been co-opted by neoliberals who don’t want anything to change or to be accountable to anyone else. But these terms are not and should not be used like panaceas. Climate change isn’t going away (although, of course, we should do everything we can to reduce how much the climate changes), and we will have to adapt, to be resilient, to learn to live with it, as the recent IPCC report on climate consequences, vulnerability, and adaptation makes clear. That will take determination, sacrifice, and solidarity, not self-assured complacency.
Denial of the hazards, denial of their consequences, denial of the losses, and denial of the injustices of climate change are not features of a society that will endure as the crises accumulate. And so, if we are to learn to live with climate change, we will need to rediscover the humble determination implicit in that phrase, and amplify it in order to overcome its tendency for arrogance, self-satisfaction, and self-centredness.
Learning to live with climate change will require letting go of colonial ideals of mastery. It will require learning from our indigenous communities how to live with, not on or off, the environment — to be in reciprocal, not extractive, relationship with non-human world. And, as part of that, it will require a determination to keep going in the face of adversity, rather than to give in, as many “it’s already too late” climate doom narratives advocate.
Of course, although “climate control” is a farce, recognising our vulnerability and interconnection with the climate in the midst of a climate crisis can be truly terrifying. So learning to live with climate change will require being in caring, inclusive, collaborative relationships with other humans. As the incredible work of communities in flooded regions these past weeks have shown, we will need solidarity and care, not divisiveness and victim-blaming, so that we can learn with each other how to live with our changing world.
Dr Blanche Verlie is a researcher at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Her book Learning to Live with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation, is available as a free e-book.
