Two weeks ago, as I was walking west through my neighbourhood in the early morning, I was struck by the eerie copper tone in the atmosphere.
I turned and looked to the sky and was stunned by the glowing red sunrise. It was utterly disorienting – I stared, took photos, checked the sky in all directions, confused about what I was seeing.
I knew from its position that it had to be the sun but it looked nothing like it. To the west of the city, and north along the coast, bushfires raged out of control. The intense red light bounced off concrete and shined off street poles. There were a few other early risers on the street, all of us stopped in our tracks, faces turned to the sky. Many raised their phones and snapped.
And then we went on with our day. Unsettled, disoriented and looking over our shoulder every few steps, but for the most part operating as we usually would. It is a bizarre position in the landscape to hold, living at the edge of calamity.
Paying closer and more considered attention to the natural world has been a personal project of mine over the last 18 months, which I have chronicled at times in journal entries.
It began as a somewhat inward-looking exercise to help myself feel more grounded in times of stress. For the most part, those journal entries unfurled like plants themselves, forming at the root with whichever plant or flower I identified with at the time of writing, and reaching out towards the underlying feeling as if towards the sun.
It has, at times, caused me significant emotional distress. When I noticed certain plants blooming months after they usually do, when I noticed the persistent greens right through the winter months, when I noticed cold-weather blooms coming out later because of the steadfast heat – these things prompt awareness of the future of the planet and I have given in many times to despair.
I discovered the true potential of this project recently in reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, a meticulous and wide-ranging treatise on rejecting modern capitalism’s notions of productivity and optimisation.
In the book, Odell describes discovering, among many other things, that embracing bioregionalism can be a way of returning to community, which in turn ensures more effective activism. Odell writes: “Observation and simple conviviality should be recognised not only as ends in and of themselves, but as inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.”
The summer I experienced when I first moved to Sydney three years ago was full of days spent in a near-sensual anticipation of heading outdoors. I fell in love with the air in all its sickly sweet promise, thick and nourishing with humidity. Before this year, the idea of being outdoors represented a promise of bright expanse, the sky felt wide and infinite.
By December, hedges of unruly jasmine start curling and browning in the heat, wilting and heavy after their springtime explosion. The fragrance of frangipani emerges and mingles with that of hot, wet concrete. The jacarandas turn and the bright purple blooms start dropping to the streets. What I love most about the jacarandas is their capacity to surprise you, particularly in built-up urban environments, dotted as they are throughout the city, in pockets between apartment buildings, warehouses and garages.
This year, that anticipation of moving outdoors at the end of the day has transmuted to dread. I heed health advisory warnings that instruct us to stay indoors. I cancel classes and appointments. I notice the subtle tightening in my chest.
Looking to the jacarandas outside my office, I am startled by the colour contrast – the bright purple against a shock of orange sky. When afternoon comes, the light turns and an ominous red light starts stretching across the floors, through windows that are dusted with a thin film of ash.
A week ago – before the day the thickest smoke choked Sydney and thousands of protesters took to the streets in particle respirator masks – I walked through my neighbourhood on my way to meet a friend. The sky was a deep tangerine and I watched as crowds of office and retail workers on their way to Christmas parties rushed through the street in groups, wearing felt reindeer ears and Santa hats, clutching at each other in what I intimated was a perverse, confused joy.
I walked past outdoor dining tables, people eating with their pollution masks suspended from their chins. I overheard one man talking to his friends as they waited at a pedestrian light, “I can’t stop thinking about the dinosaurs.”
I looked up at the glowing sky as he crowed, “This is it!”
We in the cities are experiencing now what those in areas afflicted by drought, floods and fire have felt for some time: solastalgia.
Solastalgia is a term coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht while researching the impact of open-cut coalmining in New South Wales’ upper Hunter region. It describes a sense of grief, of existential dread and distress, caused by significant environmental change.
Alexis Wright has written of the new language of climate catastrophe and the powerful nature of this country. Indigenous people have long argued of the responsibility we humans have to the land. The sense of connection we feel to the natural world is vital, and it is no less so for those of us living in cities and built-up environments.
In recent weeks I catch myself making matter-of-fact asides about the end of days, and I’m working to pull myself up, because I worry what it does to any sense of purpose or resilience I might need. It has become clear to me that going forward, nothing will be more important than sensitivity and hope – and nothing will be more dangerous than resignation.
A phrase I’ve heard often over the past fortnight is, “the new normal”. Most of us are questioning, but I worry that some of us are, already, accepting. I’m guilty of this tendency, too. I share photos of the impossibly red sun on my Instagram stories and I caption them “normal”. “Normal sun, normal planet.”
I text my houseshare group chat pictures of the P2 masks I bought for us and caption it “just Anthropocene things”.
A year or so ago I started joking that my gym membership was less about managing my mental health (it was) and more about preparing for the end of days (it started to feel possible).
Of course, part of this is a natural inclination to revert to humour, when to submit to the overwhelming sense of catastrophe would be too much to bear. But beneath the jokes is a very real fear.
My hope is that I have a few ways of pushing against this sense of resignation within myself, the first of which is to remain aware of the ways in which politicians and mining corporations benefit from these exact feelings of hopelessness.
The second way feels open to dismissal as frivolous but it’s for that very reason I want to hold on to it – it is a refusal to be denied the pleasure of nature.
It’s not a solution on its own and it must necessarily take place in context of sustained protests and strikes.
But part of what has made these strange orange days so distressing is the fact that life does go on. It feels absurd that life should be so normal.
I find myself refusing to accept that this is the new normal by insisting on another normality. Insisting on the right to an unencumbered existence outdoors means insisting on a planet that is not merely habitable, but one that is joyful, nourishing and sustaining.
I don’t want for my friends to adjust their toddlers’ playtime routines to navigate playgrounds covered in ash, to seek out respirator masks that will fit their small and ever-changing faces.
I want the prospect of going outside at the end of a work day to feel thrilling and rejuvenating. This is not denial – I know that if I have a child, their summer will be markedly different from any that I knew.
But I hope for all of us to know the pleasure of slow, early mornings, to walk through urbanised spaces and still be reinvigorated by jacarandas lining the streets.
To know unfettered access to green, public spaces, and to be able to breathe, freely and deeply.
Léa Antigny is a Sydney-based writer and publishing professional
