I am descended from people who factor a flat tyre into a drive to the airport. I own a personal, portable water filter, just in case. I am someone who patrols her boundaries. I am a list writer, a timetable checker.
The overarching project of my life has been making myself safe. No alarms; no surprises. It has become legend in my family that, at age 11, I ruined a holiday by demanding we move out of our accommodation at the foot of what everyone told me was a dormant volcano, because I thought it was too dangerous. (The volcano did erupt, on my 35th birthday.)
Nothing had changed by age 44, when I published a personal guide to surviving climate change, which was essentially a list of everything I was afraid of and all the ways I planned to stop those things happening to me. By age 49 my plans had come to fruition. I had left inner-city Melbourne and moved to the Huon Valley in the south of Tasmania.
I’m not the only one who has thought it worthwhile making huge changes to their life in an effort to stay safe. There are the awful white-supremacist preppers, of course, and the billionaire tech magnates with their horrible luxury New Zealand bunkers. The self-sufficiency guru Michael Mobbs caused a ruckus in 2019 when he announced he was selling up his Sydney home to escape the coming societal collapse; he planned to shift to Bermagui, which he thought would be safer. (On 23 January 2020, residents of Bermagui were told the Badja Road fire was heading in their direction and it was too late to leave; to seek shelter as the fire approaches; to protect themselves from the heat of the fire.) From the wreck of the pandemic we can salvage and resurrect an inner lifeNyadol NyuonRead more
Since Greta Thunberg started making headlines, since the IPCC declared we have only 12 years left to get our act together, since the UN’s biodiversity body warned last year of imminent ecosystem collapse, people of run-of-the-mill, middle-class privilege, friends and relatives of mine, have been quietly approaching me, asking, “Where will I be safe? How can I keep my children safe?”Advertisement
When my co-author and I wrote our handbook, we tried to answer this question. The answer was: nowhere. There is no where that will make you safe, there is only a when: when you become rich enough to build your children a bunker village with its own food and water and oxygen; even less probably whenwe decide to redistribute society’s benefits so that being rich is not a pre-condition for being safe.
Until either of those whens happen, we suggested, you need to change your definition of “safe”. Stop looking for places to hide and barriers to put up. Build stronger relationships with the people around you so you will be there for one another when difficulties arise. Invest less of your time accruing material goods (like personal water filters) that you could lose in a fire or flood, and more of your time organising for social change. Stay light on your feet, valuing people and experiences more than you value property, and look for a life where those things are nurturing and exciting.
So much for all that: in my struggle for safety I abandoned the network I had in Melbourne, moved to Tasmania on 16 January 2019, and bought myself some property just east of Huonville. (On 15 January, lightning struck 2,400 times across south-western Tasmania, igniting several fires including the Riveaux Road fire, which threatened the Huon Valley for the next three months.)
During the 2019-20 mainland bushfires, when Tasmania was cool and damp, I was safe. During the coronavirus pandemic, isolated in my cottage at the end of a dirt road on a sparsely populated island at the bottom of the world, I was safe. (By late Apri, an outbreak in the north-west of the state meant Tasmania had the highest number of coronavirus infections per capita of anywhere in Australia.)Sometime in early April a friend in Melbourne sent me an email. “You must be feeling pretty pleased with yourself. The fires, now this?!”
I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I realised that all that work I’d done – the project of a lifetime – had finally paid off.
And then I sat on a rock all by myself and had a little cry because it felt terrible.
We all know, deep down, that we can never be safe. Don’t we? Searching for safety is a panicked thrashing around that drags you deeper and deeper into the quicksand. For a while in my 20s I went to the doctor once a week – four different doctors: so, as far as they each knew, I went to the doctor once a month – just to check whether I was safe from dying. They would say yes, and I’d have a day of relaxing, and then I’d think, well, yesterday I was safe, but how about now? What I wanted was to stay in the doctor’s office, hooked up to a (so far nonexistent) machine that would feed out constant information about my health, alerting me instantly if I was in any kind of danger, for the rest of my life.
You can only ever know if you are safe in retrospect, once the you that was safe is gone forever without ever knowing how safe she was. You can wake up in the morning and know you didn’t die in the night, but you can never go to sleep because who knows what the future holds? Where can I move to that is safe? Let me know if you figure out how to move to the past.Oh, the night. I would also ask my housemate to check on me now and again to see if I had died or was near death while sleeping, because perhaps the only way to relax your vigilance is to hand the burden to somebody else; the trick, then, is not being too vigilant about how well they’re carrying it. (She never checked whether I had died.) When I was much younger, I assumed the government, grown-ups and some other amorphous forces were carrying the burden of keeping me safe from existential threats. Because that’s their job, isn’t it? A child raised in the 70s and 80s – me – could sanely go through their early life assuming that the government was concerned with their health, their financial wellbeing, even the future of the Earth they relied on. (In 1985 the world had stockpiled 61,662 nuclear warheads.)But now? Watching the disintegration of the United States and Brazil, knowing their rampant obsession with individual freedom is no different from here, except a little more heavy-handed with the satire, now I know – and we all do – that each of us must bear our own burden. Nobody else is watching out for us. We cannot afford to relax.
This state of constant vigilance where threat is ever-present, just over there, just outside the line of our sight (don’t blink), it doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else. It eats everything. You drag yourself panting into a glade in the sunlight of safety and instead of feeling joy, calm, peace, you find the forest is full of ticks (every last one of them is carrying Lyme disease).
This is me, on a rock, having a cry because sure, I’m safe right now, but what is the point of being safe if everyone else is drowning and burning and starving and all the things you love are desiccating in the ever-hotter, ever-drier atmosphere? In a world like this world, safety means isolation and loneliness. It’s a jerk act to smile when everyone else is weeping in pain. There are no moments of spontaneous wonder in a bunker.
Where can you be safe? Where can your children be safe? You can’t, they can’t, stop asking that question. Is there something better to be than safe? Well, I don’t know. But maybe it’s better to be brave.
I have never managed to be particularly brave. I’ve always been able to come up with a rationale for slipping back into my comfortable life before things get really bad; my lucky life has always let me. But wouldn’t it be something to behave courageously? To see the threat and step forward to meet it?
In 1917, the Australian poet Lesbia Harford wrote:
Today is rebel’s day. Let all of us
Take courage to fight on until we’re done –
Fight though we may not live to see the hour
The Revolution’s splendidly begun.
“Politics is hard,” write Kai Heron and Jodi Dean in their article, Revolution or Ruin, for the journal e-flux, “because it asks us to take and wield power, to be disciplined, focused, and clear-eyed … it asks us to choose sides, to name our comrades and our enemies.”
I think about that when I see you all – on the news, on Twitter – out on the streets angrily demanding justice, polarising opinion, while I’m here at the end of my pleasant country road. There is a kind of climate action that is about whittling away your own impact, reducing your footprint, negating yourself. What am I trying to make myself safe from? Bushfires? Floods? Criticism? Judgment? Small and quiet, squeaky-clean, a tiny target: “Leave me alone,” I beg the world and its terrors, and that is exactly what it does.
• This essay will be part of the anthology Fire, Flood and Plague, edited by Sophie Cunningham and published by Penguin Random House in December
