Stories from the front lines of the climate crisis
It's hard to focus on anything but COVID-19 at the moment, but accelerating global heating is an even bigger problem and it's caused by the same overpopulation, over consumption, urbanisation and deforestation that is driving a new age of pandemics.
I explore this in my new book Body Count: How climate change is killing us. The book is based on interviews with Australians who've lost family or loved ones to extreme weather events, disease and other causes linked to warming.
It sounds grim, but in travelling from Launceston to Townsville, Kinglake to Grantham, I've been privileged and inspired to meet and hear from some of the extraordinary Australians who've lost the most to climate change.
The book tells stories from the 2003 Canberra bushfires, 2009's Black Saturday, the Queensland floods of 2011, Melbourne's devastating thunderstorm asthma outbreak of 2016 and other deadly weather events. These stories are both tragic and heroic.
The death toll from heat, fire and smoke in the 2019-20 disaster is still being reckoned with, our next fire season is only just underway, and the WHO estimates there will be more than 250,000 warming-related deaths each year from 2030 onwards. Australia is highly vulnerable.
Our climate change body count started some time ago, and it's rising.
Stories from Body Count
“I still remember saying to her … if a fire ever gets into that forest they’ll never stop it, it’ll be like a nuke going off.”
David Tener at the memorial for his former wife, Alison, who died in their home at Duffy – across the road from pine plantations – during the terrifying Canberra bushfires of 2003.
“How many times do you hear people die by asthma?”
Elsa Voong waited on the phone for an ambulance in Melbourne’s outer suburb of Mernda as her husband, Sam Lau, collapsed in the thunderstorm asthma outbreak of 2016. Her two kids, Jet and Julia, hold a photo of their late father.
“Take my brother first.”
Jordan Rice drowned with his with mother, Donna, when their car was trapped in the Toowoomba floods of 2011. The tragic story broke hearts around the world, and his father John Tyson – pictured at Donna and Jordan's grave – was left to bring up two sons, Blake and Kyle, alone.
“Our people are now dying younger … right across my region it’s happening.”
Muruwari and Budjiti man Bruce Shillingsworth, an artist, activist and educator from Brewarrina in western NSW, describes the loss of water of First Nations peoples as ‘a second wave of genocide’.
“I didn’t know anyone who didn’t like my wife. She was just a great person.”
Peter and Leonie Jackson on their wedding day at Avoca Beach on the NSW Central Coast. Leonie died in an outbreak of melioidosis – a tropical soil disease – when floods struck Townsville in 2019.
Among all the people who died with an indirect attribution to this catastrophic summer season, Imogen Jubb says "my Mum is likely one of them.”
Her mother Annemarie – pictured here with her husband of 47 years, Peter – had a heart attack as bushfire smoke choked Canberra.
