Climate Justice & Grief: I Write from the Wound
I write from the wound. And I am tired of being polite about it. Climate collapse isn’t a bedtime story, it’s the bastard in your house, smoking in your kitchen, setting fire to your curtains while you stand there debating whether it’s really smoke.
We were told the Queensland floods of 2011 were a one-off. A freak event. Freak, my arse. You don’t drown entire towns by accident. You drown them with decades of deregulation, deforestation, denial. Ask Grantham, where houses floated like matchboxes and bodies were pulled from brown water. Ask the children who learned too young that roofs were for clinging, not sheltering.
Hazelwood, 2014. A coal mine smouldering for forty-five days, filling the lungs of Morwell with poison. The government coughed into its sleeve, muttered “nothing to see here,” and carried on cashing cheques from the coal barons. Science was not ambiguous. The particles in that smoke doubled hospital admissions. Increased premature deaths. The inquiry confirmed it. But still, they dare to shrug.
Think of Cape Town, 2018, when the taps almost ran dry and the city counted down to Day Zero. Think of California, 2020, when wildfires burned four million acres and orange skies turned San Francisco into a dystopian postcard. Think of Germany and Belgium, 2021, when floods killed over two hundred people in towns that thought themselves safe. Think of Pakistan, 2022, when monsoon rains left a third of the entire country under water. Think of Greenland, 2021, when rain fell at the summit of the ice sheet for the first time in history. Think of Japan, 2019, when Typhoon Hagibis drowned suburbs and killed nearly a hundred in a single storm. Think of the Amazon in Brazil, 2019, when fires visible from space scarred the so-called lungs of the planet. Think of New South Wales, 2019, when bushfires turned the sky red and drove families into the sea. Think of New Zealand, 2023, when Cyclone Gabrielle tore houses from their foundations. Think of Antarctica, 2022, when temperatures spiked forty degrees above normal in a place once thought immune. Every continent speaks the same language now. The wound is worldwide.
Across the world in Britain, 2013 and 2014, Somerset flooded so badly entire villages were marooned. Farmers ferried cows out on dinghies. Politicians turned up in their high-vis cosplay, all photo-op, no policy. Then 2018 came with the Beast from the East freezing the pipes, followed by Saddleworth Moor burning in a heatwave that scientists called the fingerprint of climate change. Snow and fire in the same year. And yet the denialists still sniffed, “Just weather.”
Here’s the science, for anyone who still plays dumb. The five warmest years on record globally: all after 2015. The UK’s hottest year on record: 2019. Australia’s hottest year on record: 2019. Not coincidence. Not bad luck. Not God punishing sinners. Physics. Greenhouse gases trap heat. Carbon dioxide lingers for centuries. Methane is worse. Scientists have been shouting this since the 1980s, but denialists treat it like gossip at the pub.
And forgive me, but I don’t think climate denial is just ignorance. It’s malevolence in a cheap suit. It’s the moral equivalent of telling a cancer patient it’s just a cough while flogging them cigarettes on the side. And these men and women, they have names.
Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers sneer at protest while polishing coal. Scott Morrison, who brandished a lump of it in Parliament like it was a sacred relic. Tony Abbott, who dismissed the science as “absolute crap” and swung an axe at every green policy he could find. Boris Johnson, who mocked climate change in print until it became politically convenient to play eco-saint.
In Australia right now, Pauline Hanson still calls climate science a “scam.” Malcolm Roberts carries on parroting conspiracy theories in the Senate, still moonlighting for the Galileo Movement. Matt Canavan shrugs at bushfires and tells schoolkids to put down their protest signs and learn to drill for oil. These aren’t leaders. They’re arsonists in suits.
In the UK, Richard Tice of Reform declares human-driven climate change “absolute garbage,” straight-faced on national television. Nigel Farage and Liz Truss cosy up at the launch of the Heartland Institute, a US-born climate denial factory funded by fossil fortunes. And Kemi Badenoch, now leading the Tories, waves off the UK’s net-zero target as a fantasy, calling it an “abstract concept” while promising to drill and dig like it’s 1953. Imagine mocking physics while your constituents are busy sandbagging their doorsteps.
Meanwhile, the boardrooms of Glencore, Santos, BP, Shell, Rio Tinto bristle with executives banking on products scientists have shown drive collapse. Not faceless forces. Profit-clad actors keeping the tinder dry while the rest of us breathe the ash.
Sometimes I wonder if the earth wouldn’t be better off without us. And then I correct myself. The earth would surely be better off without them. Without their smirks on Sky News, their signatures on new coal permits, their oily handshakes with lobbyists. Better off without their pantomime at disaster sites, without their slogans of “clean coal” and “safe gas.” It is not humanity as a whole that sets the match to the forest. It is the industries and leaders who profit from the blaze. They do not hold the hoses. They own the matches.
Think of Pakistan again, a third of a nation underwater. Think of the Arctic again, rain on the roof of the world. Think of Venice again, drowning while cruise ships block out the sun. How many times must we think of it before they finally act.
But then I remember grief. Grief is proof of love. And love is more dangerous than denial. Love takes to the streets when the air is full of smoke. Love throws soup at oil paintings while men in suits wheeze about “civility.” Love blocks coal trains not because it thinks it will stop the world from burning, but because to do nothing is to collude with the arsonists.
So yes, I write from the wound. But I also write with rage. To mock the charlatans who still mumble about “cycles.” To spit in the face of those who say “too expensive” while billions are funnelled into fossil subsidies. To remind us that grief is not a graveyard. It is a war drum.
Think of the floods. Think of the fires. Think of the futures stolen. Think of the lies told. Think of the men and women who laughed while the world burned.
We mourn in motion. We mourn with fury. We mourn loudly enough to rattle the bones of every coward who still says “just weather.” And we will not be soothed. We will not be reasonable. The wound is wide open. The time for manners is long gone.