France right now

This is a quick note. I want people in Australia, in the rest of Europe, in America, to take note of what is happening in France and in other parts of Europe because it is being reported like some sort of curio, and it is not, it is shattering.

We are well into our fourth week of huge temperatures right across the whole of France, including cold, rainy Normandy, the high Haut Jura over on the border with Switzerland, and chilly Brittany where the winds blow ceaselessly from the Atlantic. We have not just topped but smashed all previous records and are also now in the most severe drought ever recorded. Aerial views of the entire country show everywhere is brown, and that whole river systems in the South have dried up. This region where I live is one of the worst affected because of the drastic difference between normal and what is happening. The Berry, where I live, has been on numerous occasions hotter than the South of France, and the South of France this year is hot, very very very hot. The thing is, this region is not the Mediterranean south, it is 250km from the Atlantic coastline, 400km north of Toulouse. It gets hot in the South of France, always, although drastically more now. But this region…no. Not like this.

I live on the edge of a very large nature reserve full of tiny lakes that were created by human hands (monks’ hands!) in the Middle Ages. This region is famous for its birdlife. The birds are silent. The forests are now dying, the leaves of huge trees burnt off and falling leaving stark branches throughout the treeline, and 15km from me, in places that are usually damp and green even at this time of the year, there are now huge forest fires and my near neighbour, a nurse, is out at all hours treating smoke inhalation and severe heatstroke. The stream next to my house is bone-dry. The huge Creuse river is centimetres deep now in most places, thick green algae chokes the shorelines and many of its tributaries and inlets are just dust. It feels like armageddon. This Sunday, for the fifth time in four weeks, we will spike into 40 degree celcius days in a region where the average temperature at this time of year rarely tops 26 degrees. At night the temperatures are not dropping below the 20’s. The water in my well, four metres deep, is not icy any longer. The soil temperatures are beyond.

I can barely work. Most businesses around me are now closed in the afternoons. The streets are empty. In the cities they are empty as well. The brocantes are not running properly. The aircon in my car is broken, so when I do have to go out, I have to time it. In previous summers I got by with just winding down my windows. I went to lunch with a friend on June 17th, which was in the first week of this extreme heat, and driving home at 7pm I almost couldn’t bear it. I’m Australian. I am not being a wimp, or a sook, or a whinger, to use all the slang. It’s insanely hot. None of us are sleeping. I am writing this at 1am and the outside temperature is still 25 degrees. Inside is breathless.

Further afield, the UK just saw its hottest day on record. Climate scientists are talking about the UK running out of arable land and food within years now, not decades, but years. In the European Parliament, some representatives are putting forward the well-founded idea that the next wave of climate refugees will not be from Africa or the Middle East, they will be from Greece and Spain and Italy. Finally, the anger is beginning to mount. We have been warned and warned and warned by climate scientists. Fossil fuel companies have known what they are doing for decades. Our politicians have had this information to hand for decades and have done…nothing.

I am not writing this to be alarmist, we are way beyond the point of being alarmist. Climate change is here and it is real and it is absolutely devastating. I’m sick of saying ‘unless we act now’. Act now. Do it. Fresh drinkable water is becoming scarce in some parts of France already. [I wrote this sentence earlier today and then not two hours later saw that large swathes of the Vendée no longer have any potable tap water at all]. Parts of Paris (the poorer parts, of course) have also lacked tap water over the past few weeks. The electrical grid, both here and in other parts of Europe, and in the States, is shutting down at times, because airconditioning is not an answer, it just adds to the burden our planet is already carrying. Trains are not running because they can’t be guaranteed to be safe. In some places there have been reports of roads melting. Systems are beginning to collapse.

We know what we need to do, and the only reason we are not doing it is because we are greedy and self-obsessed and we justify the existence of wealthy people amongst us, people whose wealth allows them to buy our politicians. Our politicians are gambling with life on the planet as we know it, and they are doing so for personal gain. The rich need to be stopped, stripped of their assets, and taxed. A tiny minority of people have an obscene amount of money and power.

Is this what we want for our children? Is this what our trees and birds and wildlife and insects deserve? Is this what we deserve? Are we going to go out like this, just because we thought we deserved endless car and plane trips, endless access to fossil fuels and endless shopping? Goddamn.

Surely a different future is possible, and we can see it if we look. There is so much work to do, but the first work is always in our minds. We can choose to just turn away from the destruction and move in different ways. The beginning is that simple and that complicated. I am working on this personally and I might sometimes share what I am doing if it is of interest to anyone. The ways our Western societies operate is so ingrained in the ways we experience and recreate the world around us that it can be very hard to see the wood for the trees, very hard to unhook from beliefs and ideas which we think inherently exist. They don’t.

I’ve been blessed to spend a lot of time in places where people don’t think like us, which are also places that have been affected by climate change, severe climate change, for many years now. I have spent years of my adult life living in Muslim countries and amongst Muslim communities. I have spent so much time out of Western norms that I find myself quite unable a lot of the time to see them as norms. Both in Australia and here in France I often find myself watching people speaking about subjects as though I am watching them through glass. I don’t mean this in an arrogant know-it-all way, I just mean it in a ‘I see things in lots of different facets’ kind of way. People speak so convincingly about what they believe are absolute truths and yet they have no understanding that in other cultures these things are not true, and are not valued, because they have no value. The West fetishises and condemns what it cannot understand or control, and even in the way we talk, we reproduce these ideas. It doesn’t have to be so.

Imagine a world where we actually all have real work to do, and we do it together, learning from people who know, and we turn away from the models we’ve been sold of what success and failure and individualism and importance look like, and we begin to value different things and move in different ways. Imagine if we all found each other again. I know some people will say this is idealistic, and yet Indigenous people still live like this, still, despite everything our systems have done to them. I’ve lived long enough amongst Indigenous communities to know that these things come with heavy, onerous and binding responsibilities, the absolute negation of individualism which can sometimes be a huge burden to carry. But our individualism and our hunger for recognition and our idolisation of these things is killing everything, and we, we need to be far more responsible than we are.

These are my late-night musings. The neighbours in my small village are outside loudly celebrating France’s World Cup win over Morocco, and I can’t blame them because inside their apartment is probably untenable. I will try to sleep.

I forgot to put this disclaimer on the last post and so I will put it here, I’ve been meaning to for a while. I never use AI in any of my work. AI is the next iteration of strip-mining, it is not just strip-mining our lands and our water supplies, it is strip-mining our intellect and our humanity and then selling it back to us to line the pockets of very wealthy people who then buy our politicians. It is something that needs to be forsaken, not just because of what it is doing to our water supplies and our environments but because of what it is doing to our very precious minds. I don’t care if things I make or write are not perfect, I do care that they are mine. I like to see what other people’s minds and hands are capable of. I am not interested in what non-living entities produce. They have nothing to teach us at all except, as in a parable, that perhaps Pandora’s Box is still with us, and it really does need to be closed.

What’s on your minds about these things?

Goodnight xx