A letter from the front.

Dear World,

I hope this letter finds you healthy and happy. I know you have been having a hard time lately but these things surely pass. This is just a short note to keep in contact and let you know how I am going.

I am back from weekend away with the family. We stayed at a nice little coastal town some 250km south of my fine city. It is the middle of winter in this hemisphere and we had fine weather. I was even wearing a tee shirt during the day – now that is remarkable.

The thing that I want to write about was a deeply shocking thing I saw on my way to that place, but first, a bit of background. When I was in my late teens to early twenties I drove that path hundreds of times. I was a fairly keen surfer back then and the best waves are south of my home town. I still manage the pilgrimage a couple of times a year, not to surf, just for short family holidays.

The road south follows the coast a few km in land. There is a section of the trip that passes through a national park where a dense, ancient, forest full of large trees approaches the coast. It was magnificent and diverse. (As a side note this corner of my country is world renowned as a biological hot spot – the number of different species per square km rivals the Amazon.)

A few years back I noticed some of the larger trees were dying back. This was sad but such is the nature of a forest – trees eventually die. On my next trip the following year I passed through the forest and was horrified. The canopy of most of the large trees was brown - these trees were dying on mass. A few of my friends had also seen this event and were equally outraged.

Over the next couple of years it seemed to have stabilised. The large trees were left as bare skeletons but the under growth of medium sized trees and some saplings could be seen. It looked like it might recover. It may take a long time but I was hopeful.

This year heading down my worst fears were realised. The understorey was dying. Not just a bit but many km of brown stretched down the highway. As we entered the area just on dusk the destruction was not immediately apparent. After the first km I realised what I was looking at and was alarmed. By the end of it I was nearly in tears.

This area has been forest for thousands of years. It forms part of a national park that people had acknowledged as unique and worth protecting. It is dying and is nearly gone. It’s not as if some developer pushed it down to put in a golf course and housing estate or some farmer cleared it for sheep to roam. It is just giving up and surrendering.

My part of the world is also renowned for something else. Over the past 25 years the average rain fall is about half of what it used to be. This factoid often turns up in lists of examples of climate change. It might make a 5 second point during some lecture in another part of the world but the example is reality for me. The sting is many of my fellow denizens don’t seem to understand the significants of what is happening. The governments solution has been to increase the amount of ground water used and now to build a desalination plant.

I could have wrote about the cave systems north of the city that have stopped forming their beautifully intricate formations or the lack of water run off to the dams that supply the city or the record dry, sunny, winter we are currently experiencing or the degraded state of the native fauna closer to the city. I didn’t because these are things I see every day, and like the frog in pot, it is difficult to appreciate steady relentless change. A smack in the face is more effective.

File this under letters from the front.

Regards

Suburban Surrender