Burning land: part three
Climate change denial follows the flames
Fire is written into Australia’s DNA. I say this almost literally, because Australia’s plants and animals have adaptations to fire encoded in their genes. Many species even depend on fire as a part of their life cycle. Australia’s first human inhabitants also learned that Australia was a land of fire, and found ways to live with, and control, the flames. But millions of years of evolution and many millennia of careful environmental management, as well as the global climate, have now been knocked off balance, culminating in last summer’s devastating fire season.
The scale of the damage is almost incomprehensible. A preliminary estimate of the impacts from September 2020 reported 3113 houses burned, $1.7 billion in insurance losses and $20 billion in impacts on the Australian economy. Then there are the costs which are more difficult to count – 33 people directly killed and an estimate of 400 additional deaths due to air pollution. This second category is seldom mentioned, but worth a closer look.
I have talked about air pollution before, when I looked at the unexpected benefits of lockdowns on air quality. Among the most dangerous of the pollutants that I discussed were soot particles less than 2.5 microns in size. In Sydney during December 2019, the level for these particles was four times the maximum recommended by the World Health Organisation. During 2019, Sydney had 81 days when air quality was defined as poor or hazardous – more than the whole of the previous decade – almost all due to the bushfires.
There are other impacts, too, which don’t get much attention. Following the deadly bushfires in Victoria in 2009, when 173 people died in two days, more than 15% of people in the most-affected areas reported probable post traumatic-stress disorder, directly related to the fires. In areas defined as moderately-affected, the number was still high, at 7%. These numbers cannot be directly applied to the bushfires of last summer, because the people killed in the 2009 fires all died over two days and in a small number of towns. But the 2019/20 fires were still traumatic, and it’s likely that many people in the affected areas are still suffering.
The fire at Mallacoota in Victoria gives a good example of how terrifying the fires must have been. The town, on the coast just south of the New South Wales border, was outside the area recommended for evacuation on the 29th of December. But late that afternoon, a warning was issued which extended the danger zone by more than 50 kilometres to the east. Mallacoota was right on the edge. By the next day, it was too dangerous to evacuate, and fire was bearing down on the town.
Dawn on New Year’s Eve saw 4000 people waiting in the safest place they could, the foreshore. Smoke blocked out the sun and at nine o’clock Mallacoota was in darkness. Photos and videos show skies as black as night, or sometimes glowing red, as firefighters work to protect people while the town burns within sight of them. People talk of embers raining down on them, or being warned to get into the water if they hear warning sirens. The temperature was 49 degrees, with wind gusts up to 80 kilometres an hour. It’s unimaginable to me, as someone who has never experienced a fire.
A wind change in the afternoon meant that the centre of the town was saved, but fires still burned and there were now 4000 people with no way of getting out by road. In the largest evacuation by sea in Australia’s history, emergency services and the navy rescued 1700 people, most of whom were not residents but had been visiting Mallacoota for the holiday period.
Although the rescue at Mallacoota made that town’s disaster particularly memorable, the same terror visited town after town, across southern Australia from the east coast to the west.
One such town was Buchan, around 130 kilometres from Mallacoota as the crow flies. It’s on the edge of the forest of the Snowy River National Park, and, in 2016, had a population of just 236 for the town and surrounding district, with 127 homes.
Like many towns in rural Australia, Buchan was already very conscious of fire before last summer. In September of 2019, the town’s newsletter was already warning of a fire season that was worse than usual. Subsequent newsletters talked of community preparedness meetings and tips for making homes more fire-safe.
The day after Mallacoota burned, it was Buchan’s turn. The town’s church, hotel and store were saved, but 24 homes were destroyed and one man was killed. In some ways, Buchan was lucky, because it had been evacuated in advance of the fire. But losing 24 homes out of 127 is a lot, and fire also closed the caves which are the town’s main tourist attraction. One cave is still closed.
A number of journalists talked to residents of Buchan and nearby towns in the wake of the fires. Most of the comments are as you’d expect – they express that they feel lucky to survive, but they still live with memories and the sense of loss. Some shrug their shoulders and accept that fires are a consequence of living in the bush, others consider that government mismanagement of the land was partly to blame.
One of the journalists, from Reuters, asked what they thought about the role of climate change in the fires and found responses ranged from dubious to highly sceptical. In general, the people she talked to considered land management – in particular a lack of fuel reduction burns – to be the chief culprit. From all that I’ve read on the topic, it’s clear that they are partly correct – both modern science and 50,000 years of indigenous Australian experience with the landscape agree on that. But, as I discussed in my previous articles, 2019 was the hottest, driest year on record, and even the rainforest burned, so something else is going on too.
Reading their comments made me wonder about climate change denial. The way that the article was written suggested that, in general, the residents of Buchan were deniers of climate change, viewing it as something that out-of-touch city-dwelling greenies blame on farmers. Despite two thirds of Australians believing that the bushfires were worsened by climate change, and a significant rise in the level of climate change concern overall, Buchan was a holdout. It’s a conservative town, the Reuters article implied, and so it’s not surprising that the people don’t accept the evidence.
There may be more to it than that, though. When a government which gets revenue from fossil fuels, or a fossil fuel company itself, denies climate change, we tend to think it’s the result of vested interests. It’s less clear why the residents of a small town ravaged by fire may think that way.
Some answers can be found in the work of a Robert Gifford, a Canadian psychologist who works in the field of environmental psychology – the relationship between people and their surroundings. He identified a range of psychological barriers to taking action on climate change that he called the “Dragons of inaction”. These dragons include having a world view which suggests everything would be fine, such as believing that God or new technology would provide a solution, having vested interests in the status quo – which most of us have, for example, by owning a car – or mistrusting the sources of information on climate change, such as government or scientific institutions.
Gifford’s work isn’t specifically about people who deny climate change, because he is talking about action rather than beliefs. Many people who accept the evidence of climate scientists and are very concerned, still don’t do nearly as much as they should. I know that I fit into this category, and I can see Gifford’s “dragons” in some of my own responses.
But denial of the evidence is a little more complex, and the town of Buchan itself provides some insight. The first edition of the town newsletter to come out after the fires, in March 2020, contains a short piece of writing by a local resident (although not a “local”, having only lived in the area since 1985). The author, Kay Scieren, who clearly lost her home in the fires, comments on the human reluctance to accept the impact we have had on our planet’s fragile life-support system. The thought, she says, is too scary.
She might just be right. In researching this article, I went to the source that I always consult when I want to understand human attitudes to risk – Peter Sandman – or rather his website. He raised an important point that I hadn’t considered before.
Denial, in psychology, is a defense mechanism, a way of avoiding painful thoughts and feelings by pretending that something doesn’t exist. This is not to say that everyone who denies the existence of climate change, or who seems to be apathetic, is doing so because the reality is too frightening or painful to bear. But, Sandman argues, we shouldn’t overlook the possibility.
His point is important, because if people are apathetic about something that’s a serious problem, then a particular approach to risk communication is needed. The approach is what Sandman calls “precaution advocacy”. In a nutshell, precaution advocacy is about making the problem real and immediate enough to people that they are prepared to do something about it. It could be described as “scaring people” although it’s scaring people in a way which is helpful and healthy – enough that they wear a seatbelt or reduce their use of single-use plastics, for example – but not so much as to cause distress.
But if people are in true denial, they’re already scared – or at least, they would be scared if they allowed themselves to accept the evidence for climate change. Making climate change more real and immediate just makes it more scary, and not in a way that spurs people to action. Trying to scare people in denial just makes the denial stronger.
When I think about last summer’s bushfires, and residents who seem reluctant to see climate change as playing a part, I wonder about denial. If the fires were caused by insufficient fuel-reduction burns then there’s an obvious solution, and people need not fear that they will experience such a terrible summer again. If the fires were caused by cyclical droughts, then they will come again, but not for a while, and there’s no blame to be borne. But if climate change played a part, then the problem is only going to get worse, and all of us are responsible. It’s a painful thought.
Sandman’s article on climate change denial casts the responses of Buchan residents in a different light. The inhabitants of rural Australia live with the threat of bushfire every summer. It’s not a threat that they are likely to forget. The reality – that bushfire seasons have been getting both longer and more intense since the 1950s – is understandably frightening. It makes sense that those who are most affected don't want to hear the message.
For those in true psychological denial about climate change, a different kind of message is needed. They don’t need to be scared about the issue, but they don’t need to be reassured either. After all, when a situation is genuinely dangerous, it’s dishonest and unhelpful to try and tell people that everything is fine. Those in denial don’t need guilt either, because guilt is another emotion which can push people further into denial.
What people need, Sandman says, is help to make their fears tolerable. And that starts with empathy. It’s similar to the point I made in one of the articles I wrote about vaccination – that it’s important to recognise that people who oppose vaccines are, in general, people who want to make the best decisions for their children. It’s not an appealing thought – that we need to have more empathy for those denying climate change. But it’s an important one.
The Turnstone comes out twice a week - a full article on Sunday and some interesting links related to each week’s article on Wednesday. If you have any suggestions for topics or articles which I should highlight, please let me know.
Do you know someone who might enjoy The Turnstone? Please forward it to them.
Did you receive The Turnstone from a friend? You can subscribe and receive it directly every week.
Do you want to see more of The Turnstone? All of the stories can be found in the archive, here.
Have you found a factual error or typo? Let me know and I’ll correct it in the archive version.