Pattern and Forecast (Vol. 5)

This is the fifth entry in a series in which writers give a report on the weather. Any meteorological statements made may range from the personal to the scientific, from observable weather to the felt. Read the first entry, by Andrew Durbin; the second entry, by Amina Cain; the third entry, by Madeleine Watts; the fourth, by Andrew Durbin. 

I’ve only recently moved back to Australia, to a Melbourne bayside suburb that is wealthy and capital-L Liberal (to say you are Liberal in Australia means you support the major conservative party). I am neither capital-L Liberal nor wealthy. When running along the Elwood foreshore, the fragments of conversation I pick up all seem to be about money, bollarded by platitudes:

If I could just save five K, put it into shares.

Don’t know why she stuck with him for so long. He didn’t have any money, anyway.

But at the end of the day…

Well, it’s all water under the bridge.

The last time I lived in this city, I was married. I lived—we lived—in a book-lined Edwardian in the quaint, quasi-industrial inner west, with cat and clawfoot tub and respectable sound system. There were fireplaces in every room, stained-glass windows, a garden at constant war with us. Packing tape for insulation, subscriptions to everything, no gray in my hair.

Was I happier then? Inconclusive. I listened to about the same amount of Jason Molina then as now.

Was I more hopeful?

A lot can happen in five years. The global average temperature can increase to 1.04 degrees above the pre-industrial baseline. Glaciers can recede at rates that warrant revisions of the word “glacial”. Oceans can measurably warm and rise and acidify. The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest living organism, can bleach by half, become a signifier, a man-made catastrophe by which to measure other man-made catastrophes. Pacific gyres of particulate plastics can grow to demand new landmasses for comparison—though Bigger than Bolivia, for whatever reason, does not carry the same heft as Three Times the Size of Texas. The single-figure population of northern white rhinos—emblematic of extinction for how many years?—can be depleted to a single sex. Meanwhile, thousands of less storied species can blink from existence without our collective notice or concern.

Change of many kinds is occurring at an accelerated pace, outstripping even the more sombre forecasts, and so a year—or five years—seems densely packed, longer in terms of quantitive events. At the same time, there is a sense of grandscale groundrush, a plummet towards collapse too fast and terrible to comprehend.

For as long as memory allows, the closing down of...