Here in the Australian capital of Canberra, it feels like the apocalypse has come. A national catastrophe is unfolding, with each day bringing new shocks. And we have yet to reach Australia’s usual peak fire season, which typically doesn’t arrive until late January.

The wildfires have been burning now for three months, across a landscape already parched by drought and through vegetation wilting from fierce heat waves. So far, more than 12 million acres (some 5 million hectares) have been reduced to ash, an area 10 times larger than the lands burnt by the 2018 California fires. Historian Bodie Ashton estimates that if the fire front were a straight line, it would stretch from Los Angeles to New York and back again with hundreds of kilometres left over.

The south coast of New South Wales, usually packed at this time of year with families on holiday, was evacuated last week as one town after another was razed. In Victoria, thousands were trapped on a fire-ringed peninsula; the navy had to be mobilised to rescue them by sea.

At least 25 people are dead at the time of writing, and the fires are expected to keep burning for weeks. Almost 2,000 homes have been consumed by flames, with more lost each day. We Australians always imagined climate refugees would arrive by boat from sinking Pacific islands; now we have thousands of internally displaced persons from our own home-grown climate change disaster.

The Most Important Environmental Stories of 2019



1. #ClimateStrike

The spectacle was truly world-historical: On Friday, September 20, protests swept the planet as millions of people filled the streets to demand that global leaders take bold action to address the climate crisis. The turnout far exceeded organizers’ expectations. In Germany alone, some 1.4 million people marched to call for climate action, while another 300,000 people packed the avenues of Australia and a quarter million jammed Lower Manhattan. A week later, similarly massive protests rocked Italy, Canada, and New Zealand. Altogether, at least 7 million people worldwide participated in the climate strikes, according to 350.org.
The scale and scope of the climate strikes—and, above all, their militant tone—marked an important turning point for global climate advocacy. There is now, unmistakably, an international civil society movement demanding that corporate and political leaders adopt policies and practices that are aligned with the increasingly dire warnings coming from scientists. As the climate strikers made clear, lofty promises and incremental progress are no longer sufficient to halt rising temperatures and increasingly acidic oceans; only a sweeping, global campaign to cut civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels will do. The youth-led and youth-inspired climate strikes also revealed how young people are increasingly spearheading the climate movement; for them, the climate crisis isn’t some kind of far-off threat but rather a clear and present danger.
The generational divide between millennials and Generation Zers (who have inherited this crisis) and Baby Boomers and Gen Xers (who have recklessly fueled the problem or blithely ignored it) will likely form the central pivot of climate politics for years to come. As one 13-year-old climate striker told The Washington Post, “I am here because we want adults to act. It is time to do something.”

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/most-important-environmental-stories-2019