The birth of Hope 2020 (now One Small Thing)

Hope 2020. (Now called One Small Thing)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/

This is a call to action, not just for Australia, the singed canary in the coalmine, but for the whole world. Pay attention. What is happening to us is coming for you.

We have reached tipping point in Australia, which means the rest of the world isn't far behind. Tens of thousands of climate refugees are right now evacuating vast areas ahead of another predicted day of firestorms. Thousands still stranded and now many towns have no viable drinking water as it has been contaminated by aerially dropped fire retardants, metals, arsenic, ash and debris and the treatment plants have been lost to the fires. States of emergency declared.

This is real. Not dry scientific statistics and reports, not predictions, not pretty graphs and models you can bat away and think about later. Real, right now, affecting tens of thousands of living breathing humans. And many dead ones, with more to come. This is just the beginning.

If you are witnessing this from outside Australia, you probably have no real idea of the scale and scope of this thing as the international media has been strangely muted about what is actually going on here.

The size of this climate emergency is staggering, and it is being fought principally by volunteers, who have ordinary lives and jobs and are not being paid, and have been on the frontlines for months. They go out day after day, night after night, into a war zone, without proper protective equipment, in worn trucks that can malfunction. There is no real help or leadership from our government. The rage in Australians is extraordinary. I have never seen anything like it.

If we had 30 000 displaced people, 1300 houses lost, 2000 outbuildings lost, 100 facilities destroyed, many people dead, dozens more missing, and 6 million hectares of land annihilated from, let’s say… terrorism, there would be such a huge international groundswell of attention, support, commentary and action, it would galvanise the whole world.

Instead, there is global apathy, starting with not only our own government, but us, the people, the on the ground Aussies. I think it is because Australia is the canary in the coalmine for climate change, and nobody really wants to accept that our world can really change this way. Not really, because if it can, we feel doomed.

Let’s face it, we’ve left it too late to tackle carbon emissions in any real way. Because we don’t want to lose our comfortable way of life. We don't want to make the necessary changes to our comfortable lifestyles. We wait, and wait, saying, later, when it’s obvious, it won’t happen in my lifetime.

It’s one thing to put out the recycling and talk about policy and point fingers at politicians, but it is another to make the very real sacrifices that are coming, whether we are willing or not. We’ve all got our fingers in our ears going lalalalala to drown out the increasing howl of the hurricane that is coming.

The hurricane that is here.

Our world just changed, forever. This is a dramatic statement, but a whole country is on fire and the devastation is beyond comprehension. Whole towns gone. Half a billion animals dead, and that number will rise substantially in the next weeks as there is no food or water in the aftermath and habitats are destroyed. People talk about the Aussie bush regenerating, and in our traditional bushfire patterns this is true, but what is happening here has never happened before.

Usually Aussie bushfires take out the underbrush, the bark and leaves, and some of the canopy, but the trees still live. When there is rain, new shoots rise out of the black. It is a beautiful thing to witness, the incredible unfurling of green through the ash. Fires happen in sections with corridors so animals can escape.

This is different. People are calling the firefronts monsters, without exaggeration. Towering fires have stretched in unbroken fronts for 80km. Imagine an 80km wall of flame so hot and huge it creates its own storms and fire tornadoes, like the one that flipped a five tonne firetruck, killing two of its volunteer firefighter occupants. Flames higher than the opera house exploding into columns of chaos. For real.

There is no escape for animals, birds, insects, all the marvellous and varied living organisms that make up an ecosystem, from such a thing. Now vast national parks are made of endless silent sentinels; trees are black twisted sticks in lifeless forests of eerie silence and clouds of ash. Not a birdsong, not an insect buzz.

Our natural world is giving us feedback, right now, in the real.

How will we react? How will we respond? How will we act?

Governments, whose only focus in on the next election, have no vested interest in long term planning, environmental or otherwise. The simply won’t be here for the consequences.

They know populations are dangerous, once the peons realise that there is power in numbers, so we are sedated with distractions, with banalities, with PR blah blah; with tv and shopping and alcohol and a million messages to buy stuff instead of messages of how to skill up for transition times.

We are discouraged in a zillion ways, covert and overt, from uprising. Once a mob is roused it becomes its own raging firefront, a ravening beast that can overrun governments. If we ignite, we can burn the whole house down. In Indonesian there is a word for a crowd gone berserk. It is ‘amok’. To ‘run amok’ is to see a crowd boil into action, to become a creature greater than the sum of its parts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, wishing I was in some position of power, to be able to step in, but I am not a political animal and I don’t have answers on that level.

What I am, though, is the matriarch of a little community, in the real, a community that gathers in the wilderness 8 weeks a year to explore a different way of being human, using ancient tribal technologies to weave a basket of community and safety, where everyone gets their needs met. There is no alcohol, no internet, no spiritual bypass… just real people sitting in circles telling the truth, kids being mentored by a host of aunties and uncles, everyone taking off their masks with a common agreement to look after each other, no matter what. We have been through things in our little Rewild Tribe that could have been disasters, except we looked after each other, and they weren’t. Crises fostered trust, resilience, communal strategies, safety. We look after each other to we learn that we can.

No matter what.

I don’t know politics but I do know this. That if we agree to look after each other no matter what; magic happens. It is such a little thing but it is everything.

And now, on social media, I am struck by the disparity between the political animals and the human ones. While our prime minister reveals his lack of empathy and compassion with every gesture, meanwhile in the epicentres of the fires, people are fighting together to save each other’s homes and lives. Firefighters, volunteers, risking their own lives over and over, day after day for months to save another’s house, only to find their own has burned to the ground. People taking in the wounded, the displaced, the shocked and distraught. Families screaming from the bank of a lake as their house burns and the fire is at their backs, being picked up by another in a boat so loaded it is almost to the waterline. People going into burning houses to pull others to safety. Thousands clustered in beaches or huddled in evacuation centres while the sky is luminous red to black and the ash so thick you’d choke, all singing so the kids don’t get scared. In the lines of traffic stuck for seven, eight, twelve hours trying to escape the disaster zones, everywhere there are stories of people looking after each other. A man with his foot in a cast going up and down the lines handing out water and food to families stuck in cars. Another with a guitar, singing funny songs to make the kids laugh. People offering places to shelter; their homes, their yards, their clothes. People helping complete strangers because in times of crisis we remember that we are a community.

This is an amazing time. And to me, to the matriarch who sings in my bones, it is time to forget the politicians and remember that we are tribal creatures. That we know how to do this without relying on some so called leader in a system that is broken, kowtowing to mining interests that suck the lifeblood of water from an already parched country, for money.

I’ve been wondering where my power actually lies, and the matriarch whispers that it lies in community.

It is up to us to take personal responsibility. Not to wait to be told what to do, but to make the individual choice right now to behave as if we have been given a path through this.

We love our way of life, We love our comfort. Humans will take the easy way if it is available. To prepare for transition we have to make sacrifice. We need to choose the hard way so we are prepared for new times. We need to find the path of hope.

So this is my call to action.

Can we start a hub for groundswell community collaboration during transition times? The transition is here. Let’s get our fingers out of our ears and our hands off our eyes and recognise that our world is changing and this is just the beginning. We cannot rely on things being the same.

Everywhere in our global media, in social media, in governments and communities and families there are reactions to climate change moving from denial and obfuscation, through rage and blame, to despair and collapse, none of which are useful. All are paralysing.

What if we find a middle way where we look to our communities, look to our heart connections, look to the places where we come together, and work on skills to support each other through transition, through emergency, through a world in fire and flood, ice and storm.

I’m talking about real, practical tools for transition. Social media is a gift here, a tool we can use for all our benefit, a place where we can gather to share information, to reach out to our people, making decisions at a grassroots level.

How can we form better connections with our neighbours? How can we personally start to make the sacrifices we need, not from the top down, but from the bottom up, regardless of government policy? How can we take this rage and turn it into action that is useful? Grow our own food, purify our own water, drive less, become self reliant? Learn how to read the book of nature, to make friends with our environment, drink less booze, connect open eyed, have community days, prepare for disaster? How can we learn to move with our families through a changing landscape? What if instead of going into numbness, we go back to school, start to train and prepare, in small groups, pods that can thrive in any conditions?

A dear friend just said that the most beautiful child’s name he knows is... Hope. What if we all birth this child together? The child of our best intentions, our sacrifices, our education. What if we grow the fuck up and stop expecting someone to save us and then blaming them when they don’t?

This page is a place to share useful skills for transition times. How to nurture myriad small communities into self reliance. What we can actually do individually to mitigate the changes in our world, and how to cope with those changes that are inevitable.

This is a call for ideas, thinktanks, practical solutions for support on all levels. Community builders, scientists, researchers, activists, artists, gardeners, rewilders, families, elders, fixers, dreamers. Between us we have the skills to teach each other, to remember the wisdom in our DNA, to solve problems as a tribe. This page is the beginning of a hub where we can move into constructive action.

Any political commentary will be deleted; there are plenty of places for that. Any negative chat is not welcome. Calls for prayers, while beautiful, can find other places to fly. This page is a forum for practical solutions.

If we face the possibility that the world as we know it will change in our lifetime, and if nobody is coming to save us, how do we save ourselves? I know we can.

If we look after each other, no matter what, there is always hope.

If this speaks to you, welcome home. Let's see what we can do. Together. Share your skills. Share your ideas, no matter how far fetched. Share what you know in your bones. Be courageous. Speak up.

This is the link to the group Hope 2020 (EDIT... now called One Small Thing). See you there. (Make sure you answer the three questions and agree to the group rules or you won't be able to join.)
And if you're called, share this post far and wide so we can collect all our people.
Big love,

Mama G
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/