My name is Lesley, a former environmental scientist, and I have been concerned about the impacts of climate change on the beautiful landscapes and environments of Australia, which I love, for many years. I have more recently found out about the many devasting impacts on human health and mental health.

I have not been able to understand how most people just did not seem to be aware of the impending threat to their lives and livelihoods. And how governments continually put profit and self-interest before the environment and any action on climate change.  People talked about “believing in climate change” or not. Do they “believe” in gravity or that  the Earth is flat? It didn’t make any sense to me.

To be fair, I too did not think it would be upon us so soon, or with so much ferocity.

In 2019/20, we were in another but yet more severe drought and the bushfires that were ravaging other parts of NSW were getting closer to Canberra.

I went out into my back garden. The air was full of smoke and things were covered with fine white ash.
 
It was eerily quiet. There was no hum of insects and the birds that normally flitted in and out of my garden were gone – or were scrawny and gasping. The Black Summer bushfires were on my door step and I was planning to get out of Canberra to escape the effects of the awful smoke on my poor lungs.

I realised that climate change had finally come to my own back yard.

I wrote down some words. Unlike the singer, James Taylor, who wrote about fire and rain but just couldn’t remember who to send it to, I sent my words as a letter to the Canberra Times. Who published it. Then I turned it into a poem. 

Unfortunately, there were a lot more events and situations that gave me inspiration for more poems.

I have long thought that climate change is a communication failure.

Maybe some of these poems will appeal to people’s hearts and emotions in a way that facts and graphs cannot. I hope they encourage some more people and governments to take more and urgent action to slow down this runaway fossil-fuel-driven locomotive we call Climate Change.

Climate Poet Oz