Extinct by April de Angelis

Author:April de Angelis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

April The world is on fire from the Amazon to California, from Australia to the Siberian Arctic.

Do we watch the world burn or do we choose to do what is necessary to achieve a different future?

During the 2019 to 2020 Australian bushfire season, strong winds and extreme heat drove wildfires.

The old ways of fighting these fires are increasingly redundant

Australian firefighters said they were frightened

The idea that a fire could generate a tornado as it did in Australia in 2003 seemed hard for scientists to credit but many more fire tornadoes have occurred since then. Thunderstorms created by the intense energy of the fire can shoot out lightning that ignites fires twenty miles ahead of the fire’s front line. They are known as Pyro-Cbs. Australia generated eighteen of them last year.

Forty-six million acres were burnt, thirty-four people died, as well as three billion terrestrial vertebrates including thirty thousand koalas. One hundred and three billion dollars in economic losses. NASA estimates that three hundred and six million tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere.

Feedback loops.

As Greta Thunberg says, Our house is on fire. Why aren’t we doing something about it?

Because we have too much faith in human progress?

Because it’s not happening to us – not yet anyway?

Because we are so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening sense of what constitutes ‘normal’?

Aaron (voice-over) I had one particular meeting with a fireman

He had just spent the whole summer travelling all over the north of the boreal forest trying to put out these wildfires with his team

Fires are part of the landscape but they’re not supposed to be that common, that fierce

The biggest city is Yellow Knife and they almost had to be evacuated

Forty thousand people were told to stay in their houses for a week because of wildfires

And the air pollution was so horrendous you couldn’t breathe

And the other thing was the water levels in the lakes were so low

because of the drought

And the heatwaves, that they couldn’t power the city’s hydroelectric dam

So they had to set up a system of generators and have a diesel convoy

Endlessly coming from miles away.

Ironic – having to turn to the most polluting fuel in the world which is actually driving the climate crisis.

April We’re talking about fire but also air and water.

Aaron (voice-over) Like I said.

April Connected, yes.

caption: Water.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.