On Boxing Day I had an article published about being pregnant in a climate emergency. It was about the conflicting and contradictory emotions many of us are forced to hold if we choose to take the leap of faith of bringing a child into the world in the midst of climate collapse.
At the time I wrote that piece, the smoke came and went. Occasionally we caught snippets of blue sky.
We could still hear birds then. See bees feeding on the summer flowers in our garden.
Just six days later, the house surrounded by a dense glowing orange fog of smoke, my writing felt both prescient and dated. The birds were gone. Canberra, and the wildlife that lives in the national parks that encircle it, was suffocating. Climate collapse wasn’t a slow-moving force my child and I might gradually see impact our lives. It was here, now. Upon us and immediate.
That was the day the smoke was the thickest. So thick it shut down the whole city, the airport closed, all roads in and out cut off with fire. It was the first day that felt like sunset from start to finish. A colour we’ve come to think of as “apocalypse orange”.
When, even though no fire had crossed the borders of the Australian Capital Territory, Canberrans had their cars packed to evacuate. Where everyone clutched their iPhones flicking between the live fire reporting and the live air quality reporting. Back, and forth, back and forth … on and on, we livestreamed the end of the world.
That was also the day before I was due to have a pregnancy ultrasound. Sitting in my bedroom in the orange semi-light at midday I looked at the murky sight outside my window and wondered “What have I done?” At best, I was experiencing the type of prolonged and acute stress that means my baby was flooded with potentially life-altering cortisol hormones and had, despite my best efforts, no doubt been exposed to damaging levels of fine particulates. At the worst, had I created a person who would be born just to watch the world end?
Perhaps, I thought, I have made a terrible mistake.
Sitting 600km away in Melbourne as I write this, where the sky is blue and people come and go about their daily life, it’s hard to convey the intensity of living in the middle of a long-running disaster. The world narrows. Your ability to think critically evaporates.
New daily rituals emerge – wake up, check the fire warnings, check the air quality reading. Get out of bed, check the air purifier. Next, wash brown smoky water out of clothing or animals that have left the sanctuary of the house for any period of time.
Then go about your day, trapped inside, always with one eye on the live stream. Your social life reduces to rushing from your car inside a friend’s house where you look at the live stream together while externalising your shared internal monolog of “We are not OK. The world is not OK.”
That next day, at the ultrasound, there was no heartbeat.
Being pregnant in a climate emergency is an existential challenge. Having a miscarriage in the epicentre of a climate disaster is a logistical one. Canberra is housing thousands of climate refugees – pressuring an already fragile public health system.
Our hospital rooms are full of smoke. MRIs and other machines are non-functional, their smoke alarms prohibiting them from working.
As a public health researcher, people wrote to me to tell me how as they were put under anaesthetic they coughed from the smoke that has made its way into all of the city’s operating rooms. About closing their eyes as the drugs kicked in knowing a surgeon was about to cut them open while smoke swirled around the room.
In a state of acute stress, and now acute grief, I had to problem-solve my way out of a disaster zone and into safe medical care. It is a sign of my privilege that I managed to do that. That when the airport reopened I could make it to friends in Melbourne. And those friends could get me access to private healthcare within 24 hours.
This a privilege many do not have. Sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote that smog is the great equaliser; none of us can escape it. But smog, and smoke, do not affect us equally.
In a matter of weeks Canberra – a city known for its crisp sunny skies and eucalyptus smell – has shown us how every aspect of climate change disproportionately impacts those who have the least social and economic resources. The city has air inequity, where those with high incomes can purchase thousand-dollar air purifiers, while those who do not sit in their homes marinating in particulate counts that are known to be beyond hazardous. And where people like me can choose not to have surgery in a smoke-filled room, while others are giving birth to babies whose first breath will choke them.
I don’t know what I will do from here, whether having lived on the frontlines of climate collapse will mean I choose to not get pregnant again.
I know it has changed me. It has changed us all – those who have seen the fires, lost homes or breathed toxic air for weeks and months on end. It has turned an abstract fear into a concrete reality. Shown us how climate change will alter even the most mundane aspects of our lives, from our morning rituals to whether we can leave our own homes.
That our infrastructure and systems are more fragile than we would like to believe, and if we choose to parent we will have prepare our children to survive in a very different world while we ourselves try to understand how it is changing.
Gemma Carey is a researcher at the University of New South Wales. She has written for Meanjin, the Mandarin and has appeared on ABC Radio. Her memoir No Matter Our Wreckage will be published in 2020 by Allen and Unwin.