NATURE QUOTE OF THE DAY
“In answer to the question of how they go on, the scientists all say the same thing: because of the students.”
Australian National University science writer Tabitha Carvan asked scientists how they keep going in the face of existential dread.
PEAK GRAUN OP-ED BURNOUT HAS REACHED THE ANTIPODES
INSULATION AND AIR CONDITIONING NOT SO MUCH
Paralysed by climate despair, I’m finding it hard to think about the end of the world and what to make for dinner –... so I decide to interview scientists from different fields – the health sector, the human environment, and the climate system – about how to exist in the face of existential dread.
I think it started last summer, when our house became so hot during the heatwave that we spent an entire day in the air conditioning at Belconnen Mall. I mean, the whole day. At around 5pm, flopped on some wipe-down, synthetically upholstered benches outside Kmart, our kids begged to go home.
“Not yet.”
We waited until after dinner, when the air was crackling with lightning, and the temperature finally crawling back into the thirties. We opened the door to our house,... with no insulation, and only one dawdling ceiling fan for cooling.
Standing on our doorstep, engulfed by the heat of the house, I knew we could not continue to live here, not if this summer was the ‘new normal’. The idea of this place as our home was over.
But when I think about it some more, maybe it started when my son was three and deep into his dinosaur phase. “Will humans go extinct too?” he would ask, over and over again, in the way of three-year-olds. “Will the world ever end?”
“Maybe,” I would say. “But in millions and millions of years from now...”
Then there was the heatwave and the bushfires in Tasmania, and the floods in Townsville, and news that all the insects could disappear, and the Great Barrier Reef turned into what looks like a pile of bones on the seafloor. And it didn’t feel so impossible anymore.
And my son, now six, is asking again if humans will go extinct. He’s left behind dinosaurs and moved onto a strange, gothic obsession with abandoned places.
