![]() ![]() Yet, though we must act immediately, we need to imagine the aeons to come, planning for outcomes well beyond the threescore years and ten that scripture allots to a man. Photograph: Jaime PlazaĪccording to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have, perhaps, 12 years to avoid catastrophe – and one of those years has nearly passed. ![]() Wollemi pines are often described as ‘living fossils’. “ future was sold,” she explained in a speech to the British parliament, “so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money.” The emergence of Greta Thunberg as a global leader highlights the temporal inequity of climate change, a burden shrugged off by the old on to the young. Fossil fuels depend on million-year old geological processes so that, in a sense, industrial society runs by burning natural history. “Time is money,” warned Benjamin Franklin, and the extractive industries built fortunes taking him at his word. For us, however, it means flux and uncertainty, with new research suggesting the oceans could rise as much as two metres by 2100. Lord Byron considered the sea “the image of eternity”. More than anything, I think, climate change politicises time. “As the world becomes more unstable in the grip of vast and all-pervasive change,” Falconer writes, “it’s difficult to discern exact chronologies, relationships and meaning.” The novelist Delia Falconer discusses climate change ushering in “a new age of signs and wonders”, in which the most commonplace occurrences (a warm evening, the absence of birdlife at a particular spot, an unexpected change in vegetation) feel fraught with ecological portent. In our times, unseasonal temperatures – even when pleasant – fill me with a vague dread. I can’t bring myself to complain, given the prolonged warmth of Victoria’s autumn. On the day of my visit, Melbourne is blustery, so much so that Lee warns via email not to expect “much GT action”, since Wilbur and his slightly younger companion (perhaps 90), Little John, both dislike the cold. The one on the left is Jonathan, estimated to have hatched in 1832 and still living in 2019. Two giant tortoises photographed in the grounds of Government House in St Helena in the 1880s.
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