OUR scorching summer is over. There has been a bit of rain, a softening and brightening of the air. There is great relief in this.
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But the deep unease brought on by drought and fire is unlikely to dissipate so quickly.
We seemed to cross some sort of threshold over Christmas and new year. Scientific warnings of the effects of climate change - longer and more intense fire seasons, droughts followed by extreme storms and rainfall - were all coming to pass. But it was all too real, all too close to home.
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Meanwhile, the burden of drought, fire, flood, feral pests and habitat loss is affecting the iconic animals that many of us grew up with, that filled our imaginations and childhood picture books. The koala and kangaroo, the platypus and wombat, the Murray cod and the yabby are all facing a gloomy future.
So how do we cope with this, emotionally? Denial is one way. For some, it's enough to hold their hands over their ears and say "la la la" when confronted by scientific predictions.
Others quote a few lines from the famous Dorothea Mackellar poem about droughts and flooding rains, as if this somehow negates the piles of peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Another way of dealing with it is to see the current situation as a series of economic, political and social opportunities. It's about stepping into a low-carbon future replete with wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, permaculture and water-saving strategies. We can do this!
But even for those of us trying to take this road, there's grief and loss to deal with. I know the coral reefs and schools of giant mulloway I knew as a child in northern Western Australia are just a shadow of their former selves. The world of teeming natural abundance that I was born into has gone forever.
An Australian researcher, Glenn Albrecht, coined a word for this feeling: solastalgia. It refers to grief for natural places that will never be the same again.
And then there's "eco-anxiety", which the American Psychiatric Association describes as "a chronic fear of environmental doom".
It's important to take this disquiet seriously. We need to talk about it, read about it, write about it. We need to take action where we can, but we also need to acknowledge that we've already lost so much of what we had.
