In the three weeks following the anxiety of New Year’s Eve, where the NSW South Coast community huddled together with fear at their doorstep, the Australian community could think of little else.

I didn’t expect this to happen...yet. When Greta Thunberg previously talked about ‘unimaginable, unprecedented weather’ I would think of images of palm trees bending in the wind, of hail stones as big as golf balls and black trees burning from dirt to sky. Now, when I hear her talk, or maybe plea would be a better word, I see images of the entire sky turning black with thick rolling clouds of ash in the middle of the day. I think of children submerged in the water in Mallacoota with gas masks on. I think of water tanks on farms boiling from the heat, baby kangaroos burning to a crisp & birds falling from the sky from exhaustion. I think of the cracks in the dry mud from the most severe lack of rain in decades. I think of the way the heat hits you and the flecks of ash settle into the corners of your eye while you cover your mouth to go outside. Why would you go outside? You left the candles in your car and you need to go and get them because you’ve been told the power is about to go out.

So what now? I think I’d like to be FOR something this year. Wouldn’t that be nice? Not to be anti-(insert politician here), anti- Adani, anti- water sell offs, anti- Fossil Fuel consumption. I’d like to be FOR something. For art, dance, music, clean air, wildflowers, more bees, more time in nature, more walking and more reusing and recycling. What a great world to be in.

We can all virtue signal by posting things on Facebook showing how much we care, how much we plan on being better and doing better, but I think we need to find new ways of helping. Until we can demonstrate the changes in our home, we cannot have the scope to think beyond our front door and to the large scale global changes that are required. So, here’s some brilliant news about changes being made around the world to brighten your day.

- China will have completely banned plastic bags by the end of 2020 and is on the way to banning all single use plastic by 2025 - 2018 saw the largest annual increase in global renewable generation capacity in history - The sea turtle population has increased by 980% thanks to the Endangered Species Act - Holland has covered their bus stops with mini gardens, for bees to take refuge - Peru has committed to ending palm-oil deforestation by 2021 - In Rome you can now pay for public transport with plastic bottles - A man in India has planted one tree every day for 35 years, and has created a forest larger than Central Park as a result - The Humpback Whale population has increased from a few hundred to 25,000 - A robot is delivering coral ‘babies’ to help restore the Great Barrier Reef - A scientist in Mexico has created ‘plastic’ from cactus juice that biodegrades in a month & is safe to ingest - Canada has passed a bill that makes it illegal to keep whales, dolphins and porpoises in captivity for entertainment - South Korea once recycled just 2% of it’s food waste. Now it recycles 95% thanks to smart bins and biodegradable bags. - If 1 million people purchased their next item of clothing second hand it would save 6million tonnes of carbon pollution entering the atmosphere.

Daily Ceremony acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of the land we work on, and we pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.

#climateaction #bethechange #australianbushfires #globalwarming