Dispatch from Australia: Our reporter describes the ongoing catastrophe of record bushfires on the continent’s wildlife
Kangaroo Island volunteer firefighter Jen Child took this photograph of fellow crew members after a long day of tamping down hot spots that continue to threaten wildlife, livestock, property, and human life a week after catastrophic fires swept across the western end of the island.
By
Photograph by Jen Child
January17, 2020
3 p.m. (New Zealand time), January 5
This is the day of the tangerine sky. It is midsummer, mid-afternoon, and the sky above Auckland, New Zealand, has turned dark orange, as if in an eclipse. Drivers turn on their headlights. Worried residents call the emergency number to ask what’s happening. Smoke from Australia’s bushfires is drifting across the ocean and turning our own sky fiery. We have seen the headlines: “Australia is burning,” “Australia is on fire,” even, “Australia is committing climate suicide.” We have seen the photos: a fire tornado, evacuated townsfolk sheltering on a beach, kangaroos leaping for their lives, flames turning forests incandescent, cockatoos dropping dead out of scorching skies. And now the disaster is above our heads, eerily present though 1,400 miles away. It used to be that the symbol of climate change in the South Pacific was a drowning atoll; now it’s a burning continent.
Read more at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/01/kangaroo-island-wildfires-dispatch/
