DEAR WORLD ❖ being a climate fraud
originally titled: Treading water
This piece I wrote was originally published in Island issue 170 in March, 2024, and I’ve re-published it here for ease of sharing. It explores with what it means to be a diaspora Asian contending with responsibility in climate change, and the many subtle gradations of how different places are impacted, from rich and poor suburbs to rich and poor countries.
I always felt like a fraud when it came to caring about the environment. I didn’t have a special relationship with the bush, or with water. I wasn’t a bird whisperer. When I was in the bush, I was scared of snakes. When I was out in the sun, I was walking home sweaty in a polyester uniform or squeezing myself into a rapidly thinning rectangle of shade, waiting for the bus home that was always late. I had never been an active and willing participant in my natural environment, yet had, as I grew older, decided to dedicate most of my energy to working on climate change.
Summers were sticky where I grew up. Unlike the Sydneysider dream of dripping gelato and salt spray, Western Sydney summer was stagnant, never-ending, and harshly lit with blinding white pavement. ‘The West’ can be up to 10°C hotter than the rest of Sydney because of the urban heat island effect: a catchy name for too many black roofs, wide concrete paths and a scarcity of trees. My childhood suburb was home to the rapid development meant to accommodate a quickly growing immigrant population, including many Filipinos like our family, and a broader class of people excited by the prospect of owning a massive lawn and double-story house in a rich country. Summers in Western Sydney were for reading, television, or sitting in the air-conditioned car on the way to somewhere else, because even thinking of moving was tiring. The afternoon sun trumpeting through my west-facing window made me nihilistic and acquiescent to sleep over schoolwork.
When I met Emma Bacon, founder of Sweltering Cities, an organisation focused on helping Western Sydney adapt to worsening heat, I joked that I should have received bonus marks for doing my summer exams in an un-airconditioned hall in Blacktown. She laughed and said, ‘I think you might have a point.’ Last year, Sweltering Cities surveyed Australians who regularly endure heatwaves, and those people reported feeling anxious for loved ones, isolated, claustrophobic, incapacitated by insomnia and prone to anger towards their partners1. Another recent study found that ‘an increase of 1°C in average annual temperature [was] connected to a more than 6% rise in physical and sexual domestic violence’2 in a sample of three South Asian countries, where heat is also intertwined with economic insecurity due to agricultural dependence. There is growing evidence to show that extreme heat exacerbates stress, irritability and mental illness. While it should be obvious that constant physical discomfort is agitating, it’s easy to dismiss the broader threat of deteriorating climate day-to-day when complaining about ‘bad weather’ is a mundane feature of Australian small talk.
For me, heat waves collapsed any ability to form a coherent idea or grasp an intention to act. I assumed this was what summer in Australia was like for everyone, that others were pushing through the heat while my unwillingness to work and study was a sign of laziness. I didn’t know that heat can be oppressive in a physical way.
José Rizal, the Filipino writer and nationalist whose words inspired the Philippine Revolution, wrote in his 1890 essay The Indolence of the Filipino that ‘A hot climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as cold incites to labor and action… The fact is that in tropical countries violent work is not a good thing as it is in cold countries, there it is death, destruction, annihilation.’ Rizal argued that Filipino ‘indolence’ was not a flaw of inherent character, as suggested by the Spanish occupiers, but a natural result of colonially imposed submission, which, over 300 years, had stifled local education and trade and deteriorated and demoralised its native population. In this context the Filipino was not lazy but more like a patient, expending scarce energy fighting against relentless malady. Ironically, the Europeans from cool regions who reproached the indolent colonies, travelled by carriage and arrived at their Manila offices surrounded by servants. Have things changed? According to a headline I saw the other day, maybe not so much: ‘Migrant workers toil in perilous heat to prepare for COP28 climate talks in UAE - workers from Africa and Asia labouring in 42°C heat in Dubai to build conference facilities.’
At Wylie’s baths in Coogee, my friend helps me improve my freestyle stroke, patiently, non-judgmentally. It’s 7am and there is no one else around. We do laps as the sky fills with syrupy marmalade, and I gradually relax, letting go of the compulsion to apologise for my bad form.
Swimming has been a stop-start pet project of mine for a while now. I spent countless summers staying on the sand at the beach, occasionally wading shyly 50 feet away from everyone else, and avoiding the dreaded spontaneous swim in the creek. I felt sullen about my lack of adventure, but when I dunked my head under and felt a bubble of panic float up my chest, I had no capacity to take lessons from well-meaning people who told me to ‘just stop being so afraid.’
I enrolled in adult swimming lessons. My classmates included an enthusiastic international student from China and a sheepish Asian-Australian around my age. I had thought it might be in my nature to give up – in Tagalog there is a concept of ningas kugon, which describes a type of dry grass that burns rapidly and extinguishes itself after a few seconds – but the appeal of seeing a new sunrise and a friendly face made it easy to keep going. I’m thinking of Rizal’s idea that indolence is contextual, how the heat is a welcome impetus when you’re about to jump into a pool, and a curse when you’re facing a 40-minute walk home on unshaded concrete.
Post-swim notes from my journal say ‘Still trying to lay flat, kick from hip, keep body long. A random lady with her titties out offered me advice. She said it’s easier to lay flat if you close your eyes and just feel how your body feels.’ I was ecstatic for the advice. The first time I swam alongside the fishes, I felt I had found a new community. When I learned how to evade the tricky sea urchins, I felt like a local who knew my way around. Moving smoothly in three-dimensional space, it was as if I’d unlocked outer space.
My friend says that when she first moved from Malaysia and went to school in the eastern suburbs, all the other girls in her grade were years ahead of her in swimming. The beach was a beloved and accessible feature of their routine, and many of them would cite a special, personal connection to the ocean. She tells me that she used to stay back after school and wouldn’t let herself leave until she jumped into the deep end and figured out how to tread water.
Not until I rented an overpriced apartment in Bondi did nature ever strike me as something ‘healing’, ‘joyful’, ‘spiritual’. Before that it mostly meant hostility or discomfort, but on the coast, I finally understood what it meant for Australia to be The Lucky Country. Sitting atop the rocks at Ben Buckler point at the peak of COVID-19 probably saved my life, with that vast body of water insisting that I just keep going, and going, and going. The Ocean seemed to run on a completely different sense of time, offering a reprieve from whatever incidental joy or disaster punctuated our little human lives.
In the Philippines during COVID, the Manila government created the Dolomite Beach, a manmade seashore pitched as a rehabilitative project for the benefit of Manila residents’ mental health. Detractors say its cost could have bought 637,704 full doses of AstraZeneca. Typically used for construction, the white sand – crushed dolomite sourced from a mine in Cebu – is inhospitable to native fauna and must be replenished every time the beach is washed away. Environmentalists have protested the existence of the beach, while the government claims that the mental health benefits of it ‘cannot be quantified’.
Collectively we have a confused relationship with nature. It is unclear to what extent ‘man’ should overcome versus yield to the ways of nature. Many Sydneysiders who swim at carefully curated, maintained beaches extend their right to enjoy the ocean to culling shark populations, all to make space for (human) swimming. Elsewhere I have met farmers with great ecological knowledge who reject vaccines as harmful interventions in the more intelligent ways of nature. Hiking in Scotland, I witnessed a tragic accident that was fatal to a hiker ahead of me: it took little more than a stray rock and three days of trail fatigue to cause the incident, and to stamp in my mind a much more vigilant respect for nature’s wildness.
In Western society, our idea of nature as a safe place of rejuvenation seems to be the product of marketing, reflecting a belief that we can predictably apportion nature into safe packages. It is a consumer-oriented relationship rather than an equitably respectful one: we care for nature as it benefits us, but less so for its capacity to harm us. We care for nature when it gives us life, but often ignore nature’s innate right to life. This one-sided relationship has desensitised us to nature’s capacity for chaos and danger.
In the pool, I’m learning to feel safe. A pied cormorant dives into the water and fishes gleefully for its food, happy to swim alongside the be-goggled humans after a period of close observation. The cormorant seizes its catch and tears at the fish as if it were taffy. He suns his wings, and several people coo at the sight. A lady with kind eyes bobs up above the water and points us to an octopus hiding in the rocks. It is a brighter orange than the Sydney Train station signs. I sink down to look more closely and make an effort not to step on her. I gaze at her in adoration: her tentacles curled up, eyes bulging, suckers facing out. It’s like looking at a slowly blinking baby in its cradle. like looking at a slowly blinking baby in its cradle.
After our swim we plan our next climate action meetup over coffee. We debate everything from the big picture to the details – what environmental issues to write our MPs about, how to spark curious conversations, what snacks to bring to meetings (I find homemade onigiri helps temper the bitterness of dealing with a dismissive government). Sometimes our focus is urgently specific, like writing to the Federal Environment Minister over Centennial Coal’s plans to discharge contaminated water in the Blue Mountains. Other times we focus on empowering our community, finding ways to reinforce that they do have a voice and that their stories do matter.
I occasionally dither on whether we’re shouting into the void. Still, I keep turning up because it feels better than the grief of doing nothing. Somehow, when we’re together, our individual hopelessness transforms into collective hope.
Mitzi Jonelle Tan is a 25-year-old climate activist from the Philippines. Describing her motivation for climate action, she says ‘I know what it feels like to be afraid of drowning in my own bedroom.’3 As one of the most storm-exposed countries on Earth, the Philippines is extremely vulnerable to climate change. It is also the deadliest country in Asia for climate activists, with 11 being murdered in 2022. Filipino environmental activist Natasha Tanjutco argues that Westerners always seem to be looking for a linear course of action ‘to figure out how to feel, then figure out how to act, then act. But here, we just act, and we feel things during, we feel things after, and then we act again.’4
Reading this makes me feel a dagger of shame because I see myself instantly in her words. I educate myself about climate issues calmly, diligently; the same way I eat my vegetables. I go to therapy, meditate, watch a play, plan out my career and hope it adds up to something while I turn down the alarms in my mind that say it might be too late. Too late to avoid a negative feedback loop of climate collapse. Too late to resurrect families of extinct animals. Too late to decide I’m ready to go vegetarian again. And I can turn down the alarms because I know on the deepest, most uncomfortable level, I have more space to think and act than others. By way of the country I inhabit, there are seawalls – literal and metaphoric – that protect me from the worst consequences. I recognise that these walls have been built through exploitation and punishing labour, not unlike those COP28 conference facilities. All of this is a reminder that while I have ties to my family’s country, in the landscape of climate justice, I have Australian privileges.
It’s a contradiction that also forces me to consider my allegiances. My climate justice lens is tied to family and cultural roots in a country already being ravaged by climate change, a place to which I have an emotional but little practical connection. In the locale of my own life the issue of climate disaster feels confined to a future which is still emerging. Events like the 2019 bushfires are concrete, current and distressing, but mostly the issue of climate change exists somewhere in theory. I notice that my favourite olives are pricier and harder to come by, but I do not worry that my source of income and food is going to be wiped out by worsening typhoons, with no alternative but to wake up, sow more seeds and take on more debt, the experience of farmers in Tueguegarao, my father’s home province. Climate action in Australia often feels like an act of charity rather than a matter of physical survival; it is like planting a tree, not putting out a fire.
I want to know where precisely to lay my allegiance so that I can have an obvious role to play as victim or perpetrator. I recognise that, like many people, I am somewhere in the messy middle. The artist Jenny Odell writes: ‘As physical beings, we are literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally determined by our contexts. If we can embrace that, then we can begin to appreciate our and others’ identities as the emergent and fluid wonders that they are.’5 This is what it means to be ecologically conscious. It is a jolt out of the delusion that we are isolated objects floating in space, meant to exploit our lifeless surroundings, a recognition that we are not inherently separate from each other, or compartmentalised in our identities, allegiances and responsibilities. Every action has the potential for network effects and feedback loops that create something on a level larger than one legible to an individual. It makes knowing how to act confusing, but it also makes action, big or small, deeply meaningful.
As we’re leaving the pools, a man drives out on a motorcycle. I get a sharp whiff of the gasoline sputtering out of his engine, and my mind fragments with memories of the Philippines. I remember riding as a kid, helmet-less on the back of my uncle’s motorcycle, on a road barely hugging the side of a mountain, or standing on the street in the early morning, watching the tahô vendor scoop out hot syrupy silken tofu into a cup for me as motor-tricycles and jeepneys growl past.
It is odd that while gasoline can be so violently polluting and assaulting to the senses, it doesn’t detract from the feeling I’m struck with of being at home. Even if I can’t justify why, for a moment, the smell of petrol makes me want to fight for that place.
Sweltering Cities. (2022). The 2022 Summer Survey Report. https://swelteringcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/FINAL-Summer-Survey-2022-Report.pdf
McClure, T. and Dhillon, A. (2023) ‘Climate crisis linked to rising domestic violence in south Asia, study finds.’ The Guardian. June 29. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/28/climate-crisis-linked-to-rising-domestic-violence-in-south-asia-study-finds
Tan, M. (2021). The Mainstream Climate Changgne Movement Needs To Get More Creative. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/climate-change-movement-creativity
Tolentino, J (2023). What To Do With Climate Emotions. The New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/what-to-do-with-climate-emotions
Odell, J. (2020). How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House Publishing.