AUSTRALIA ON FIRE
This was Raphaël’s last public speech. He made it at an XR rally in January 2020 in response to the Australian bush fires, which were still raging at the time of his death in February. By the following month, the fires had burned an estimated 186,000 square kilometers, destroyed over 5,900 buildings, and killed at least 34 people. Up to three billion terrestrial vertebrates were affected and some endangered species were believed to be driven to extinction. There decisive figures on the number of creatures killed, but some estimates put it at one billion.
Extinction Rebellion, can you hear me? I want to start by telling you you’re not alone today. People are protesting at Australian Embassies around the world this week. And right now in Australia, people are lining the streets in their tens of thousands. In Sydney 30,000 protestors are demanding, shouting, screaming two things: Fund the Firies, and Climate Action Now. What do we think of that?
I have to tell you something hard to hear. Donations won’t put the fires out, or stop them from happening again. People put fires out. People like the wildland firefighters risking their lives right now to protect lives, property, and ecosystems from annihilation. I want to talk about why Governments paying green sector workers to safeguard ecosystems might prevent this tragedy repeating itself.
I’m Fox and I’m a wildlife biologist. I’m wearing some of my field gear today, some of the clothes I might wear when I’m on surveys or patrols on a job. And yeah, I might look like an idiot wearing snake boots here in London, but you know what, unlike the Australian Government I’m here to stand for something.
I’m one of the founders of the Wildwork, which is short for the Wildlife and Wilderness Workers Network – we’re ecologists, activists, land defenders, conservationists, climate scientists, park rangers, anti-poaching soldiers…. And we’re also wildland firefighters.
Like many people in Australia now, I’ve also ended up as a volunteer putting fires out in the Bolivian Amazon. I wasn’t expecting it, but when people light up the rainforest just a few kilometres from where you live, and the government doesn’t send anyone to help you, you put your boots on and go out with jerry cans of water. You don’t have a choice, because your home is next.
Now there’s 13,000 highly-skilled people in the Wildwork, and do you wanna know the number one reason people join? They’re looking for a paid job. Most of them are stuck working in cafes or bars trying to make a living while the planet burns. Let me tell you why this is a problem.
This is Australian volunteer firie Andrew O’Dwyer and his daughter Charlotte – she’s one year old. Just days before Christmas, Andrew and another firefighters, both volunteer firefighters in New South Wales were killed as their fire truck was hit by a falling tree amidst the blazes. Both were fathers to young daughters. Charlotte wore her dad’s firefighting helmet to his funeral on January 7th. I want to pause for a moment so you can all get that image in your minds. Prime Minister Scott Morrison was under a lot of pressure and he attended the funeral. I hope the sight of that little orphaned girl wearing her dead father’s helmet plagues his nightmares for the rest of his life.
The friends and colleagues of those firefighters – in some cases pregnant women and whole families signed up to protect their communities – they will go back into those fire frontlines this week, facing toxic smoke and unprecedented infernos – unpaid.
Now let me ask you something.
If your house was on fire here in London, and you called the firefighters, do you think they would be volunteers? Are our firefighters unpaid?
When you get sick and you get treated by a nurse or doctor, are they unpaid?
When you’re in serious trouble and you call an ambulance, are the emergency medical technicians crowdfunding to pay for their bandages and defibrillators?
The police that stand around you now maintaining order, are they volunteers?
What about the military? Are British soldiers unpaid?
What about Australia’s soldiers – are they unpaid?
So why in living hell, quite literally, are 90% of Australia’s firefighters unpaid?
Since when was defending your community and your country from burning to the ground a volunteer job?
To briefly sum up the devastation, at least 26 people have died, over 2000 homes have been destroyed, and an area larger than Scotland has burned. Smoke is choking cities around Australia, causing breathing problems as far away as New Zealand. Effects on wildlife have been disastrous. In two days in northern Queensland, 23,000 spectacled flying foxes—or one-third of the entire population—fell from the trees and died from heat exhaustion. Conservative estimates suggest at least 480 million birds, mammals and reptiles have been killed or affected in the blazes, not counting bats; more recent figures suggest around a billion animals have died overall. ‘We are witnessing an ecosystem in collapse,’ said Griffith University’s Professor Fran Sheldon.
Ecologists say they’ve likely resulted in multiple extinctions of Australia’s unique species, increasing the likelihood of further ecosystem collapses.
I’m a scientist, but I won’t rattle on any more facts and figures about the science to you or the Australian Government, because you know the science, and the politicians haven’t listened for decades. But I will tell you that the ecological and climate disaster of Australia’s bushfires, like so many others, was preventable – and we know exactly how. Hindsight is an ugly and bitter thing. But if any good learning and positive change can come of this, we should embrace it with open arms. If we don’t, we’ll repeat the same mistakes, and suffer the consequences all over the world.
The repeated call from protesting Australians enraged at their Government? ‘Fund the Firies – Climate Action Now’. They know that this is in great part a result of climate breakdown and poor management by governments. They recognise that the brave firefighters who put their lives on the line to protect wildlife, bushland, property and human lives should be paid for their work. It’s a shameful insult that these people, who provide a vital service to society and our planet, have to work tirelessly for long unpaid hours as volunteers in extremely dangerous conditions.
It took the government months of destruction to come up with a half-baked and inadequate response to the unpaid firefighter situation: giving people 20 days’ leave from their day jobs to fight fires, and pledging USD $7.5M to aerial firefighting. It’s a pathetic failure to adapt when we know the costs to affected communities dwarf this, and the worst is yet to come. Where to get the money for all these wages? It’s simple: end Australia’s suicidal fossil fuel subsidies, which reach USD $20 Billion (AUD 29 Bn) – over $1,300 AUD per taxpayer, squandered on a suicidal policy. Tell me, why the hell should Australians pay their taxes if that’s what their money is wasted on, and the firefighters are lucky if they see peanuts?
All the fires did was bring this absurdity into the orange light. The system’s ugliness is now plain for the world to see. But that recognition must go further. It’s not just Australia’s firefighters who have been striving to protect us from the worst of disasters like this one. Let me tell you who those people are.
It’s wildland firefighters risking their lives tackling the blazes in the Amazon, California, Siberia, and all around the globe – a job often pushed onto prison inmates that promises “hard work, low pay, miserable conditions … and more!” These are skilled people, often working as volunteers in dangerous conditions, risking their lives. Yet in Brazil, the state even hit back against volunteer firefighters, imprisoning them on suspicion of starting the fires.
It’s the climate scientists who stacked data for years to predict the wildfires, and warned us this would happen – yet have been ignored and questioned for decades.
It’s the Indigenous land defenders whose deep knowledge and traditional practices of land management, including controlled burns, could have prevented this disaster. But these communities have been swept aside and persecuted for generations.
It’s the rangers and ecologists monitoring wilderness health year on year, flagging up species losses, ecosystem disintegration and destruction. Those same people, who have eyes on the wild every day, are too often silenced, not consulted when the big decisions are made about how we manage nature.
It’s the conservationists fighting tirelessly, on the ground, in the lab and in Parliament, to save these species from extinction and restore ecosystems to a stable state. Yet they are underfunded and sidelined as troublemakers.
It’s the anti-poaching units, first scouts and first lines of defence against wildlife crime, going up against heavily armed poachers to protect nature at all costs. But although they risk their lives to uphold the law and protect the ecotourist economy, they are bypassed by corruption in the state and police forces who disregard their evidence.
It’s the environmental journalists and science communicators searching for these hard-to-find stories, and bringing the frontline reality to the public eye in cities like this one, where we’ve been disconnected from the natural world. But those truths are never given the coverage they deserve, washed out of print by stories more helpful to the narratives of the billionaire press.
It’s wildlife rescue workers and veterinarians working sleeplessly to save the millions of animals affected by these fires in Australia, and those affected by poaching and illegal trafficking for animal parts and exotic pets elsewhere. In the veterinary profession, hit by some of the highest depression and suicide rates of any field, we cannot imagine the hardship they are going through now, being forced to euthanise thousands of animals too badly burned to save.
A lot of these jobs protecting wildlife and ecosystems are working-class roles. They’re usually taken on by the nation’s poor, local people and especially the Indigenous – many of whom have no choice but to protect their communities and homelands. I want to salute here the work of Amazonia’s Forest Guardians, the grassroots Indigenous land defenders who patrol the rainforest expelling illegal miners and loggers where their government has failed to protect their homelands. You may know this Forest Guardian’s face – Paulo Paulino Guajajara was shot in the face by illegal loggers in an ambush. And in fact, we cannot ignore that it’s very often women protecting wildlife. They’re breaking down gender stereotypes by making conservation one of the few majority-female STEM fields. Women are even putting themselves on the male-dominated, violent and militarised frontline against poaching and wildlife crime. We have to acknowledge here pioneering work by groups like the Black Mambas, and the Akashinga, Africa’s first all-female anti-poaching unit: they’re indigenous, vegan, armed and dangerous – they tick so many awesome boxes I’ve run out of fingers to count them on – and they will stop at nothing to catch poachers killing elephants and trading ivory.
Like Australia’s volunteer firefighters, these people are providing a vital service which protects us from the worst impacts of ecological disasters. They are both prevention and cure, climate mitigation and adaptation. Without them, the situation would be so much worse.
And yet, so many of these reputably-qualified and highly-skilled people are working for free or peanuts, doing long unpaid internships, volunteering part-time, or doing it unnoticed as part of their daily lives. The fact they work out of passion is not an excuse to allow a system in which they work for nothing.
Thousands are stuck searching for the few paid jobs that exist, which paradoxically, are not easily accessible to people from disadvantaged backgrounds. These jobs are often working in big NGOs funded by donations, or they’re pay-to-volunteer projects which exploit passionate but inexperienced workers looking to build their CV. It’s an unustainable model for these ecological projects and for the individuals starting out their careers. Many workers give up on green jobs altogether because the work can’t support them financially, let alone provide long-term job security or feed a family.
This is already unacceptable, but it gets worse: working conditions are extremely difficult. It’s physically tough and mentally challenging. There’s a lot of danger involved: getting burnt in fires, catching parasites and diseases, and even the risk of attacks from the wildlife you are striving to protect.
There’s long hours at unsociable times. Work takes place in remote locations far from family, including during traditional holidays. In a wildlife sanctuary, in an anti-poaching unit or in a vet clinic, you can’t just go home for Christmas and leave the animals without your care.
Worse yet, many of these workers are actively persecuted for defending the environment. That’s because their work directly confronts lucrative polluting and extractive industries like poaching, mining, agribusiness and fossil fuels. Environmental defenders are brought to court, threatened with violence and evictions, labelled as terrorists, unjustly imprisoned, and murdered for their work. At least 164 land and environmental defenders were murdered last year according to Global Witness, down from 207 deaths in 2018. That’s three to four killed every week, a rate that’s been described as “war-zone levels”.
But governments can turn this around, for people and planet. If we provide State funding for workers who protect and restore climate and ecology, we could provide countless skilled and good-quality jobs. It would reduce unemployment rates by taking all those lost job-searchers into stable careers.
Best of all, it’ll massively increase the number of people working in green sectors who are actively tackling the ongoing climate and ecological crisis. The reward-to-investment ratio is off the charts. It’ll have massive long-term benefits for the job market and the stability of local and global economies. If governments fail to make this change, the impacts on our society are so dire I can’t do them justice in this speech. As we often say, “There are no jobs on a dead planet.” Not in the coal industry, nowhere.
The Green New Deal and politicians like AOC who back it, they mention a just transition for workers in carbon-intensive sectors, and millions of new climate jobs. Often we’re convinced with pretty pictures of engineers working on solar panels or wind turbines. But some of the best ways to tackle the crisis involve natural climate solutions: that means protecting, restoring and rewilding ecosystems for both mitigation and adaptation to the coming changes. Allowing nature to recover and heal from the damage humans have caused could suck untold amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and let wildlife bounce back, not to mention restabilising our food and water systems.
In the GND’s millions of jobs, the boots on the ground protecting nature, ecology and climate are too often forgotten. That has to change: we need these people more than ever. As we’ve seen in Australia and elsewhere, when weather patterns break down and ecosystems collapse, it’s not only our wild places and animal species that are threatened. When they die, we die, because our society and economy are based on ecology. The living planet sustains our food, our water, our way of life. As the planet’s ecology is degraded and social inequity increases, our property, our lives, our children, our social order and entire civilisations are under threat – we risk collapse into chaos.
Australia is on fire. Now let me ask you something: Are we in a climate emergency?I hope the Aussie government can hear you, because according to them, this is not an emergency. What do you think of that, Rebels?In a climate emergency, green sector workers are our emergency service workers. They risk their lives to protect us all. They should be paid, supported and respected. It’s time for Governments to accept that saving the planet is worth paying for, and coal expansion is not.
So let’s tell them, Rebels: Fund the Firies, Climate Action Now!