It's been an eerie start to the year here in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa. The day dawned ... except, it didn't. The air was thick and yellow-hued. The birds were silent. 'It almost looks like an Australian bushfire sky,' I thought. 'But those fires are over 2000km away in a different country. It can't be that.' But it was. It is. And it's been a very unsettling way to ring in the new decade - a visceral reminder of how precious our world is, and how connected we all are ... and how badly we are failing our own habitat and the other animals we share it with. I've seen a lot of people sending thoughts and prayers via social media, but I don't think thoughts and prayers will do a lot. What we can send - those of us with $5, or $50, or whatever to spare - is cash. And if you don't have any spare cash at this rather financially draining time of year, I have some other ideas further down.
Help fund fire services (seems crazy, you would think the Australian Government would be onto this)
Help the people displaced by fires What else can we do? Climate change has made these bushfires more catastrophic than they were in the past. It is up to all of us to do our best to reduce our impact on the environment.
As I finished this post I had to run outside to break up a cat fight. I couldn't see a single star in the sky. Photo: Christian Reusch, Flickr, 2013. Comments are closed.
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Author2023 Burns fellow Kathryn van Beek has an MA from Victoria University Wellington - Te Herenga Waka’s International Institute of Modern Letters. She is a winner of the Mindfood Short Story Competition and the Headland Prize. Her collection of short stories, Pet, is available as a podcast, and her work has also appeared in Overland, takahē, Newsroom, and the Sunday Star-Times. She lives in UNESCO City of Literature Ōtepoti Dunedin with her two rescue cats. Archives
July 2023
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