CLIMATE CHAOS ARRIVES TWICE

Jul 8

Most people still experience climate breakdown as anticipation—abstract, distant, safely unreal. But millions are already living it as memory: heat, fire, flood, loss, and aftermath etched into nervous systems and daily life. They do not live with the possibility. They live with climate chaos fingerprints already pressed into their bodies and their memories.

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Climate breakdown is now being lived through bodies. Photographer: Ekkasit A Siam/Shutterstock

It wasn’t the wildfire that shook my core, that rewrote my sense of self. Not the sixty-metre flames. Not the showering hell-fire still raining embers across our landscape. Yes, that was a big, terrible event. But, it had shape and form. I could understand it.

My soul became wounded—untethered—while standing in a familiar space rendered desolate, monotone, and utterly, profoundly silent. Not a bird, not a hum. Not a single living sound, save Earth’s sad sigh. The giant trees along our creek-line stood as tall, blackened skeletons from their toes to their tips. Where once hills were dense with greens and ochres, now they were covered by tree bones, with drifts of white ash at their feet. It was a landscape rendered entirely mute. Not even the wind blew. From horizon to horizon was a coil of thick, ghostly demise. In that moment, I knew the world I had loved would never return.

At my feet lay the remains of an eagle’s charred skeleton. Parts of its spine and the bones of one shoulder. I’d known this soul. With their mate they had circled above our heads for seasons as we’d stood within our vines. We had watched them teach their young to fly and hunt, from the top of a giant swinging tree. They probably died mid-flight, fleeing the firestorm. I will never know how they fell, but I am haunted in my imagination.

The bodies of hundreds of smaller birds were scattered across the paddock. In fences were the twisted, tormented remains of too many animals for my heart to contemplate. I averted my gaze. It was too much to absorb. Yet, my moment of reckoning still raced towards me.

I turned to watch Geoff walk up the vineyard’s hill, bending slowly every few steps to caress his fire-blackened vines. His movement was tentative, achingly gentle. As if fearful of heaping greater harm upon an already dreadful injury. Our house was gone. Our sheds were gone. Our orchard a charred ruin. Our vegetable garden and everything across our whole farm rendered to ash. Nothing but death remained. And, here we stood in this vineyard—a place of ten years of hard labour and love.

As I watched, he stopped and slowly stood. Face toward a distant horizon, his expression caved violently inward.

I felt his silent howl vibrate down the hill—and my soul shattered.

Five years later, I still return to that hillside. I still smell ash. I still feel the silence. And the echo of that silent howl.

There is a moment when climate chaos stops being something you know and becomes something you carry. It is not always a dramatic moment of flames or floodwater. Sometimes it is a week of frightening heat when the nights don’t cool. When your body cannot recover. When the weather you trusted begins to feel unfamiliar. The threshold is different for every person. But the crossing is the same.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that moment and climate breakdown this week, prompted by three important pieces exploring climate awareness and deflection from Kira Thomsen-Cheek, (Comparisons Are Odious), The Salvage Signal (What if It Never Happens?), and Jessica Hetherington (Danger Season: Let’s Stop Calling it Summer). This essay seeks to honour and build on their messages, as we all face escalating climate chaos together.

I have come to understand that climate breakdown arrives twice. First in the imagination. Then in the body. It is the difference between reading the weather and standing inside the trauma as it breaks over your skin. And between them lies a dangerous and confusing territory: the moment when the body begins to understand before the mind is ready to admit what is happening.

The first arrival is mediated through forecasts, models, probability projections, Substack essays. It sits inside the news reports of weather events and climate disasters elsewhere in the world. In the listing of the death toll of people we’ll never know. Of heat indices. Of storm strength. Of acres burned. It’s described in conditional terms: could, may, likely, expected.

The climate reporting most Substack readers see weights toward the Northern Hemisphere, not because other regions are absent from science, but because land is unevenly distributed across the planet and climate scientists measure the heat of the landmass in the north. When it hot in the north, they speak up. Yet. by the time the ‘super’ El Niño is ramping up the northern hemisphere will be entering it’s cooler period, so the escalating heat, and storms, and fires will be happening in the global south far from mainstream news. The climate crisis has never been geographically democratic. And the fate of the majority are not newsworthy to the north. What is visible in global reporting is not the full system of harm, and what is scientifically measured does not automatically translate into shared emotional understanding. This all conspires to keep understanding superficial.

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Fog sat deep in the valley. The sun was up but made only the gentlest impression across the treetops. Five months had passed. It had rained and our fields, newly verdant green, were cloaked with a layer of deep, white mist with the skeletons of dead branches thrusting through.

The trees that stood just outside the door of our small shipping container home remained deep, charred black. They will be forever black, I guessed. A flush of vibrant growth hung close to their branches in a desperate bid to survive. It infuriated me how the conservation movement wanted to celebrate this flush as evidence of ‘recovery’. These were not happy trees. They were fighting to survive and repair deep burns; to build themselves anew, just like all victims of trauma. Many of them didn’t make it.

It was not the first time, or the last, that I stood with one hand on the closest arboreal friend and whispered ‘I am deeply sorry’. I still perform this apology today.

My phone pinged with well-meaning messages. Strangers celebrating the ‘wonder of nature bouncing back’. Past visitors remembering their trip and sharing pictures of scenes that no longer existed. They smothered me with hope. Messages peppered with emoticons: hearts and smiling faces. Chirps about visiting ‘post pandemic’, before seguing into how tough their travel-less life was, stuck inside their homes. Climate chaos had ripped my world apart, but, ‘cheer up’, they quipped. ‘In time, this will pass’ they said. Their messages rasped. They compared my experience with their projected wisdom that the world stays the same. They forced a veneer of polite happiness onto each day, and I was too tired. Too angry.

In that first year I learned something cruel about the experience of a major climate events. The hardest part is not always surviving the threat or the disaster. Sometimes it is surviving the distance between what actually happened and what others believe happened. I’ve been watching this unfold again in real-time this season as deep, dangerous heat has descended on previously cool regions. Heat kills. It’s deadly serious, and is a fast road to other runaway dangers like wildfire and crop collapses. Heat will soon be our ever present collective nightmare. I know many people have just lived through their own climate reckoning moment.

Perhaps this heatwave was your moment. Perhaps it arrived not with flames on the horizon, but with a temperature your body could not understand. Perhaps it was the first night when sleep would not come. The first morning when stepping outside felt hostile. Dangerous. The first time you looked at a weather map and felt fear instead of curiosity.

But, this experience won’t be seen by others, because what often follows a dangerous climate event or a disaster is misrecognition—the failure to correctly perceive another person’s lived experience. In the context of climate chaos, it’s sickening to watch and worse to experience. For those who have not lived through a climate disaster (like Europe’s recent wildfires)—or sustained exposure to extreme environmental stress (like Europe and the UK’s recent heat dome)—there is an expectation that life will quickly revert to the norm. But for those inside the experience, there is no return.

The landscape of their life has changed. Their nervous system has changed. Their sense of safety has been rewritten. When told to move on and quit whining, they experience a form of erasure. People who have not lived through the rupture underestimate how deeply it etches reality—how it alters memory, attention, and the baseline sense of what is safe. There is a violence in this mismatch: the assumption that because the threat is no longer visible, it is no longer present.

It’s present, believe me. Permanently now. The disaster ends. The body does not let the pain go. PTSD, anxiety, depression, displacement stress, and long-term psychological impacts are not anticipatory fears. They are consequences of exposure. They begin in bodies trying to adjust to environments that no longer behave predictably. Heat that does not ease. Air that carries smoke instead of distance. Seasons that no longer hold their former shape.

And its set to get a lot worse. Where once we had a wildfire and then months of nothing out of the ordinary, extreme events are no longer separated in time or meaning. Not isolated moments. The are escalating and they are overlapping. The conditions of a warming system expressing itself in multiple directions at once. The significance is not any single event. It is simultaneity. Climate breakdown rippling across the globe. Heat, drought, fire, and flood interact and amplify one another as compound extremes.

But we don’t see all this because climate disasters are unevenly reported in media ecosystem. Events in Europe, North America, and the UK are seen, while disasters in Africa, South Asia, and the Southern Americas disappear from attention cycles quickly, producing a distorted perception of the continuity of what’s actually happening. Not because the impacts are uneven. Because attention is. This is not simply a media problem. It is the psychological architecture of distance—where emotional proximity determines what is believed, and emotional distance determines what is ignored. Distant is abstract. Nearby is urgent. And what falls outside sustained attention begins to disappear from emotional reality altogether. The result is not just informational imbalance, but emotional geography—a map of what is allowed to matter.

Simultaneity, continuity, compound extremes.

*** * ***

Standing in the ashes in the months after the wildfire, I clung hard to my devotion to the conservation movement, even while the evidence of my experience screamed rejection of its foundations. I was trapped inside a cognitive dissonance loop, and it hurt. Heart shattered. Brain in pain. More than thirty years as a professional and activist on the environmental front lines. My sole, driven focus. I had given my life to something I believed would protect the living world. Then I discovered it could not.

I could feel my soul speaking before my brain caught up. It was already too late to save the world as we know it. The wildfire revealed that no park, lofty agreement, or strategic goal could defend an ecosystem from extreme climate chaos. All the campaigning, the traveling, the praising, the performance operated from inside the machine of harm. Pitiful. Incremental. Negligent. Our global community—our entire lives—were so deeply entrenched in a soulless economic growth frame we could not unpack in time.

I was waking to the reality that what was needed was radical adaptation. But to speak those words out loud was to commit myself to the marginalised and dismissed fringe. For months, I was terrified of speaking because there was no safe place to stand. If I was wrong, I would lose the community that had been my life’s work. I was fearful that mt thirty years of commitment might be reduced to the story of someone who had ‘lost perspective’. But if I was right, if the collapse was arriving faster than people wanted to believe, then protecting my reputation was a form of betrayal. Silence would become complicity.

But my inner purge had started and I had no option. I spoke the words (I wrote a book) and pleaded with my colleagues to change course. And, the environment movement recoiled. No public denunciations or dramatic confrontations. Just quiet cruelties. My warning became whispered evidence that I was emotional, untethered, unreliable. The people I had stood beside for decades stepped away. Turned their backs. I had spoken the words I believed were true—and in doing so, I had made myself homeless (again).

Seasons passed while I stared vacantly into despair, contemplating self-destruction.

It seemed my whole life’s effort was rendered useless.

Until it was not.

I tell my story again and again because I recognise the courage it takes to speak from inside climate chaos. There is no safety in this landscape. Those who write from the frontlines are often standing in terrain that others cannot yet see—a terrain shaped by experience, not anticipation. It is a landscape of grief, fear, confusion, and profound recalibration. I know what it is to stand there. I know what it is to wonder whether anyone else can see what has happened. I do not want people standing in that place to feel alone.

Because there is a fundamental difference between anticipation and experience.

Anticipation can be held at a distance. It can be analysed, debated, measured, and quietly set aside because the body has not yet been asked to carry its weight.

Experience changes everything.

Once climate chaos enters the body, the world is rearranged. Safety is no longer assumed. Weather is no longer neutral. The future is no longer somewhere ahead waiting to arrive. It has already walked in the door and sat down at the table.

Every time climate chaos imprints on a life, it leaves something behind—not only burned forests, flooded streets, altered landscapes, and broken systems, but a residue that settles into memory itself. The land carries what happened. The body carries what happened, too. Nothing fully repairs back to what it was. It only layers forward.

Climate chaos arrives twice. First in the imagination. Then in the body.

The first arrival asks us to understand. The second demands that we bear witness. And millions of people are now standing at that threshold.

Some are still waiting for climate breakdown to become real. Some are feeling the first fracture—the moment when weather stops feeling ordinary, when heat stops feeling temporary, when the familiar world begins to feel uncertain. Their bodies have begun registering what their minds are still struggling to accept.

And some are already carrying the memories of what climate chaos has taken. They are not describing a future. They are living with a lost past pressed into their bodies and their memories.

The danger is not only climate breakdown itself. It is the distance between what is happening and what people are still willing to feel. It is the space where suffering can remain invisible, where warnings can be dismissed, and where people are left carrying impossible realities alone.

And the Earth can not wait for humanity to become comfortable with the truth.

Solidarity & Soil
Margi

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References

I usually resist references in my Substack essays, because I’ve been writing academically for a lifetime and frankly I am bored with it. I hope that readers can critically analyse and research for themselves. Here, I write essays … not research papers or news reports.

But, I respect I make some claims in this piece and would like to stave off the inevitable ‘prove it’ comments getting in the way of discussion, so here is a short list of a few papers that fed my thinking. Knock yourselves out:

My ‘super’ El Niño commitment

In the year ahead, I will publish a regular climate ledger at the end of my essays, documenting unfolding climate disasters as they occur across the world—not only those that dominate media attention in the global north. The intention is simple: to help readers resist forgetting.

Climate breakdown is not episodic. It is continuous, uneven, and accelerating. And what feels distant is often only a matter of attention, not geography. Just because it has not reached you yet does not mean it is not already happening.

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References

My ‘super’ El Niño commitment

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