About

I’m Nicole. From the south coast of WA. A novice writer, but experienced sustainability geek. An ocean swimmer and nature lover. 

A bit over thirty years ago I was leaving school to study environmental science, on the wave of global interest in sustainable development. Our Common Future, published in the late 1980s, was cautious about the relatively new science of climate change, but warned multiple times that:  

More widespread climatic changes are likely to emerge within the foreseeable future as the accumulation of ‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere leads to global warming early in the next century.

Twenty years ago I was back doing post-graduate study in sustainability and had an academic paper published about Australia’s abysmal response to the Kyoto protocol. 

Ten years ago I was back at Murdoch University again, this time as a lecturer in sustainability (still there) and had an opinion piece published in the Drum online about climate change denial.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that my entire working life, and much of my voluntary work, has been a response to the ecological crisis, which in those three decades has only deepened, despite the increasingly strident warnings.

And yet, all of my work feels like nowhere near enough. For years I have been feeling almost paralysed in terms of how to respond to the reality of the climate emergency now unfolding and how to deal with the ecological grief that pervades my life like a soft but insistent drone.

All the evidence suggests we have just over a decade to begin a rapid and dramatic transformation of our economy, energy systems, and transport systems in order to achieve the reduction in carbon emissions required to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.

I have to try something, anything, everything I can do to take action on climate change. Even if it does feel pathetically futile and highly unlikely to succeed. In another decade, if we’ve done nothing, then it will be the time to wallow in despair.