Essay by Eric Worrall
Adam Gottschalk, a freshly minted Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics, lamenting the lack of urgency in addressing climate change.
I start my first job as the world careers and threatens what enriches my life
By Adam Gottschalk FEBRUARY 18, 2024
This essay is about beginning a career at this time, in this climate.
I am 21 years old and a university student. It is 2023, early autumn. I am starting my first office job. It’s a government job: a short-term, part-time internship in the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (a long name with a clumsy acronym, “DCCEEW”).
DCCEEW is doing important work. My team assists the financial sector to redirect capital towards activities that benefit biodiversity. They call these activities “nature-positive”.
Everyone in my team is positive about nature.
It is the middle of winter and I am reading an article by one of Australia’s leading climate scientists which says, basically, that because of the El Nino event just begun, the Great Barrier Reef could die this year.
This year.
…
It is the end of winter and I am going to Lady Elliot Island tomorrow with my dad. Wikipedia tells me that Lady Elliot is the southernmost coral cay of the Great Barrier Reef. It has waters that are “particularly rich in sea life”.
…
If there is anything I wish more people understood, it is this urgency. It hangs over all.
…
Later, as our plane banks away from the island, I see a whale surface, glisten, blow. The water sprays up, then the whale sinks below.
Adam Gottschalk is an Anne Kantor Fellow at the Australia Institute in 2024. He holds a Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics and a Bachelor of Arts (Environmental Studies) from The Australian National University.
For starters Adam, I’d like to compliment you on your writing style, it’s impressively clear and expressive. Perhaps titles like author, politician or journalist will feature in your future?
But there is a reason why when brutal dictators want foot soldiers for their great societal transformation or cultural revolution, they pick young people to be the vanguard of their movement. Young people tend to take things literally, and accept what they are told by authority figures at face value. Young people haven’t developed a lifetime habit of always questioning what they are told.
The Great Barrier Reef is in no danger of dying, at most it will change location a little. The reef is composed of an organism which has survived for at least 200 million years, through unimaginably catastrophic global extinction events and disasters, including the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs.
The reason that coral is so good at surviving great upheavals is that while adult coral is immobile, coral spawn is immensely mobile.
Every so often corals spawn. Corals produce immense clouds of microscopic eggs and sperms, which germinate into highly mobile microscopic coral larvae which seek out new places to colonise.
The Great Barrier Reef itself has moved location countless times over the millennia, the reef has only been at its current location for a few thousand years. Some Australian shorelines are composed of coral which lived thousands of years ago, during the Holocene Optimum, when the sea level was significantly higher than today. The Great Barrier Reef had and has no trouble changing location when climate change impacts sea conditions, such as when the world cooled after the end of the Holocene Optimum, and the sea waters retreated to today’s level.
And in fact, Australian coral coverage hit a record high a record high in 2022 – as an organism which is responsive to conditions, coral cover fluctuates wildly when conditions change.
I’m not accusing the scientist who you think told you the reef would die this year of lying, but I am suggesting you need to do more research, so you can form a more complete picture of what is really happening.
I wish you luck. Someone with your talent for writing has an immense opportunity to do some good for the world. Please do your utmost to do your research, and don’t just take people’s word for it – make sure you gather all the facts, and form your own conclusions, before committing your pen to changing the world with your ideas.
Oh and please don’t feel guilty about that aeroplane trip to Lady Elliot Island. That island is difficult to reach by means other than air travel, though in 2017 a drug courier on a jet ski made an impressive attempt to bypass the usual transport options.
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