Pre-COVID lockdown, I was driving to my friend’s house — a 35-year-old woman with no children (yet?) — and The Suburbs,

‘Mmm, this sun is so good,’ I murmured to my friend, as we lay belly-up at the beach last summer. Temperatures had reached 33 degrees at 11am that day, and by 12.30pm they crept to 39. By then, the heat wasn’t even enjoyable anymore and we hopped and winced across the sand, taking refuge in the car and blasting our faces with the air-con. When I tried to return to the beach two weeks later, I felt like I was choking on the polluted air, thick with smoke from the raging bushfires. I stared hopelessly at the sea’s horizon marred by a hazy, charcoal sky. Is this our new reality?

Instead of “staying on brand” to show oh-so-sincere concern, how about you get someone to pick up a damn phone and call Addis Ababa and speak to representatives of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission about their preliminary report? And okay, yes, because we live in an age when the commission is regularly accused of partisanship, how about getting someone’s ass on a plane out to the refugee camps in Sudan and talk to witnesses there in the interests of balance and fairness?

On a trip to Tropical North Queensland last year, I kept my eyes peeled for the elusive, unmistakeable electric-blue Ulysses butterfly. With breeding rates dropping to zero, it’s on the verge of extinction due to extreme temperatures and not enough wet seasons (the optimum conditions for the butterflies to lay eggs). I thought I caught a glimpse of the iconic species in the Daintree rainforest one afternoon, but perhaps it was my imagination. Perhaps we’ll only ever see them in our imaginations and museums — an ominous reminder of what we’ve lost.

Journalism — like drama — is fueled by conflict. And without conflict, the professional know-it-all analysts and the reps for the human rights organizations would each be out of a job, but luckily for them, “business is always good.” As much as the Western media routinely go on about the strife and killing in Africa, the examples above speak of the African spirit.

It’s glaringly obvious that our Earth is diminishing in natural resources, beauty and wonder — things look pretty grim for us and future generations. My concerns are that if I bring more energy-guzzling, carbon-emitting little humans into the world, I’ll only add fuel to the wildfires, rising sea levels, food shortages and mass animal extinction. I’ll only contribute to the problem.

Funnily enough, band member Win Butler said the song was written to evoke a sense of a foreboding apocalypse — and he hit the nail on the head. It’s coming, we all knew it was coming, and now we’re scared. We’re running out of time to do all the things we wanted, to show our kids the beauty of our planet.

The reality is that Ethiopians do not come in only one homogenous flavor — there are millions of citizens of mixed-heritage who don’t readily identify as just Tegaru, just Amhara or Oromo or Guarage or any single one of the dozens of other ethnicities in the country. So part of what has been going on with Tigray and with these episodes of ethnic cleansing is a nation coming to grips with a system that amounts to a kind of apartheid, forcing its citizens to walk around with ID cards that must have an ethnicity selected for them. And many seem to be sick of this.

We can be reminded of this fact even in tragedy. According to the EHRC preliminary report on Maikadra, victims told its investigators that “other residents, who were Tigrayan themselves, helped several of them survive by shielding them in their homes, in churches and in farms.” Let’s assume for a moment that at least part of the report’s findings are true, that these accounts can and will be verified. Think about what it means. The report mentions a woman hiding 13 people in her house and then leading them to safety at a nearby farm. “She went as far as staying with them the whole night in case the group came back in search of them.” The report talks about another Tigrayan woman “who was hit on the arm with a machete while trying to wrestle a man away from attackers who set him on fire.”

I personally find it amazing that to even suggest Ethiopians of different ethnic backgrounds still have things in common, that they might still feel solidarity thanks to history, is now supposedly a “political” position — and that somehow this is biased. I’m sorry, but let me call bullshit on that. Again, whether Ethiopians let Tigray leave its union in peace or work out a new constitution has to be decided by them. How Oromia fits in has to be decided by them. And it’s not biased or partisan to wish the best for a great family of a people to work out its differences, or to have the perspective that even if new political lines are drawn on a map, that their future will still be an inter-connected one.

Turn on the news, scroll through social media or just google ‘climate crisis’ — in addition to the constant pandemic panic, you’ll be faced with the blow-by-blow of global warming and the depressing depictions of our planet’s future.

The past five years have been the warmest five years in centuries. Last year was the second hottest year ever recorded and ocean temperatures were the highest they’ve ever been. Scientists confirm that these unsettling statistics are from continued global warming due to excessive carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions, largely contributed by human activity.

Millennials and Generation Zers will witness many horrors of global warming before we’re gone. Well, we already are — the recent Californian fires, mirroring the Australian Black Summer, fuelled by record-breaking temperatures and months of severe drought, is a flaming red flag we can’t ignore. Amidst the pandemic and the looming inevitable natural disasters, I’ve given up on ‘summer plans’ or ‘holidays’ this year, and maybe for years to come.

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s me is that the producers of Bitcoin now have access to more sophisticated financial products which they can use to hedge their exposure. In theory, this should mean that the mining industry is more stable and less exposed to boom and bust periods. It lets miners focus on running their operations efficiently, and frees them from the burden of worrying about their unhedged exposure to their equipment.

I’ve made my own observations of climate change around me in Australia, noticing how the seasons have altered over the last several years: autumn starts later; winters are harsh, but shorter; flowers bud earlier as spring approaches sooner; and summers are longer — the heat is more intense and frequently unbearable.

Writer Katie O’Reilly agonises over this loss, asking herself how she could bring a child into an increasingly uninhabitable world, knowing that ‘all their favourite picture-book animals were going extinct’. The alarming decline in global biodiversity means more than one million animal and plant species are on track for extinction in the next coming decades.