Hope Is The Thing With Singed Feathers

A speech to the Trans-Tasman Forum of the Ecological Society of Australia

A couple of months ago I was invited to give a talk at a forthcoming event run by the New Zealand Ecological Society and the Ecological Society of Australia. The Trans-Tasman Forum, as it is dubbed, has the title ‘Hope matters: climate change and ecology’. My talk would be one of five others in a dedicated fire ecology session and I would fill a ‘mid-career’ slot.

I do grudgingly accept that I am now a mid-career academic, but I felt compelled to warn the ESA president, Perpetua Turner, that I am not actually an ecologist. In my defense, I work with ecologists, am fond of them and often claim to incorporate ecological principles into my research. Much to my delight, Pep responded that as a fellow traveler of windy paths interested in joining the dots of the grand puzzle of fire, I would fit right in. Woohoo!

After recently plotting fire’s part in the demise of Western civilisation, writing a little ditty about hope couldn’t have come at a better time. Here are my notes on the talk, which I reserve the right to alter at any point up to and including during the talk.

Hope in a Prison of Despair, Evelyn de Morgan (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Hope: A Scavenger’s Guide

I would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, the traditional owners of the land on which I work too much and don’t rest and play enough. This is Aboriginal land. Always ways, always will be.

My name is Hamish Clarke and I’m a senior research fellow and Westpac scholar here in the FLARE Wildfire Research team, within the School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

It might not be apparent from my cynicism, the bags under my eyes on my otherwise expressionless face, and my deadpan – some would say monotone – delivery…

But I’m actually a hopeful guy!

In fact, I’m a little less depressed and anxious about climate change than I ought to be.

I put that down to a faulty psychological and spiritual apparatus. I’m talking to my shrink about it.

But yeah, I’ve got hope. And you know what, I don’t think I’m the only one. I think there might even be more hope out there than we realise.

You’re all here, after all, aren’t you?

So where do I find hope?

Well, any damn place I can. I’m always on the lookout for it. These are mean streets we’re living in and this is a sick society. So I must scavenge, lurking around and finding hope where it has been discarded or has fallen out of someone’s pockets.

Sometimes I find it in a glint in the eye of a like-minded soul, sometimes I find it in the smuggling of a human touch into official communications or in the calling out of BS at an all staff town hall meeting.

Sometimes I find hope in a beautiful paper that stands out from the firehose of oncoming articles.

But hope is not always furtive. It is not always renegade.

I’m constantly struck by the warmth, positivity, genuineness and kindness of people I meet from all walks of life. Yes, there’s lot of a up-hill shit shoveling. And more than a modicum of douchebaggery.

But for the most part, people are trying – to connect, to help, to understand, to share. A lot of the barriers to these things are structural. We made them and we can unmake them, with some effort.

Yeah but what about climate change?

I am fortunate to be in such a wide and wild and woolly and welcoming field as fire, not to mention climate change. Of course there are dominant disciplines and ideas – ideological home ground advantage, if you like – but there is also a widely shared recognition that the problems in fire and climate change are complex and can’t be solved by just one discipline, by just one group or agency or type of knowledge.

That gives me hope.

Even in science, it is not so crazy these days to suggest that we aren’t actually God’s gift to society, the source of all knowledge and the best thing since sliced bread. But hey it’s not such a bad idea for us to have a seat at the table (and not just the kiddy one), to at least be part of the conversation, part of a process of good governance.

That gives me hope.

I’ve jumped from business and marketing and accounting and international studies and German and Spanish, to biochemistry and neuroscience, to environmental management, to climate change, to bushfire risk, to whatever the hell it is I’m doing now. And I’ve remained employed the whole time.

That gives me hope.

The global fire crisis does not have the equivalent of a fossil fuel lobby, gathering wealth as it stems the tide of popular will. You bet your arse there are problems, and some seemingly intractable disagreements, but there is more common ground than many realise, and it is growing, in a kind of reverse sea level rise process.

That gives me hope.

I am incredibly lucky to be part of a lovely team, who spend about half of every group catchup discussing their plans for the weekend.

We have engineers, ecologists [pauses for crowd to stop cheering], risk modellers, software developers and much, much more.

The young people in my group, and young academics and practitioners in general, seem like a pretty damn cool bunch. They’re often kind, enthusiastic and wear fewer ideological blinkers than me and my generation.

That gives me hope.

The renaissance in cultural fire, and growing respect for Indigenous knowledge give me hope. The tenacity, generosity, skill and wisdom of First Peoples here in Australia and around the world give me hope.

So yeah, you know what? I think there’s actually quite a bit of hope lying around. And I think we can multiply it.

I say hope is a renewable resource, streaming through the atmosphere.

Mostly during daylight hours. Partially obscured by pollution, clearing, invasion and colonisation, racism, fascism, prejudice, fear, bureaucracy, the academic pursuit of excellence…

But once recognised, once fostered, once gardened, it blooms and it’s contagious in the best possible way.

In fact, I call on each and every one of you to become hope viruses, vectors of optimism that effortlessly evade the face mask of resignation.

I call on each and every one of you to become hope arsonists, lighting hope in other people’s hearts as flagrantly and frequently as you please, so that confidence might spread like wildfire.

I call on each and every one of you to build hope power plants whose cooling systems fail and who go into full meltdown, releasing large quantities of hope isotopes into the surroundings, hope isotopes that will never fully break down due to their lengthy half-lives.

That’s right, I’m mixing my metaphors dammit and I don’t care. I hope you don’t mind.

I’ll leave you with a question, which is the unspoken part of the title.

What are we hoping for?

Bah, it’s easy for you ecologists. You just hope we stop trashing the world, that we let things live, and that people keep giving you permits to go out in the field and measure stuff.

And it’s easy for you climate change researchers. You just hope we stop burning fossil fuels and clearing land, stop fucking up the climate system so we can return to a state where we’re dealing with the regular freaky stuff that life throws at us, not this supercharged climate chaos bullshit.

For those of us in fire, it’s a lot harder. What kind of future are we hoping for?

What kind of fire? What kind of fire regime?

What kind of fire manager?

What kind of fire governance?

What kind of fire research?

What kind of fire knowledge? What kinds of fire knowledge?

It’s my hope that we start getting serious about painting some rich and detailed pictures of the fire future we all want. The use of generative AI is optional but please don’t get it to do the whole assignment.

Maybe we can even make some pictures as compelling as this vision, from the Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Fire Strategy 2019, quoted in a recent paper led by Jack Pascoe:

Right Fire, Right Time, Right Way and for the right (cultural) reasons according to Lore

I hope you enjoyed my talk. Thanks for listening.