Naturalising climate change

Mother Nature is having a moment this month. In the aftermath of the horrifying Texas floods, politicians, the media and everyday people were in awe of her fickle power. Politicians are particularly wont to claim themselves helpless in the face of this power, as we are also seeing in relation to the algal bloom decimating South Australian coastal waters.

To be fair, and gender stereotypes aside, Nature has a moment most months lately, as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme events and social media feeds us disaster porn 24/7.

And there are contradictions. Sometimes Nature is downplayed. As Saffron O’Neill’s discourse analyses show, media are still likely to frame heatwaves with visuals documenting fun in the sun rather than emphasising danger.

Australians are all too familiar with the situation in which Nature ‘takes the blame’. The term is taken from Jamie Linton’s argument that the antisocial nature of what he calls Modern Water means that ‘nature always takes the blame’ for water scarcity, instead of the particular social and economic configurations through which it is made available to people.[1]

A burnt roadside in the Blue Mountains, NSW, during the 2019-2020 bushfires.

Recent Australian examples span fish kills, fire and floods. Fish kills on the Barka/Darling River were blamed by NSW and federal politicians on both drought (2018-19) and flood (2023), rather than, as an Academy of Science investigation found, the historical and continuing overextraction of water for irrigation upstream.[2] In a stroppy exchange with a journalist, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the Black Summer bushfires as a natural disaster over which he had no control.

As floods caused havoc across northern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland in February 2022, then Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk used the same framing to warn residents of a fast and furious rain bomb; ‘This is Mother Nature. I can’t control Mother Nature.’

From Texas to eastern Australia, politicians downplay or avoid their own agency and responsibility, whether for lack of preparedness, slow response in the moment or the aftermath, or inadequate action against longer-term climate change processes. They are blaming Nature for things that they have part responsibility for. In framing drought and fire as natural, and in focusing on short-term drivers such as seasonal ‘tinderbox’ conditions, or arson as a source of ignition, politicians deflect attention away from climate change and the necessity to acknowledge human agency as fundamental to its current processes.

The extension of this approach is an emergent new expression I call the naturalisation of climate change. The trope that climate change is natural and people can’t do anything about it is well established in the denialist playbook, but I am referring here to something slightly different. By naturalisation I mean bringing something into common use, making it seem natural and normal. It is no longer tenable for politicians to deny the existence of climate change. But by wringing their hands at the power of Mother Nature and ‘natural’ disasters, they shift the national gaze away from their own contribution; for example, in facilitating the continued mining and export of coal and gas.

The framing finds fertile ground in Australia, where it plays into a national narrative of white survival in a fickle land ‘of droughts and flooding rains’, to quote (which they often do) Dorothea Mackellar’s iconic poem My Country. Applying a charitable reading, understanding the narrative helps us understand why climate denialism has resonated in Australia for longer than elsewhere.

At its most powerful, this imaginary allows us to misread causes and relationships, and thus to justify particular kinds of incorrect action or inaction.

We are all vulnerable to this naturalisation, as we experience the power of the non-human or more-than-human world, and our own lack of control over circumstances. Thousands of people huddle on beaches, defended by a couple of fire trucks. A masked young boy takes a tinnie offshore against the threat of the red and black sky. Floodwaters lap at the doors of the cathedral on the hill. Mould grows on every surface of house and cupboard for months on end. The air in our major cities is filled with bushfire smoke for weeks. Tornadoes cut swathes across landscapes that have not seen them before, flattening trees like matchsticks. Firestorms create their own weather. These examples are less than five years old; it is striking how quickly they have become normalised.

What will happen as climate change increasingly takes expression in extremities that exceed even a rapidly changing experience of normal? When a 1 metre rise in sea level reconfigures all our coastal cities? When daytime temperatures in Sydney and Melbourne regularly spike into the 50°C range? When night-time temperatures stubbornly remain in the 30s?

There are many circumstances where extra-human processes exceed our capacities to do anything about them, and it is not surprising that we feel powerless. But to the extent that we think in binary terms, this tendency to think of Nature as separate from us, and therefore as something to blame, avoids responsibility for things we can influence now.

Footnotes [1] J Linton 2010 What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction, UBC Press, Vancouver, p. 70. [2] Australian Academy of Science 2019 Investigation of the Causes of Mass Fish Kills in the Menindee Region NSW over the Summer of 2018-19. Australian Academy of Science, Canberra.

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