What can we do? A recount of the Risk, Responsibility and Reputation Event, 2nd in the Everyone’s Climate Series, Thursday June 18 2026
I don’t get to many of the WA Climate Leaders’ fabulous events.
I inevitably wish I had.
I was so glad I was there for this one as now, not a week later, the evening’s central themes of Risk, Responsibility and Reputation are back loudly knocking on my door.
This is the story of my evening — what I heard, felt and experienced, and my ongoing reflections, so not a verbatim report — but hopefully of interest both to people who were there and people who couldn’t make it.
Meri has the ineffable gift of warmly, richly and brightly inhabiting any size space, not from the front of the room where she actually is, but rather as if she was right next to you. She’s the person who shares a candle and a song book, or a sandwich and an umbrella, or maybe a torch and map. And then she introduces you to some of her brilliant friends.
The first of this evening’s brilliant friends comes to us via a recording but it does not diminish Dr Christiana Figueres’ impact.
‘What can we do?’
That’s Dr Christiana’s opening line tonight, and it’s also that most famous line from Sonya’s monologue in Uncle Vanya. I’m sure Dr Christiana knows this.
SONYA: What can we do? We must live our lives.
Now this is usually performed as though to accompany a soundtrack of sobbing violins. But I wonder, listening to Dr Christiana, if Chekhov would have been equally open to hearing it as a battlecry akin to:
“What was there to be gained by fighting the most evil wizard who has ever existed?” said Black, with a terrible fury in his face. “Only innocent lives, Peter!”
Uncle Vanya (1897) is a play about climate change — playwright Anton Checkov was arguably the best known early climate activist. It’s in this play he sets out the perilousness of the situation and the joy and power of working to overcome it.
DR ASTROFF: Russian woods are groaning under the ax, millions of trees perish, dwellings of beasts and birds are emptied, rivers go shallow and dry, wonderful landscapes vanish, never to be brought back again…
Man is endowed with intellect and creative powers so that he may multiply what is given to him; but up to now he has not…(Act I, p. 14,15).
DR ASTROFF: …when I hear my young wood rustle, the wood plot I planted with my own hands, I realize that climate too is a little in my power, and that a thousand years from now if man should be happy, why, then I’d be a little part of that too. When I plant a birch and later on see it burst into green and wave in the wind, my soul fills with pride. (Act I, p. 15)
I am sure all of this is in Dr Christiana’s mind as she asks “What can we do?” And she speaks of courage, of all of us working together on this, and of how we can be collectively contributing even as we live our lives because this is a time when the sands are shifting.
Chekhov saw it coming before the commencement of the last century- but, as Meri now reminds us, more than a century later we are halfway through the critical decade. And Western Australia does not have a legislated emissions reduction target.
However- before any of us sitting next to her could feel isolated in grieving this unpalatable fact — Meri reminds us of recent research commissioned by WA Climate Solutions to see how many West Australians want a renewable energy target. The collective is larger than I’d known. It was 62% in March, and in April it grew to 73% of West Australians who want a renewable energy target.
From the Solutions for Climate WA press release:
“…support among One Nation voters increased from 35 per cent to 52 per cent and support among Liberal and National voters increased from 59 per cent to 71 per cent.”
Paraphrasing only a little — ‘It’s the hip pocket, stupid!’
This is pretty much the message Meri’s friend Lacey Filipich came with. ‘I’m here to tell you how to talk to capitalists,’ was how she began her allotted 5 minutes.
What does she say instead of ‘there’s no profit on a dead planet’? She says…
You Will Be Poor
Every word given equal heft, like machetes spinning through the air.
Your share portfolio? What will it look like as the forecast productivity decline of 10 to 18% arrives? She helps us visualise that squeeze by reminding us of supermarket shelves during the pandemic which saw global productivity fall by 3 percent.
Your real estate? No better news here. To quote Lacey directly:
“One in 10 properties predicted to be uninsurable by 2035 in Aus. No insurance = no mortgage = cash buyers only = smaller buyer pool = price drops. National Climate Risk Assessment predicts over $600 billion off property values. Already started in Lismore, Gippsland, even in Mt Pleasant (for the Perthians) with rising cash sale rates… ..
Climate change is a massive threat to your personal financial stability.
It will make you poor.
Anyone who says otherwise is willing to make you poor, and that’s not very nice, is it?”
It is not very nice.
Dr Jatin Kala outlines where we are. Not where we wanted to be — the whole of 2029 is predicted to remain above the 1.5 degrees of extra warming first breached in 2024. There are no solutions we can scale that will let us continue to emit and reach net zero.
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And, abruptly and unexpectedly, the evening’s themes of Risk, Responsibility and Reputation are not about ‘them’ but about me and my family.
Australia’s current policy settings allow unlimited use of carbon offsets by emitters — and the critics of this policy conflate exploitation of policy shortfalls with carbon credit integrity.
We (my Mum and Dad, myself, my husband and our three sons) have lived and worked to radically regenerate Austin Downs Station for the last twenty five years. We started this journey following my parents’ conviction that the landscape was far more degraded and had far further to heal than was the prevailing industry view. (The story here.)
On Austin Downs the regeneration work was paid for us by us until a percentage of the property was eligible for carbon credits. All four adults worked off-property and our three sons donated years of physical work. My father Tom also advocated strongly for carbon farming in the Rangelands over many years — with projects allowed from 2018 and our first earnings arriving in 2022.
Our credits have integrity. The credits and the use to which they are put are separate. But critics of the scheme continue to conflate the two. Is it because carbon project proponents like my family are less able to defend ourselves than the polluters and the policy makers?
In fact these criticisms are great for the polluters. The carbon price plummets. There’s not much impact on government. It’s devastating for landscapes and their stewards — Traditional Owners, leaseholders and landowners. On Austin Downs we’ve added a further independent layer of accreditation in hopes of better protecting the beginnings of regeneration on Austin Downs.
And we believe it really is just the beginning — that we are only glimpsing now the lost ecological wealth — and that we have vastly underestimated the number of families who lived here and the visitors who once passed through.
So it was great to hear Kado Muir (photo above by Marnie Richardson) Ngalia Traditional Owner and Chair of the National NT Council, begin by talking of the large population in Australia prior to 1788. Of course, those millions of people were not just sustained by the landscape but by the culture connecting them within and to the landscape so tightly that conceiving of them as separate is still difficult for First Nations Australians today.
Listening to him I wondered how anyone could hold something like this? —
Everything/everyone is in a reciprocal relationship with everything/everyone else. Only take as much as you need and give back reciprocally.
And still accommodate for people who think something like this?—
Land is for growing something to sell, or it is for extracting something to sell. Those things are extra or surplus. They are there for the taking (and for selling) in order to accumulate wealth.
The science of our extraction/surplus dependant culture is now uncovering all those relationships — we call them feedback loops, or essential nutrients for plants, or temperature tolerances. We are finally listening to First Nations people to navigate, soothe and repair the relationships our extraction has so systematically disrupted.
So how does Kado answer the question ‘What can we do?’.
He doesn’t only answer verbally. He shows us. He turns to each panellist in turn and repeats one word or phrase they’ve used as though threading all words on the same string. “So…” he says, then lays down how First Nations land and science scaffolds the transition. He is demonstrating everything we are hearing tonight – to answer ‘What can we do’ needs us all to listen, to string everyone’s ideas together, to collaborate.
So —
Communicate. Relate. Work with others.
It doesn’t feel like that this can change the world but, you know, think back seven years. It has.
The positive story of those recent changes is what Rob Grant from Pollination wants to emphasise. The transition is disorderly, but it is underway. The continued cost decline in the products that turn sun and wind into power means the economic case is won. (It’s the hip pocket, stupid!)
Forty to 45% of projects are on Native Title land, and co-design with Traditional Owners is likewise well underway. On less optimistic note, he also mentioned the gulf between the workforce needed and the people we have on hand — but generally, he projected optimism.
In contrast Kate Evans from the Environmental Defenders Office is carefully measured. She tells us that climate litigation is growing. Accountability is more often landing at the right door. She feels that ICJ advisory opinion should help.
The optimism and the caution are both immediately challenged by Sharan Burrow (above, photo by Marnie Richardson), Chair of the ClimateWorks Centre. She tells us that she’s returned from being away to find Western Australians changed. We are far more risk averse. We are missing opportunities. We are falling behind.
My notes read –
Sharan, you are telling us we are playing small and it doesn’t serve us — but, you know, we feel small! Not big enough, brave enough, safe enough, supported enough, educated enough, clever enough (after all we’ve been fooled before, penalised before) to take a risk — we see more clearly what we have to lose than what we have to gain.
What changed to make us like this and how do we change back?
Sharan doesn’t directly tell us how to change back. She tells us that the change needed is to adapt capitalism. To give people agency and put them at the centre of decision-making. She wants us to level to all the playing fields because business as usual can’t solve the problems it made. And business as usual (as Lacey so pungently expresses it) is now undermining everyone’s bank balance.
And as for being braver? The point of this whole evening has been to help us to see we are part of a collective — there are people to cheer us on, people with whom we can halve our troubles and theirs by sharing, people on parallel journeys with whom we can hold hands, people with whom we can have fun and create with and make good things happen.
And I suddenly remember the visitor we have just had at Austin Downs. He is going from one remote pastoral property to the next fulfilling a government contract. He grew up on a pastoral property, benefiting profoundly from his close connections with Traditional Owner families.
Describing our day with him I wrote to one of his colleagues of how game-changing the day with him had been for us — “he’s become one of the essentials of our community, he knows the plants and also the people, shares workarounds and wisdoms, collects up troubles and troubleshooting wins to share down the line”. I was troubled to hear that our difficulties weren’t isolated to Austin Downs — but that information has provided us with meaning, solidarity and allies.
So — What can we do?
It’s not so different from the messages we give our children when there’s a crisis.
Look for the good people. Tell them what is happening. Look for ways to help others.
Thanks to Marnie Richardson for the photos (including the one above) and to Meri and the rest of the team at WA Climate Leaders.
