The heat isn’t a wave. It’s an increase in temperature that hasn’t gone away. There are bushfires everywhere, the scent of smoke sometimes wafting through the window. The news on TV is all about arsonists, firefighting, and communities fleeing their homes. It’s so hot that I’m damp with sweat in the early hours of the morning, with no drop in temperature to lull me back into my dream. When I was a girl and first started to learn about damage to the environment, it hit me first in my throat, the utter sense of powerlessness, the reality that the big decisions were being made by people unknown to me. I felt skinny, afraid and weak at the thought of it, achingly connected to nature, to the fragility of all that surrounded me. I was sensitive to where my fingertips fell, to the wings of dragonflies. Young people are important. They are closer to their own beginning and can feel more strongly what we are doing to our world. We need to listen to the young, and to the very old, to those who remember the way things were before.