As the earth seethes, blows, seizes and trembles,

Nerida is catching on.

Perseverance in preparation helps us in extreme weather. Photo by Andrei Lisakov

Bartgrinn settled in Mari’s body, turned the head with closed eyes towards Nerida. Said, ‘So, what can we do for you, my dear?’

Nerida shifted in her chair. ‘Well, I’m grateful to have contact with your energy. Mine has been a bit low.’

‘Oh, we’re always happy to talk to you. Gladly.’ The spirit responded. She felt the warmth.

‘You’ve made a huge difference in our lives.’ She smiled.

‘It’s like some others of us,’ he corrected. ‘It’s not just us.’

‘All of you,’ she said, thinking of the other spirits Mari channeled. But simultaneously aware that she still had no comprehension. Who is there? How are they there? How do they arrange themselves?

‘Yes,’ he said, simply.

‘Yes. Using the plural you.’ That much she understood. ‘I wanted to ask about our planet: the weather, the earthquakes, the floods and fires.

‘When we first began talking a dozen years ago, you and our friends told me that it was going to get much worse, that I had really no idea. And it was impossible for me to imagine, actually.’

‘But did it?’ he asked.

‘It did indeed.’ She and Mari watched international news. Most days, weather disasters were in the headlines. Floods, fires, freezes. Tornadoes, cyclones and earthquakes. Searing heat. They experienced these conditions in their travels. But these destructive events did not fill the news almost daily when Mari started channeling in a manageable way over ten years ago.

‘Yeah, we tried to tell you,’ Bartgrinn said. ‘You were not very open to that idea.’

The aurora manifests the power of our planet. Photo by Daniel Mirlea

It was true. Nerida recalled vividly how her mind was unable to process the ideas then. She listened and recorded but was didn’t accept the truth of the spirits’ prognostications. Perhaps I didn’t have the maturity, she thought. ‘I couldn’t imagine,’ she said.

‘There will be more coming,’ he said, sombrely. ‘Things always get a lot worse before they can get better.

‘At the moment you still—I’m not talking about you, personally—but you as humanity, you still have no glimpse of how bad it could get—and it will get—if there is no action taken.

‘The planet is going to shake those parasites off. We kind of told you. And it’s happening all over the place.’

Nerida nodded.

Bartgrinn continued, ‘Producing more humans is not the solution. Especially if you produce more of the ones with the wrong minds. Let’s say humans in a ‘less developed’ setting, a less fortunate area, produce more children as a safety net, thinking “Yes, they will take care of me later”.

‘If those young people move on to areas that are already overpopulated, this will aggravate these problems. And it won’t help the ones that produce those offspring in the first place. Because they go off and cause more problems somewhere else.

People are crowding out the trees. Photo by Chris Lutke

‘People should spread out more in the areas they are. And take care of the land and the environment. Keep things growing. Make it stronger. If there’s a very hot place that hasn’t got much shade and you cut down the last shade that’s there, that’s a big issue.’

An Aboriginal woman, Nerida understood that being attentive to the land and caring for it evoked a response from the land. The planet is a living being.

Bartgrinn was fired up. ‘And then making an excuse like, “Oh, not many people live there, so it doesn’t matter.” As a whole picture, of course it matters. You have to protect those areas. You have to make the shady areas bigger. You can’t rip out all the plants.

‘Or straighten all the rivers to prevent flooding.

‘Just don’t live in the areas that are flooding regularly.

‘Because there will be a lot more and a lot worse in the years to come. Moving to a floodplain, or staying there, is not a solution. These deltas form a river.

Deltas can be used to grow things, but don’t live there.

‘And the growth of your plants should go with the seasons. But you can all see that those seasons are changing. Some get a lot shorter. And other seasons get a lot longer. There is this major imbalance. Just putting more humans into the area so they go away from somewhere else does not solve that problem.’

Nerida pictured rural people moving to the city for work. Even in Australia, with its low population, she saw the problem. ‘You mean moving to the cities where the land is already stressed and unable to support people?’ Sydney couldn’t hold more people. It was hard to get a smile there. And if you did smile, people thought you were mad. They didn’t feel the land under the tar and concrete. Water was often in short supply.

‘People will not be able to survive in the cities because they will get too hot,’ Bartgrinn said. ‘I mean, they put mirrors on buildings because otherwise you would have to turn lights on, artificial lights, in brightest daylight because the sun doesn’t get through.

‘They try to reflect the light so that it comes from the sun. From get it further down inside. It does not solve the problem. The ones that are very well off will live on the top where they still have light, and in those buildings the poor people will live in the lower parts deprived of sunlight.

‘And the air, the air will be much better on the top levels.

‘People will have these flying machines where they don’t even have to go down to the bottom because it’s so horrible down there. This is where you’re heading.’

It was as if he saw that near future reality and was reporting back to her. She recalled images of the city from Blade Runner. ‘It’s grim,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ His voice took on a lighter tone. ‘There could be ways to remediate aspects of it. Some of those parts have gone a bit far already, but if you pull a bit back in other areas there could still be some remedy.’

There’s always hope, she thought. It’s not too late.

The Bloody Weather

Contagion: A Spirit Speaks