The bushfires currently devastating Australia show no signs of letting up and when we received an email about an “author auction,” we thought it’d be beneficial to share it all with you, along with some other resources on where to donate and what you can do. But first, I asked Catherine to share a few words. Catherine is one of our wonderful new reviewers and lives in Australia. Catherine: Amanda asked me to write something about the bushfires, but I hardly know what to say. I live in Melbourne, Victoria, a large city in one of the coolest and wettest parts of Australia, and right now the air is full of smoke. I can smell it even inside the house – when I go outside, it’s strong enough to make my breath catch and my eyes sting. There are no fires near me – the closest they have ever come was the one in Bundoora last week, which scared the hell out of us because Bundoora is a suburb, and not even in the outskirts. So I don’t know where the smoke is coming from today. It probably isn’t the fires in East Gippsland, around 300 kilometres away – the wind direction is wrong and poor old New Zealand is copping their smoke. It might be the fires in northern Victoria, though. A couple of weeks ago, we were even getting smoke from the bushfires north of Sydney, a full one thousand kilometres away. Or it could be smoke from the fires in Kangaroo Island, 900km to our west. Basically, there are fires in every direction, every state of Australia. It’s hard to convey the scale of the devastation. Thousands of homes lost. Relatively few human deaths so far, though even one is enough to make this a tragedy. Millions of animals killed, though, and there is talk about species going extinct as a result of the fires. Koalas are at particular risk, as their numbers were already dangerously low, and some of the earliest fires were in areas with big koala populations. And more than 12 million acres of land have burned – we are told to expect food prices to go up, because a lot of that land is farmland – and the environmental impact is devastating. Rainforests are burning that have never burned before, and they cannot be restored. And this is just the start of January. In my state, the big bushfires don’t usually get going until February, so the fact that so much has already burned is pretty terrifying. There is a lot of dry weather ahead of us before we hit the rainy months. In New South Wales, the bushfires have been going since September – that’s the first month of spring for us. It really is beyond imagining. I feel very, very lucky that for me it really is just about the smoke and the air quality, and that I don’t have the kind of health issues that make this more than unpleasant. I do have family living in country Victoria- my brother in law is a volunteer firefighter with the CFA, as so many are- but ‘luckily’ those areas mostly burned in previous seasons, so they are presently safe. I wish we had a government that cared to do something about this. I wish we hadn’t been trained by the media and the government to view climate change as a political issue rather than a scientific one. So many people have been so generous and I wish there was no need for it. I fear for the future.
If you want to help, Catherine suggests this link of resources and, if you’re a crafter, here’s another way to get involved. For the author auction, there’s a detailed thread explaining how it’ll all work here:
The auction will be happening on Twitter, so if you don’t have an account, you may not be able to participate. The auction will last for about a week and will start/end on Australian time (AEST). A website was also created to explain how things work. After browsing the hashtag for the auction there are a variety of items to bid on: books, crochet projects, artwork, video editing services, etc. Have more suggestions? Link them below! The post Bushfire Relief & How to Help appeared first on NeedaBook. via Need a Book – NeedaBook https://ift.tt/2tDX1pl
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