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Nonie Sharp on finding a language that speaks to ourselves.

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New Year 2007. Fires rage through mountain forests and delicate undergrowth; burning in Jamieson, Licola, Gaffney's Creek, happy places of my youth. At Walhalla, brief home of my grandfather in the tragic bushfire of 1886. And there's a strange white Christmas on the Baw Baw plateau.

A new dis-order grows at home and abroad. On the alpine slopes of southern Austria, wildflowers are blooming far ahead of nature's springtime. There it is +5[degrees], not the usual -20[degrees]. And the plane tree on our inner Melbourne nature strip has a strange beauty: russet leaves already mingle with the green. Autumn in January.

Nature out of place, awry. Becoming wild? With us? Out-of-placeness fuels a new debate in Victoria. Are we in an extraordinary drought akin to the Federation Drought around 1900? Or are we experiencing signs of the global imprint of climate change? Various voices chime in on the debate. Environmental scientist-writer Tim Flannery believes a new climate is already taking hold here (Age, 2 January 2007); some others disagree. In an important sense, whatever this drought is doesn't matter. Everyone knows now that climate change is real, dangerous and threatening; of a planet being poisoned under our hand.

Half a century ago, Rachel Carson inspired a generation against insecticides in Silent Spring. Yet today we're imprinting the whole planet with the ill effects of the way we live. Through our largely untamed use of fossil fuels we are creating an Earth unfit for habitation. Flannery sees 'our battle for climate' as a battle for a habitable planet within our lifetimes. He is saying, too, that if the Arctic and Greenland ice melt continues at last year's rate, then in one or two years we may be facing a fatal choice: whether to simply abandon some cities or to abandon old coal-fired power plants ('Blowing in the Wind', Bulletin, December-January 2006-07). Some people suggest that Tim is exaggerating, Al Gore, too; one hopes they are. Certainly British environmental activist George Monbiot doesn't think so. In his 2006 book on how to stop the planet burning, Heat (Penguin, 2006), he warns against the utter, total and irreversible destruction towards which unchecked climate change is headed. A process through which 'all that is solid...

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