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Ten years ago today, Kevin Rudd spoke at the National Climate Summit at Parliament House, in Canberra, famously declaring climate change to be “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

One of Kevin Rudd’s most famous quotes.

Rudd, in alliance with Julia Gillard, had toppled Kim Beazley as Labor leader the previous December. This focus on climate change was part of Rudd’s brilliantly executed electoral assault on John Howard, who had spent his period in office kicking climate action into the long grass.

Malcolm Turnbull, then Howard’s newly minted environment minister, was underwhelmed by Rudd’s speech. “It’s all designed to promote Kevin Rudd. I mean, he doesn’t care what the summit says. He’s having his media conference at 10 o'clock. The conference delegates will have barely had their coffee and had the first session,” he sniffed.

On the same day Ross Gittins published a piece titled Carbon trading v taxes — a winner eases ahead in the Sydney Morning Herald. A decade on, it makes for painful, and eerily prescient, reading:

A key question - for advocates of action as well as politicians anxious to keep their jobs - is which instrument would be harder to introduce politically. This, I suspect, is the reason so many governments favour trading schemes. The trouble with a carbon tax is that everyone hates new taxes, whereas a trading scheme doesn’t sound as if it’s a tax.

The dizzying and stomach-churning backflips over the past ten years have been described as a “power failure” and a policy bonfire.

While hopes for bold and timely action in Australia may have bleached like the Great Barrier Reef, the question that Rudd raised - one of climate change ethics, of how we navigate “the perfect moral storm” – remains alive.

Debts to pay

From my point of view, the key questions are: what do we owe to future generations; what do we owe to other species; and how are we living up to those obligations?

The thinker and novelist Alice Walker once described activism as “my rent for living on the planet”.

The celebrated linguist and US dissident Noam Chomsky agrees. In September 1991, during an interview in which he was asked what motivated him in his tireless work decrying US foreign policy and the influence of the mass media on democratic societies, he replied: “Looking in the mirror in the morning and not being appalled.” For Chomsky, intellectuals have a responsibility, “to speak the truth and to expose lies”.

But of course some would say that this is not enough - the point is not to describe the world but to change it.

There are costs, however. Consider this passage from Marge Piercy’s extraordinary novel Vida, about a Vietnam War-era activist on the run from the FBI:

Yet she had no feeling of accomplishment, because every morning in the Times, every evening on television, the war was stronger, and she was closer to exhaustion. They had not done enough, they had not risked enough, they had not tried everything, they had not fought hard enough, they had not, because the proof was before her every morning and every evening the war went on. It was raining blood outside whether she looked out the window or not; the blood was splattering down, and the hot wind that blew across the city smelled of ashes, of burning flesh. Obviously they had not tried hard enough if the war still went on.

Personally, I have tried activism (and usually done it badly, if persistently). I found that if I stopped altogether I felt worse and “acted out” in silly ways, so now I do just enough to avoid that, but with zero expectation that anything will change

In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht combined the Latin word solacium (comfort) with the Greek root –algia (pain) to create the word solastalgia, which he defined as:

The psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change.

That grief and anxiety is catching up with many of us. For a psychoanalytic perspective, see this interview with Rosemary Randall.

What should we do?

So, reader, I’m interested in finding out your coping strategies, since mine are often inadequate and maladaptive. I’ve a few questions:

• Where do you think your environmental concern came from?

• How many of you spent significant time in unstructured play in natural environments before the age of 11 (so-called “significant life experiences”), as I did?

• How do you who try to stay active on this mother of all issues cope with the seemingly uninterrupted flow of ever greater defeats?

• How do you cope with the guilt of having failed (thus far) to have done enough?

• How do you cope with the grief for the things we are definitely going to lose, no matter what (starting with coral on the Great Barrier Reef)?

• And for the climatologists and climate writers out there, how do you cope with the anxiety of knowing that conveying the end of human civilisation is your day job?

Over to you – answers in the comments.

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The Hazelwood mine will fill with water once it's closed. AAP/Country Fire Authority

The Hazelwood coal mine and power plant has employed generations of families in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley since the end of the second world war. With the mine to close at the end of March 2017, hundreds of local residents face unemployment. When the mining stops, the pit at Hazelwood will eventually become a “pit lake” as it fills with groundwater.

Several options are on the table for the Hazelwood lake, and questions have been raised about the cost of rehabilitating the mine.

There are thousands of pit lakes on every inhabited continent, but few have been designed for people to use for recreation. Although Australians are increasingly embracing these lakes for swimming and boating, most pit lakes are unsafe and are on private property.

Germany’s brown coal mines

Depending often on the local geology, pit lakes can have poor water quality and unstable banks, which pose risks to nearby communities and the environment. However, pit lakes can also be sources of income through recreation or industry, particularly for local communities after the mining stops.

The challenge for the residents of the Latrobe Valley (and other mining regions) is to decide how new pit lakes can benefit the local economy. The challenge for scientists is how to rehabilitate these lakes for community benefit.

The coal mines of former East Germany have developed into pit lakes and can provide a vision of what Australian pit lakes might become.

Lusatia pit lake in the former East Germany is now an economic asset for the community. Melanie Blanchette, Author provided

Lignite (brown coal) mines were closed in East Germany after reunification in 1990, causing regional economic collapse and emigration. In an attempt to boost the local economy, the German government tasked a state-owned company with rapidly rehabilitating the landscape and filling the pits with river and groundwater for recreational use.

In 2009 the annual economic benefit of the lake district was between €10.4 million and €16.2 million. Current lake activities include swimming, boating and scuba diving. Businesses use the steep slopes of slowly filling pit lakes as vineyards, while spa hotels with lakeside boulevards cater to upmarket clientele.

Germany’s experience shows that pit lakes can lead to public benefit. However, many of these lakes require expensive ongoing active treatment, such as liming and pumping water through treatment facilities.

Due (in part) to the remoteness and low population density of Australia, this level of active treatment is unlikely to be economically feasible.

Natural rehabilitation

But active ongoing treatment isn’t the only option for improving pit lakes. Pit lakes have the capacity to change over time and become similar to natural lakes.

Pit lakes can naturally improve over decades (as seen in the coal-strip lakes of the US Midwest), if they are exposed to “passive” treatments that increase the amount of nutrients, beneficial microbes, seeds and insect larvae.

Every pit lake has a unique suite of biological and physical characteristics that make it easier or more difficult to rehabilitate. The US coal-strip pit lakes would be considered “easy” to rehabilitate because they were shallow, had large catchments and significant amounts of organic matter. However, the lakes still took decades to recover.

It’s hard to say exactly how Hazelwood will stack up on this scale without seeing modelling, but we can assume that its large size will create difficulties, as will any potential water quality issues. On the other hand, because the pit is still dry there’s an opportunity for pre-filling treatments that improve biodiversity and water quality.

For example, using heavy earthmoving equipment to “sculpt” the edge of the pit creates more natural habitats that encourage aquatic life to take hold. Careful introduction of appropriate wetland plants can enhance the system. Working with hydrologists and engineers, drainage lines connecting the pit lake to the wider catchment can provide the lake with sources of terrestrial nutrients to kickstart ecosystem development.

Passive processes tend to be slow. The challenge for scientists is to speed them up. However, many of the ecological processes that underpin pit lake development (as described above) are well-studied in artificial and natural lakes.

Turning an abandoned pit lake into a resort is not a far-fetched idea. As Germany’s mine pit projects show, communities can embrace a changing economy, and the science indicates that passive treatment systems can improve pit lakes.

The legacy of past mines and our demand for resources will ensure that more pit lakes will be produced. Ultimately, we will have to decide how we want to co-exist with these new lakes.

Melanie Blanchette receives funding from the Australian Coal Association Research Program and is a member of the International Mine Water Association.

Mark Lund receives funding from the Australian Coal Association Research Program and the mining industry. He is a member of the International Mine Water Association.

Mass migration of species to cooler climes has profound implications for society, pushing disease-carrying insects, crop pests and crucial pollinators into new areas, says international team of scientists

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