According to Rebecca Solnit, a lot of us are suffering from something called moral injury. She describes this as the “deep sense of wrongness” that can infiltrate our lives when we realise we are complicit in something seriously bad.
The first time I experienced this in relation to climate change, I was changing my baby’s nappy soon after one of the worst Australian wildfire seasons on record in 2020. The nappy featured a smiling cartoon koala on the front. I immediately recalled the scene of a singed, parched koala being fed water from a plastic bottle by a human as it fled the inferno. A disposable nappy takes up to 500 years to decompose. I felt disgust and despair at the degree of consumption, waste and exploitation that even a modest lifestyle in a high-income country seems to entail.
