As someone born in Australia, now living in London, it's been a poignant few weeks to be working as a senior campaigner on the Greenpeace forests campaign.
When I was a young kid in Australia, we lived on a three acre property in a valley that was a mixture of bush, pasture and citrus orchards in the foothills of Perth, Western Australia. In summer we would sniff the wind nervously. Some years, we watched with grim fascination as uncontrolled fires swept the opposite side of the valley. One year, before I was born, the flames came close to my families' home, but we were fortunate.
At primary school, diligent teachers instructed us in the risks of bushfires. There's nothing like a match dropped on a pile of dried eucalyptus leaves, even in controlled conditions, to make the point to a group of rapt five year olds. Eucalyptus trees are full of oil - they explode and the fire jumps. When I was eight, Colin Thiele's classic Australian children's book The February Dragon, telling the story of an idyllic rural life consumed by summer fires, drove the lesson home. Some times as a child I couldn't sleep because I imagined the smell of smoke.
In recent weeks we've watched as the February Dragon rampaged across huge areas of Victoria leading to the deaths of more than 200 people. Not only is it the most deadly bushfire in the nation's history, there's been something new in the cultural smoke.
In Australia, fire-fighters are rightly seen as iconic: brave selfless servants of the common good. So when Peter Marshall, national secretary of the United Firefighters Union of Australia, wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to say "something is going on", expressly linking the Victorian fires to the catastrophic fire events that are predicted as a consequence of global warming, it was a darkly Damascene moment. The flames that feasted on the hottest days in Victoria's recorded history are a harbinger of the fires of climate change. Welcome to the future, with the warning bells of future climate disaster ringing in the wail of Australian sirens.
Across the globe, other flames are consuming the world's remaining rainforests, which are being cut down for illegal timber, or hacked and burned to make way for soya, palm oil, cattle ranching or pulp and paper manufacturing. Deforestation is responsible for around one fifth of the world's greenhouse emissions.
My job is to work on this issue, with specific responsibility for REDD which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. In economic terms, we have to find a way of making the forests worth more standing, than cut down. So, we need an international deal on REDD in Copenhagen in December, but meanwhile, early action in key areas to halt the destruction.
Today's work started with a meeting about communicating some of the finer points around REDD financing. There is a growing international consensus on the need to fight deforestation, but the devil is in how we do it. The danger is that the money flow will be too little, too late or that the system will fail to result in a real reduction in emissions, or could lead to the dispossession of forest peoples. Under some proposed models, the trading of forest credits could actually be a sneaky way for developed nations to avoid meeting their obligations to reduce emissions at home.
It isn't too late to act on tackling deforestation. We need credible early action to halt rainforest destruction and a good deal on REDD in Copenhagen. There is time still. But the smell of smoke is getting closer.
Editor's note: David clearly didn't read Hannah's post earlier this week, there were double spaces after every period which I've edited out.
