Hottest place on earth
The hottest place on Earth... just think about that, on the 4th of January 2020 my hometown of Penrith, Australia was the hottest place on the entire planet.
To be honest I'm not really sure how I feel about it and I've spent the past few hours trying to gather my thoughts on how I want to look at it.
I'll start with some background, I grew up in the Penrith area my whole life, it wasn't until I was around 25 when I moved and rented in Wentworthville, but as I say to many people "You can take the boy out of Penrith but you can't take the Penrith out of a boy", and within 6 months I had purchased a house in the lower Blue Mountains, a place where I could ride my bike on the road safely, have access to great mountain biking, have a dog in the backyard and more importantly, a great football team. I could ask for nothing more.
Now as a Penrith boy you accept that it's going to be hot in summer, every night on the news growing up as a kid you would see that consistently the highest daily temperatures in Sydney were in the west, you spent a lot of time in the pool trying to cool down, shade at school was always at a premium and we always had to resort to running the air-con to keep the house cool, but but hot was maybe 40, if it was real hot it might be 42, but 48.9???
During summer last year I made a conscious decision that I would stop watering my lawn, I'd put a fair bit of effort into maintaining it since I had first put it down, but it was the near daily requirement to continue watering it just to keep it green that made me reconsider whether this was even worthwhile. It was also around this time that I listened to a podcast on Freakanomics Radio that talked about how un-natural it is for us to actually keep a lawn, so I was convinced that allowing the lawn to die a slow death was actually just a sign that in the environment we live in a lawn just doesn't make sense, I just didn't expect it to die so quickly.
So what has this got to do with being the hottest place on Earth?
The answer is that it made me realise that we really have had no rain, like barely anything. Surprisingly the lawn would spring back to life when there was a bit of rain, but days of no significant rain turned into weeks, which has now turned into months. The reality of drought (without the artificial use of tap water) had turned up in my own backyard, literally.
So on a day when the temperature hits 48.9 degrees I'm filled with sadness and disappoinment, disappointment that its gotten to the state that our environment is in. That we have taken and continue to take unnecessarily and that our speed to action to try to reverse the impact is not as fast as it could be.
But there's also the opportunity to look at the positives, this will hopefully be the trigger for more people to take action to make a difference, there is always more that we can individually do to try and drive change. For me I couldn't be prouder of the place that I live, 48.9 signifies that there is a lot more that needs to be done to return it to how it should be.
Penrith and proud.