Bushfires in Australia

I’m sure all of you have heard of the bushfires happening in Australia. I had heard of them before I got down here too, but it’s a lot more personal down here. When we were in New Zealand, there were news reports of smoke blowing across the Tasman Sea and possibly effecting people with things like asthma and other breathing problems. That made it feel a bit closer to home, but a few days ago, we spent four days in Sydney. The main bushfires in New South Wales (the state Sydney is in) are directly west of Sydney. Our days there all had some smoke and visibility problems, but we went up into the Blue Mountains one day.

At our first stops closest to the city, you could see smoke in the distance over the mountains and you could tell the wind was blowing it towards us and Sydney. It really got bad after we stopped for lunch. We went to a lookout at the Three Sisters rock formation and you could see only a small portion of the bushfires in the valley beneath us. There was so much smoke in the valley and when you looked up, there was an enormous trail of smoke disappearing into the sky. Besides the obvious effects on the native forests and on the people and animals living nearby, these bushfires are releasing so much carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.

Our tour guide was a reserve firefighter. It was really encouraging when he said that he’d seen worse than what’s happening right now, but bushfires can get worse really fast. Someone once said that for people to care and donate to a cause, they need to have hope. There is hope here, but these firefighters do need help. They’re leasing out helicopters from American companies because they don’t have enough of their own.

Because of this, koalas have been losing a lot of their valuable habitat space. A lot of them also got burnt in the fires. If you can, please donate to the WWF fund. After the fires get put out, it will help with reforestation and in the meantime, it will give some of the money to koala hospitals.

If you can, please donate to one of the causes below. If you can’t, tell your friends or ask your parents. It’s really easy to think that things like this won’t affect you, but natural disasters like this are becoming more and more common and it is ultimately the fault of the human race.