[♪♪♪]

[female narrator] this is how i remember it beginning. it was the middle of a hot, dry summer. there's a light breeze. the sky is a dramatic orange... and it's snowing. except it isn't snow at all... ...it's ash, from a distant forest fire fuelled by climate change. i'm not sure what surprised me more-- the ash falling with careless grace or the feeling that rose up within me as it fell. it was grief. i knew it well.

[♪♪♪] and this time, it was for the changing world all around me. [sarah baike] everyone can relate to grief of losing a loved one, because, i mean, that's universal. but grief of losing your homeland? i never, ever thought of this as being something that... it'll be lost, forever. but... [voice shakes] ...it is. [tearfully] i don't know how to explain it, really.

it's... it was just part of you, growing up. i never, ever thought about there might be a time when the ice wasn't going to be solid to travel on. i don't think, um... i don't know how to be able to explain it to you... ...or anyone. you don't really realize how much you've lost until you stop and think about it. [winds gusting] [derek pottle] when i'm on the land, a lot of times, i just stop. i stop...

and i look. i look out in the distance and i say to myself, "are my eyes seeing what my great-grandparents saw?" are my eyes seeing the same landscape? and i used to listen to their stories and i hear their stories and their love for the land... ...and i ask myself-- i ask myself, you know, how much-- how much has the scenery changed, or the geographics changed? is the land-- does it look the same? does it represent the same thing? will this landscape still be here 50 years from now? will my grandchildren's eyes still be able to see what i see? and i don't have the answer. [♪♪♪]

[water bubbling] [narrator] my sister and i were privileged enough to grow up in a world of beginnings. star-lit skies and secret forests. fireflies and ducklings. not nightmares. not endings. not saying goodbye. [gulls crying] [♪♪♪] [greta thunberg] when i was in maybe second or third grade,

i heard about climate change. i became shocked because i didn't have a clue. the more i read, the more depressed i became... ...because i thought that if it really was that serious, then someone would have taken care of it, the politicians would have had it under control, but then i realized, they didn't. first, i stopped talking to people outside my closest family. and i stopped going to school because i would only cry all the time and then had to go home. and then i stopped eating, slowly. i lost a lot of weight and i-i almost starved to death.

i just didn't want to eat because i didn't feel any meaning. as a young person, i feel like my future and everyone else's future is being threatened. i think the scariest part is that we don't know what is going to happen. everything is so uncertain. of course, there are many estimations and calculations of when certain tipping points will occur, so we can't know for sure, we don't have a time machine, but i think it's very scary because i-i have asperger's, and i like routines, and when things are planned in detail, so i, for me, it's especially scary that everything is so uncertain. [♪♪♪]

[anote tong] to see this coming and to feel so incapable of doing anything about it, that, emotionally, was perhaps one of the most difficult things that i've had to deal with in my life. for us, it's real, it's not something that's happening in a distant part of our lives. it's not somewhere in the background, which has no relevance. it's here, now, and in the middle of our-- virtually, our home, because during the last very high tide, water was coming into our homes. so we are living with it on a daily basis, and it is getting worse.

but i think my greatest fear is that, one day, there will come a storm... [winds roaring] ...and it will all be gone before anybody realizes and acknowledges that it is real. [♪♪♪] [narrator] the world used to seem invincible to me... ...just like you did. but time eventually showed me few things are as they appear... ...and there are some things that we don't see at all,

until it's too late. greenhouse gases do their damage surreptitiously. so did the cancer cells. so... there was nothing i could've done. nothing we could have done. no warnings. at least these are some of the stories i try to tell myself. [♪♪♪] [click] [charlie veron] it was about five kilometres that way. the first-ever photograph of a coral bleaching. i thought, "wow! this is really strange."

it wasn't the colony that was bleached, just part of it. next year, i found the whole thing dead. as far as i know, it's the first photograph ever published of a bleached coral. [♪♪♪] i just thought it was weird, i just thought, "what's wrong with you?" but of course you feel it completely. you're not separated from it, you're part of it, and if it's sick, you're part of the sickness, and it affects you as part of the sickness. [♪♪♪] [beeping]

[♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] us wonnarua people believe that lizard is crying. i mean, she's up high and she can see. she's crying for all the environmental issues. and over there, you can see-- these great, big cans are just eating everything, eating our country up.

just destroying our country. [truck reverse alert beeping] [taggart speaking] it's just the same thing. we're just being brought down. we're just... we're still nothing. we're still nothin'. this land and us-- lizard rock, the trees, the river... we're all just one... and if this land hurts, we hurt. [horses whinnying] [♪♪♪]

[manari ushigua speaking spanish] [♪♪♪] [belen paez] his name is "tsamaraw," a word that is from the sapara language that means "one energy." "one energy" that has been always there in the universe,

in the galaxies, on planet earth. i have a lot of fear of what is going to happen in his lifetime, because the time is ending for a few months... ...for animals, for the forests... and in my dreams-- all this information is coming from my dreams, and i don't want to see it. [♪♪♪] [birds singing] [crickets chirping] [makutsawa montahuano speaking spanish]

[sighing heavily] [lethly vargas speaking spanish] [♪♪♪]

[narrator] my dear jen... a big surprise. i've been told i have a malignant lump in my left breast. i was shocked at first, but have impressed myself with how easily i go on like normal. will write more later... but i wanted you to know. love-- [takes a deep breath] ...your sister, saille. [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪]

[david bowman] so this is a pencil pine-- athrotaxis cupressoides-- and it's one of the oldest living tree lineages in the world. you can find the imprints of their fossils over 100 million years. they grow very slowly, they have very limited capacity to regenerate after fire. this thing might be anywhere between 800-- might even be 1,000 years old, and unfortunately, because of climate change, the next stop is extinction for these things, they're going to become extinct. it's one hell of an emotional journey

because your subject matter, motivating you and moving you, is under threat from ecological climate forces and it's being, in some cases, destroyed before your eyes. [thunder crashing and fires roaring] [sirens wailing] we thought we would fence off areas, declare areas wildernesses, and they would be safe-- they're not safe. [chopper rotors beating, fires roaring] this is like wartime. this is-- this is not peace. whatever it is, it's not peace. [♪♪♪] [jan harris] our son had been in the shed

and said he could smell smoke, and it was just this-- the wind was just... absolutely terrifying. so they walked around to where that little building is and there was a tiny wisp of smoke. oh, this must be about where the... it is really disorientating, isn't it? this must be the deck for the bedroom, yeah? -yeah. -yeah. so the bedroom-- well, is that... that wall there is that-- the line is the lounge room. yeah, and then the kitchen coming out to about here, so, yeah, the deck over there. yeah. i've been very drunk right here-- [harris laughs] ...and i've danced a lot right here. [harris laughs] i don't know if you can work it out, but there was a loft up there. sort of think, if the house, you know, a whole big house burnt down, it'd be this really slow... thing,

but it was just-- bang, and it was gone. so that was, yeah, i-- shocking? shocking and... fuck. you know? we were falling asleep. if pugs hadn't woken us up, we would've just... it would've been so fast. you wouldn't have known. you know? just weird. it's still weird. [jo dodds] the fire came all of the way down the road and it burned through every single property, onto our property, and then it stopped at the top of our hill. [chimes tinkling] my pristine little house is at the end of a road that looks like... a nuclear bomb's gone off. wallabies and roos and possums and echidnas and the bird life-- it was... utterly silent up here, for months. [mournful theme plays]

[clicking] as you can hear cicadas now, and i remember the first time i saw an ant in here... [chuckles softly] ...and how... ...wonderful it was just to see this little guy wandering around and going, "how did you survive that?" there were times i'd just go to the big trees that were still standing. just-- i wanted to just get the black off the trees and have that on me. [voice breaks] i noticed, as i walked through the forest, i'd come home and i'd have black stripes on my arms and my legs, and they'd be from things i brushed past, and i-i really... [sighs thoughtfully] ...appreciated having the forest marking me the way it had been marked by humanity, and... it was... very private that... the loss in here is very private to me,

because so much attention and energy goes to the built environment, and the people who lost their things, and my grief was about the loss of a place that doesn't get mourned. so there was a kind of loneliness about it. [♪♪♪] [wind chimes tinkling] [narrator] my dearest friends... i wish i may, i wish i might tell you a story. there once was a boy who loved to muck in the marshes, scramble up trees, gallop across the fields, horse-winged.

and there once was a boy who once was a girl. she grew into this woman creature, her heart full of joy and pain and wonder. my dearest friends, i wish i may, i wish i might be able to tell you that the cancer has not returned... [clock ticks] ...but it has, and in full force. i have been told i have one to three years left. i take this information as part of a larger truth no one is able to predict. [♪♪♪]

[wind gusting] [clare farrell] we hide birth and death and we also hide sewage. we hide all of our rubbish, we hide all of our waste. what are we doing when we deny the realities of our life and of our situation? this culture is so unbelievably fucked. you know, it's like you tell people stuff and it just doesn't go in. you-- you haven't heard what i've said and this is the fundamental problem. i'm listening very carefully to you. no, i don't think you are. you're listening, but you're not emotionally connecting. your message is so unrelentingly bleak and negative. it's not a message, right? when you go to the doctor and he tells you you have cancer, that's not a message, it's the science. it's the science. when we're discussing setting up, no one wanted to talk about extinction.

no one wanted to talk about rebellion. no one wants to talk about what's actually happening and no one wants to talk about what is the moral imperative for every citizen in the world. [farrell] we live in a society that lacks honesty, and the honest truth is that we've allowed this sort of great big mistake to happen. it's like we're all implicated by admitting that the way we live is causing a catastrophe. it's all these things that we do that add up, and then the framework of the system. [tong] it is something that drives me-- a sense of injustice that's unfolding. [storm raging] it's more important to get that marginal rise in economic growth, regardless of what it means for people in countries like mine, and so that's when i said,

"okay, fine. go ahead." "increase your emissions, but keep it within your borders, hmm? if you can do that, i have nothing to say." but, of course, you cannot. so how can there be justice? [muck squishing] our islands will be underwater. not through our fault, not our creation. the information and the science is very clear, that what is happening is damaging my home. they've got so much power to do the right thing... ...yet why do they hesitate? [♪♪♪] for so many years and decades, i've seen it and my father has seen it and my ancestors have seen

people come in here and just take the resources, build their dams, cut the forests-- take, take, take. [♪♪♪] when the construction started, i was devastated by what i saw. the amount of trees that were cut... the machinery that you used was just like a blender. it just blended everything right off the land. they didn't care about the people, they didn't care about the land, they didn't care about the animals, they didn't care about any part of the ecosystem at all. [pottle] you can't help to feel angry when it's something that's happening caused by some other place in the world, and it's impacting us. without a doubt,

inuit leave a carbon footprint wherever we go to, but there's 65,000 inuit right across inuit nunangat. our footprint on the earth is very little, compared to some of the very big industrial areas of the world, so it's imposed onto us without our welcome. doesn't make no difference how much you voice your concern, what you present, how you deliver it-- it's still going to happen. [♪♪♪] the power that's being generated at muskrat falls is being ran through underground cables to the eastern seaboard.