Australian Firefighter Saves Baby Kangaroo

A filmmaker and Instagram star who volunteered to fight Australian
wildfires grabbed this baby kangaroo just before flames would have
reach it. Video of the rescue has gone viral.

One of the many heartbreaking aspects of the Australian wildfire crisis is the toll this is taking on animals.

There's been wildly varying reports of how much wildlife has died, but it's clear the toll is devastating.

When you witness just one animal victim,  your heart just breaks.  You wish every animal could be rescued.

Such is the case in the video at the bottom of this post, in which a firefighter finds a baby kangaroo, just inches from a line of flames coming at it.  .

In the now viral video,  fire is creeping along in a forest, and firefighters are trying to stop or slow by spraying water on it from hoses. Suddenly, one of the firefighters, who turns out to be a travel filmmaker and big Instagram star named Sam McGlone, stoops down and grabs the baby kangaroo, which is less than a foot away from the advancing flames. It truly is an incredibly close call.

"I found a baby joey i the fire," McGlone says, turning the camera to face himself.  He wrapped the baby kangaroo in a blanket, fed it some water.

Indications are the kangaroo was sent to an animal rehab center.

McGlone also started a GoFundMe page to raise money to help animals affected by the wildfires. He joins many others, including rich and famous celebrities, who have the money and the influence over their fans to raise a lot of money for Australian human and animal fire victims. t

McGlone rescuing the kangaroo was a bright spot in this horrific disaster, but how many animals died because nobody was in the middle of the fires to find them?  After all, people were fleeing for their own lives and some didn't make it. So far, at least 24 people have died in the Australian bushfires.

It's not clear how many animals died in the fires, but the numbers are huge. According to The Independent, Universityof Sydney ecologists think perhaps 480 million animals have died in the fire,s including 8,000 or so koalas.

Here's the video:

New Jersey Town Adapts To Climate Change By Rising From the Depths

Adapting to the heat, drought, fires, floods and storms brought on by climate change is going to be disruptive and expensive, no doubt about that.

Should downtown Highlands, New Jersey
be raised by ten feet to avoid future bad storms and
climate change?  

Here in Vermont, we are struggling to make culverts bigger, buying out low lying properties, shoring up highways and streets to make things more resistent to the floods we seem to be getting more and more of.

The cost and complexity of just little Vermont's adaption is daunting, as I wrote for the Burlington Free Press back in February.

If you think that's difficult and expensive, check out one New Jersey town. The not very well named town of Highlands, New Jersey was smacked hard by Hurricane Sandy last October.

According to ClimateProgress.org, Highlands is going to raise its entire downtown by ten feet.

Says ClimateProgress:

"City officials estimate the cost of elevating the town 8 to 11 feet would range from $150 to $200 million--in comparison to the $574 million the real estate is valued at post-Sandy, according to assessment records."

 About 1,250 Highlands homes and businessses were damaged or destroyed during Sandy. With the prospect of rising sea levels and the possibility of stronger coastal storms in a warmer world, the city fears such a disaster will happen again unless they take the drastic action of raising the community's elevation.

No word yet on how Highlands would pay for such a project. They do hope for help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but that funding is highly uncertain, to say the least.

And Highlands is just one community and the project cost is estimated at $200 million. What of all the other low-lying cities and towns along coastlines and vulnerable waterways?  We're talking trillions of dollars.

If the worst of the climate change predictions come true, maybe some coastal and low lying communities will just have to drown.  A sad prospect indeed.

I guess we can only hope climate change over the next century won't turn out to be as bad as some people fear.