My friend Trev invited me to count lyre birds with his local community, between Gunai/Kurnai Country and Boonwurrung Country. 'We listen to their songs, and make a map of them.'

Since we were forced to make all our social interactions virtual, things have felt more real than ever. It turns out it’s not that difficult to tell the difference between the outside world and a screen. Far from an acceleration towards virtual reality, COVID-19 has felt like the return of something real. The dissolution of a fantasy.

Along with efforts at environmental management – increasingly futile in the face of both climate change and the intensification of water hoarding – the dams along the Murray Darling Basin are the barricades that reveal the contested political economy of water.

But they’re symptomatic of our contempt for the coast. We ‘love’ the beach because of whatever enjoyment we can squeeze out of it (free swims, warmth, Instagram fodder) and godspeed to anything – endangered species, for example – that stands in the way.

To continue to eat meat depends not on our biology but on our commitment to an idea that, if pushed, most of us would reject: that the spoliation of the natural world and the suffering of animals are less important than the gustatory pleasure we take in eating meat and dairy.

Artist Sofia Sabbagh on the volunteers helping track the environmental toll of Victoria’s logging practices.

Ecocentric writing and ecophilosophical thought has a more established history in Australia than many would believe. One of the most well-known figures of the field is Val Plumwood, a Sydney local who, in the 1980s and 90s, wrote comprehensively on issues of Australian forestry, the human role in the food web, and the importance of feminist teachings in our perception of ecology.

Over this past week, I’ve been watching the news roll in from Standing Rock, where protesters are fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline: dramatic images of police brutality woven through news of an election campaign where climate has been glaringly absent. In my newsfeed, a mix of independent and mainstream media, the images of the election and the images of #noDAPL sit side by side but never seem to interact, like an illustration of the chasm between climate policy and climate reality.

Because once you become aware of birds, it is hard to ignore the threats facing them. The black-throated finch is a bird Dionysius has never seen, and it’s possible he’ll never get the chance. Endangered and elusive, the finches used to live all along north-eastern Australia, but are now extinct in New South Wales and sighted infrequently in parts of north and central Queensland.

It’s hard to grasp exactly how this brutality qualifies as recreation. The damage is not confined to ducks shot legally. I’ve seen terrified ducklings paddling in frantic circles as hunters stuff their mothers’ bodies into sacks. Every year, rare and protected species – including coots, grebes, swans, ravens and the threatened freckled duck – have been illegally shot by careless or bloodthirsty shooters. On-site vets treat other native birdlife suffering neurogenic shock and exhaustion from the constant barrage of gunfire. Shooters leave dead birds floating in the water, and wetlands littered with spent shell casings and beer cans.

References to human rights, originally included in the draft agreement, have all been deleted from the operational parts of the final deal. There are no mechanisms that force countries to comply with even their initial weak plans, and a new mechanism of five yearly reviews seems redundant given the urgency of the issue. If it’s all bad news, why are environmentalists and the Greens hailing it as a step forward?