The forest floor is covered in ankle-high layers of dead, brown leaves. It could easily be mistaken for an Autumn scene somewhere in Europe. Yet this is a rainforest in sub-tropical Australia, a country where the trees are always green and shed their bark, not their leaves.

There still is some green around, as the hardier plants and trees stubbornly hold on to the preciously little water they can still access. There are patches of colour even, from flowering trees and shrubs that feel they are dying and push out a last abundance of flowers in a last attempt to produce enough seeds to preserve the species for after the drought.

But most of the trees are bare. The once dense jungle is visibly thinning out. It is like the forest is slowly fading away and becoming transparent, like a ghost of its former impenetrable self. Where walls of green once blocked all views, dark outlines of trees in charcoal black and burnt-earth browns are no more than shadows between here and the now starkly visible horizon.

Is this what the death of an eco-system looks like? Is this how life fades away, one species at a time, until only the translucent outlines of that abundance remain? Will we all become pale, lifeless, shimmering ghosts, aimlessly wandering through a desert of dead and dying dreams, vainly grasping at the mirages of the lush and vibrant riches we failed to value when it was all still alive around us?