We have grown accustomed to seeing the world burn on our screens. This summer of 2025, the images have been particularly lurid. The orange skies over the Aude region in France, the terrified columns of evacuees fleeing the flames in Spain and Portugal, the endless, smoke-choked horizon in Canada – a nation that appears to be in a permanent state of combustion. We watch, we tut, we perhaps share a post with a sad emoji. Then we move on.
But what the screen fails to convey is the reality on the ground. This isn't just scenery burning; it is the wholesale slaughter of the living world. The creatures that cannot outrun the fire front – the tortoises, the slow-worms, the fledglings in their nests – are simply vaporised. Those that can flee, a terrified menagerie of deer, boar, and fox, spill out onto roads into the path of cars, or into barren agricultural lands where they will starve. The air, thick with the ghosts of a million incinerated lives, becomes unbreathable for those that remain. The rivers, choked with ash and topsoil, will run black for years, poisoning the life that once thrived within them.
Human communities, too, are erased. Homes, built over generations, become little more than scorch marks on the earth. Livelihoods, tied to the forests and the land, vanish in the smoke. People are herded into soulless evacuation centres, clutching the few possessions they could grab, their faces etched with a trauma that will never leave them. This is not a "wildfire." This is a climate pogrom, an orchestrated, if indirect, act of mass destruction, for which we are all complicit through our decades of apathy and denial.
For those of us in the temperate, manicured landscapes of countries like the UK, this still feels distant. A tragedy for others. A foreign news report. But the fire is coming for us. The same lethal equation of record heat, prolonged drought, and tinder-dry vegetation is writing itself into our own future.
At first, it will consume the places we have set aside for a sanitised version of "nature." The great heathlands and country parks will be the first to go up. Think of the New Forest, the Peak District, the North York Moors, not as places of gentle recreation, but as fire-traps waiting for a spark. The rolling, irrigated greens of golf courses, those absurd monuments to ecological vandalism, will offer no defence. They will burn, their carefully tended fairways turning to black stripes across the landscape.
Then, as the heat domes settle over our cities for longer each summer, the fire will creep closer. It will find the forgotten corners of our urban sprawl. Local nature reserves, the scrubby woodlands at the edge of town, the verges along our motorways – these ribbons of green will become fuses, carrying the flames into the heart of our communities. Fire crews will no longer be racing to the countryside; they will be setting up perimeters at the end of suburban streets.
And then, one day, it will be in your garden. The hedge you planted, now desiccated and brown. The lawn you stopped watering, crisp as paper. The trees in the local park, a stand of ready-made kindling. The fire won't need a forest anymore. It will feast on the curated greenery of your own neighbourhood. It will be your home, your car, your street that is threatened. It will be your children's lungs that fill with smoke.
Only then, when the flames are licking at your own fence, will the abstraction of "global warming" become brutally real. Is that when we will finally wake up? When the apocalyptic glow on the horizon is the reflection from the next street over? When the choice is no longer between petrol or electric, but between your home and the inferno?
Is this when we finally act? When it is already far, far too late?
Comments
Post a Comment