Amazon fire from space...
Amazon fire from space... NASA

In the video "Amazon fires: The devastation seen from above," the BBC reporter, Will Grant, who is in a helicopter, has great difficulty communicating the scale of the fires that are destroying the "lungs of the world." He very well knows that something approximating an extinction-level-event is happening below him, but he does not want to sound hysterical. So he says things like: "extremely upsetting," and "extremely disturbing," and "undoubtedly, one of the more shocking sights I've seen in Latin America." But what could be more shocking (if terrifying) than seeing the space (thousands upon thousands of hectares) and time (thousands upon thousands of years) of a globally crucial ecosystem go up in smoke like that? So much of it gone and never coming back? And this is the beginning of the dry season. This is just the start. What has Grant seen in Latin America (and indeed the whole world in his whole life, which is young) that's even comparable to this catastrophe?

And one can feel the flames from far away. There's no way they are just going to go away. You are dreaming if you think the same will ever be the same again. One can expect with some certainty that a new earth is at the end of the one that's now on fire. Climate change will not destroy life, but redirect it in ways we cannot predict. This redirection may not include us. Such was the stimmung that filled my Los Angeles hotel room on Saturday, August 22.

The window of my room, on the seventh floor in a glassy, mid-sized tower next to LAX and owned by Sheraton, viewed not only the dusk but what I can only describe as a dizzying concentration of the civilization that made me and was undoing the only world I could and will ever live in. Stretching to there and here, car-clogged freeways. A stretch limo passing a Subway in front of a giant's footprint of a parking lot. There was another hotel. Another plane landing after another plane. An elephantine hanger on the left. The king-sized bed behind me. The hum of the mini fridge below a bucket of ice. The air-chilling AC. The waves for wifi passing through me. The remains of an english muffin on a plate. The ugly carpet. The flatscreen. And heard from a room by mine, ZZ Tops' "Legs." I thought, as I drank a glass of white wine from France because I now fear the carcinogenic toxin found in many American wines, the song I needed to hear was "Beds Are Burning" by Midnight Oil. (I would not sleep well that night.)


A moment later, I'm in an Uber commanded masterfully by a black American male in his 50s. He knows these streets. He and them are of one mind. The sun is now in the ocean. The homeless in islands with palm trees. I'm heading to a restaurant in Culver City. I will eventually eat fish from Australia. The song on the Uber's radio: Prince's "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." That's talking about my civilization.