The sky is on fire
You are right. A swamp should not burn.
You and your colleagues are awaiting evacuation orders while I'm in Ontario, which has been safe until now. We're driving highway 401 from Montreal to Toronto, and the sky is on fire. Or so it seems, with one of those spectacular sunsets that are common in the West, but not Eastern Canada, and thus one of those sunsets that might be, as Nicholas Mirzoeff has discussed, the result of human-generated particulate matter.
The technicolor sunset surrounds us. It's dazzling and beautiful, and makes me giddy, because we were surrounded by cement greys all day. We can't know what exactly is producing the seductive array of "refracted color" but if Monet was alive he might put it in a painting (Mirzoeff 222). There are also bugs on the windshield, which I remember from my childhood but I haven't seen in a decade or two. For a moment, I'm so grateful to see them.
And then, I'm horrified, as I become aware of the carnage my little journey and everyone else's on this highway generates. My sunset looks not much different from forest fires. I think about all the evacuees from Jasper, Fort MacMurray, the Palisades, who have had to stuff as much as they can in their car, and drive away, not knowing whether they're going to be able to return.
I think about how my little road trip is directly linked to the polycrises that have started where you live but will also come to where we live.
The beauty now gives me the same uneasy feeling I had looking at the scars in the landscape left by years-old toothpaste in San Ignacio Lagoon in Mexico. Our eye is trained to crave color, even when it's detritus, or a sign of something wrong or broken.
In this new world, we need to feel repulsion. We need to feel fear. Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova describe "conditions such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjectivities and beings" (xi).
The sun set in Ontario and we all returned to normal, while in Alberta, people were already evacuated from their homes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Works cited
Fuller, Matthew, and Olga Goriunova. 2019. Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility. Posthumanities 53. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.