www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/world/europe/summer-heat-wave-fires-climate-change.html
Watching Spain, France, USA, Canada burn from the NPHSS (https://www.naturpark-holsteinische-schweiz.de/). In a few days I return to my home to the tinderbox, but what I have seen possible in Germany will never leave me hopeless again.
We humans are in for tremendous pain but nothing we will suffer will be like the scaring of the biological systems that maintain life. Fires are chemical reactions. Their articles of combustion are instructive about conditions that proceed them. Without balance these reactions accelerate the feedback loops of dessication that increase vulnerability to inflammation and disease. These reactions will demand more and more scarce surface water to be slowed. Activated carbon without living layers to digest it will increase open spaces that will yield acreage for more concrete and condos.
The real estate barrens like my morally disfigured President will use the money they steal from public coffers to buy up those new dead parcels of carnage. They will turn the entire world into a lifeless desert if we don’t collectively straighten our spines and demand change.
I recognize there is great beauty in some deserts, but please understand those places are deserts that were formed over evolutionary epochs to sustain life in a semi-arid state, those are not the deserts we will leave to our children.
The dead spaces we will bequeath will be the indentured toil of extinct forests that were cashed in for fat decrepit landlords pickle ball courts and experimental small scale nuclear storage facilities that will temporarily sponsor a few more hours of repose before the next fire, an even bigger reaction to greed of a few to the peril of the many.
Wake up. You are not dreaming. We must use these fires to become a better people, worthy of our hiccup of time to balance our Planet’s sustainability.
How? Well to start if a parcel was a stream before it was degraded into a car wash, do not build a pot dispensary on top of it — restore the biological ecosystem and put a legal framework around it so fat Trump or his European equivalents cannot ever spoil it again. Turn that scar into a green living memory.
Growing up my Grandfather was right to share his story of heroism in WWII against a misguided Germany. I judged Germany too harshly because of it. Today though were he still alive, he would be the first to say as the Naturalist warrior I loved, that Germany can also save the world. Not by doing all the work, but by their new example, of how to actually become a better civilization.