Then, in the first weeks of her life, there was the strange heat. Throughout late May and all through June of that year, it was unprecedentedly hot and dry—the most intense heat wave of my lifetime, the longest period without rain. Whenever we brought the baby outside, we worried about whether she was sufficiently shaded from the intensity of the sun. Indoors we struggled to keep her cool. We sat out in our tiny shaded courtyard, with its cast-iron furniture and its potted plants, drinking coffee and iced fruit juice, marveling at this sudden Mediterranean swerve our lives had taken.
My wife reminded me that when we’d bought the house, people had remarked that this outdoor area, which received little direct sunlight, would be a tremendous asset in the heat of southern Europe. Less so in Ireland, they would always laugh. And now here we were, she said, sheltering from the heat like a couple of Sicilians.
Yes, I agreed, here we were. It was funny, and also not at all.
Because as pleasant as it was, this weather, it could not be received as an unmixed blessing. Every day, there were things in the news that gave a person pause. For the second time in three months, the government had issued a Status Red weather warning, this time for the risk of wildfires. Restrictions on water usage were imposed. The tabloids were reveling in a story, obvious publicity gambit though it was, about how the lack of soil moisture would mean a greatly diminished potato crop, and therefore that the country would likely suffer a “crisp shortage” in the coming year. It was a comic recapitulation of Ireland’s history of potato blight and famine. First as tragedy, then as farce. Funny, and also not at all.
On the evening news, on the front pages of tabloids, the maps of Europe blazed a vengeful red. The Swedish government was appealing for help from other EU countries to deal with rampant wildfires in the Arctic Circle. On my phone, I watched streaming video of blazing pine forests, of planes and helicopters spreading great billowing spumes of water over the burning land, and I thought about the term “Arctic heat wave,” an absurdity that threatened to short-circuit thinking altogether.
That there were wildfires in the Arctic Circle felt like the most important fact in the world. This was a thing we should never not be thinking about, talking about. But something about this truth, and the endless deluge of other more or less equally horrifying truths, made it almost impossible to assimilate. The subtext of every news headline now, of every push notification, was that we were completely and irrevocably fucked.
But Arctic wildfires? This was the subtext erupting through the surface, combusting in the dry heat of overdetermination. This, if anything, was too on the nose.
In Greece, meanwhile, dozens of people had died in wildfires at seaside resorts near Athens. Hundreds had leapt into the ocean to flee the flames, which were whipped into frenzy by winds of sixty miles an hour. Many didn’t make it and burned to death on the shore, while many more drowned. The streets were lined with the scorched skeletons of cars, keys still in their ignitions, their owners having abandoned them en masse to escape the approaching inferno on foot.
This was the catastrophe itself, ongoing and absolute, hiding in plain sight. If you asked me how I was, how things were going, I should only have been able to honestly tell you that there were wildfires in the Arctic Circle, because that was really all that could be said about how things were. But humankind, as the bird in T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” famously put it, cannot bear very much reality.
For a few months that year, I shared an office with an ecologist who did consultancy work, speaking to corporations about how they could make their businesses more sustainable. Over lunch one day, I said I was skeptical about the idea that corporate sustainability, and individuals living more consciously and responsibly in terms of their impact on the environment, could at this point have any meaningful impact on what we were headed for.
“I feel like we’re fucked,” I said. “Are we fucked?”
Though it was not a sentiment she would want to share with her corporate clients, she conceded that we were fucked. The only way she could conceive of our species doing what needed to be done to halt our progress toward catastrophe, she said, was the imminent establishment of some kind of benevolent global dictatorship whose sole purpose was to limit the amount of carbon we released into the atmosphere. This seemed an unlikely prospect, she said.
The most that could be hoped for now, she said, was that we could find ways to shield ourselves from the worst effects of what was to come. The word she used, I remember, was sandbagging.
“When we say ‘fucked,’ ” I said, “are we talking about the same thing? Because I’m talking about the collapse of civilization.”
People often asked her, she said, about Ireland’s prospects when it came to climate change. What she told them was that we were extremely lucky in a lot of ways, that we were in a very small group of nations—New Zealand being another—that were unlikely to suffer catastrophic effects from melting polar ice caps, a hotter and drier climate. People tended to think, she said, that this meant we would be fine, that we would simply have to become more self-sufficient. But this was pure delusion. What would it even mean, after all, to be fine in the context of a drowning world, a world on fire? We were a small island, with nine hundred miles of coastline and an army that would by itself be effectively useless against any kind of invasion. We would be relying, she said, on the goodwill of other countries whose people were starving, drowning, burning. We would not be fine.
One day in July, The Sun’s front page featured a fiery red map of heat waves across Europe and North America, and a headline proclaiming THE WORLD’S ON FIRE. Smaller images displayed the inferno in Greece, the grass in a London park turned brown. (Just above the image of the burning world was a notice of a competition in which readers could WIN A CARAVAN, details of which could be found on page 24.)
In those days, people were always using the phrase the New Normal, though it was unclear how it could ever be normal for the world to be on fire.
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The sound of water was a constant presence in our lives at that time—on the bedroom stereo, on Bluetooth speakers, in the car on the motorway. We used it to calm the baby, to send her to sleep. We relied in particular on a playlist called “Ocean Sounds of Martha’s Vineyard.” These recordings were so omnipresent in our life that we joked about someday taking her to the real Martha’s Vineyard to hear her favorite tracks in a live setting. (“Oh, ‘Lambert’s Cove,’ absolute banger,” we would say when “Lambert’s Cove” came on.) We ourselves were calmed and reassured by the sound of lapping tides, the roaring waves.
But sometimes not. Sometimes, I would be walking up and down the length of our bedroom, holding my daughter to my chest, a soft little animal, the burbling and lapping of the ocean blasting through the stereo speakers, and the sound would become suddenly sinister, and I would imagine seawater rushing up the stairs and into the bedroom, rising up around me as I held her close. The simplest things seemed filled with the urgent purpose of foreshadowing. The catastrophe of the closing act was inscribed into the scenery of our lives.