Antinuclear

People love to say that Sydney is like San Francisco: a city built around the water with a temperate climate and a pretty bridge. At certain moments the slant of light on the water of San Francisco Bay looks uncannily like Sydney. Australian foliage thrives here — eucalypts, flowering gums, bottle brush, colourful lantana. Over the seven years that I have spent here in the Bay, after growing up in Sydney and living on the US east coast for a long stretch, those echoes usually bring a nostalgic frisson, a bittersweet longing for home.

It can’t be like this again anytime soon, we told ourselves in Sydney, just as we told ourselves here in 2018. It is an instinctive human response, I suppose, to get through a disaster by imagining that it’s a one-time thing, a rarity. But climate change means that the seasons will just keep getting hotter. Records will keep being broken. Will this be the last year we can get away with calling the fires “unprecedented”? ……..

“Night is day in Berkeley today — but it’s not the apocalypse,” claimed a headline on 9 September. The story explained plausibly that the red sky was caused by light-filtering effects of smoke floating high above and that air quality in the Bay was surprisingly good, but it failed to reassure me. This is what the end of the world looks like, surely, if only we could bear the grief that envelops that vision right in front of us, in our lungs, under our fingers as we draw a smiley face in the ash on the car to make the small child laugh – because making light of the end of the world is now our full-time job.https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/14/is-san-franciscos-nightmarish-echo-of-sydneys-summer-now-a-template-for-fire-seasons-to-come