The Golden State is burning again. As wildfires sprint across parched highways, emergency services fight a desperate rearguard action against advancing flames. This is not a natural disaster.
It is a civilisational verdict. California, that paradise of progressive ambition and technological hubris, has built a society on the false promise of controlling nature. Every summer, the pyre is lit anew.
We watch the smoke and weep, but we refuse to learn. The Roman Senate debated grain dole reforms while the barbarians massed at the Rhine. California debates housing policy while its suburbs turn to kindling.
The crisis is not the fire. The crisis is the refusal to see that this is a consequence, not an accident. Our ancestors in the Victorian era understood that empires fall when they ignore the limits of their environment.
We have forgotten. We have built our homes in the tinderbox of history and are surprised when it ignites. The flames are a mirror.
They reflect our failure to plan, our addiction to cheap energy, our delusion that technology will save us without sacrifice. The heroes fighting these fires deserve our gratitude. But gratitude without change is a hollow prayer.
While the rich evacuate to their second homes in cooler climes, the poor and the aged are left to choke on the smoke of a failed social contract. This is not a wildfire. This is the slow burn of a civilisation that has lost its way.
The Fall of Rome took centuries. Ours might take only a few more summers.
