A literal burning hellscape

I know exactly where I was the day I heard about the wildfires just twenty miles from us. I had parked up by the allotments and a news alert popped up: wildfires have broken out in...residents are being evacuated. And I looked up, over the tops of the houses, across to where the hills stand guard on the county border, where their lush greenness has changed to a parched brown. Carrying my rucksack and flask of coffee down to the allotment, grass crunching under my feet, the trees fair panting for water, I realised that what my city, my county, has become is one giant tinderbox, waiting for the dropped match, the discarded cigarette, the knocked over candle.

Whoomph.

The wildfires have reached us here, in the middle of the landlocked Midlands. Further down in the county, another broke out only six miles from where my Mum still lives. That same day, I went back home and checked my emergency get-the-hell-out kit, two waterproof, sealable, see-through boxes of things I thought we would need in the event of a catastrophic flood (we live betwixt a river and a canal) which, until this week, felt like the likeliest scenario. I have routes up to higher ground mapped out. I have the procedure for loading cats into their boxes and into the car down to a fine art. I have a bag of basic provisions.

At the time, putting all the get-the-hell-out measures together felt like some kind of intellectual puzzle. Only Connect but with rations and basic needs to link. University Challenge but the climate is the other team and they always cheat. It no longer feels like a puzzle. It feels like something we are going to fail at.

The summer has been long and hard. My husband and I are snippy with each other. I fall asleep at the drop of a hat. The house is shrouded from midday to protect it from the punishing heat and glare of the relentless sun - not to mention the flies. The fish in the pond gasp on the surface, despite the pump; the cats hide under the shrubs, only emerging for food in the evenings. Meetings are cancelled.

At the allotment, I water only once a week and only what I cannot bear to see die - the trees, the raspberry canes, the perennials - stumbling up at 5am, still half asleep and exhausted from another night mostly spent awake. Everything else, I let wither and brown. This is going to be my last summer on the allotment: I am beaten by the third drought in a row, by the resurgence of my condition which feeds on this heat, depleting my energy levels even further. I look at the brown row of beans, beets, and would weep, if I could spare the moisture.

Yesterday, I saw an advert asking that I take shorter showers, don't use the hosepipe, avoid washing the car. Nothing about how, maybe, our water should not be privatised for shareholder benefit. Nothing about how, maybe, the millions of flights a day taken all over the world might be a bad idea. Nothing about how, maybe, solar panels should be a legal requirement for all houses built this side of 1940. Nothing about how, maybe, we should be protecting our rivers.

The prime minister is contemplating a ban on disposable barbecues. Truly, we are all saved.

Today, I signed a petition against the construction of an AI data centre in Devon. I do not live in Devon but it can only be a matter of time before one is proposed on my doorstep. Or, given that they are being raced through and around the planning regulations, perhaps one already is and I have no idea about it. A planned Meta data centre in America will be 1/5 the size of Manhattan; it will use as much power as London on an average day (5GW). Neighbours of existing data centres have had their lives made a misery. And all so that we can ask Chat GPT to identify the coffee pods in a jar (actually saw a woman do that only a month ago and had to walk away), or so that councils can create jaunty little tunes for their social media without having to pay an actual musician.

It is hard to talk about this dispassionately. To remove oneself from emotion and just focus on the facts, particularly as I have spent the last decade working in my sector, trying to bring environmental policies and procedures in, only to see those undermined by everyone's rush to get AI to crunch their visitor stats and create their marketing images.

It is hard to talk about this dispassionately because I have skin in the game. My son, his cousins, people I love.

It is hard to talk about this dispassionately because this planet is beautiful. Consider everything on it from the tiniest leaf sheep to the largest blue whale, from the common acorn to the exotic nicklenut, from the dog in the house to the jackal on the savannah. This world is extraordinary. The fact that we exist at all, we lumpen awkward bags of bones and jelly, held together with the frailest of epidermises...how are we even possible?

And, given that we are, should we not find a way to better live on this land than asset stripping it down to its bare, burning bones?