In ancient Greece, Stoic philosophers believed the Earth would be periodically destroyed by fire (Ekpyrosis) in a ritual cleansing before starting again. Stoics usually believed this event occurred when civilisation was at its very height of sophistication and complexity (like ours is now). In an echo of the modern environmental movement, Stoics believed that when the intact and perfect balance of nature called Gaia was interfered with, then collapse was inevitable.
neonatal damage, the bushfires that killed or displaced 3 billion animals, new fast-moving Covid variants that isolated thousands over Christmas, the 2020 and 2021 snap lockdowns. Of course we want our normal summers back!
James Romm, in his excellent biography of Seneca, wrote of Seneca’s unease as Rome expanded beyond its territorial boundaries, “As in the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, the very complexity of civilisation seemed to carry the seeds of its own destruction … Where once a single ship had disturbed the natural order, Rome had now filled the seas with traffic, scrambling the races and dissolving global boundaries. In Seneca’s view … the ceaseless advance of the empire would turn the cosmos itself into an enemy. When everyone could go everywhere, when no boundary remained intact, total collapse might not be far off.”
There is a macabre comfort in this, that we will not live through this again – that is, until we realise these one-in-1000-year events keep happening, they keep piling up before our very eyes, daring us to wake up from our dreams and longings of normalcy. What more will it take?
The new reality is, in Donald Rumsfeld’s words, a known known. It’s been coming at us for some time, hundreds of thousands of reports predicting this disorder. The latest this week came from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which said along with more extreme weather events, there was “very high confidence” that some natural systems had already experienced irreversible change.
If for everything there is a season, what are these destructive summers for? Some ancient and superstitious instinct says they are the Earth itself retaliating after so much abuse, or a portent of a disordered world that is so far out of balance that it must initiate a cycle of creative destruction in order to restore homeostasis.
A denial of reality is baked into the rhetoric. This week the New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet, described the Lismore floods as a “one-in-1,000-year event”, as if it was a freak occurrence, a matter of timing, unlikely to happen again for another 1,000 years.
In an excellent long read in the New York Times on the deadly California fires, Elizabeth Weil tackled the magical and nostalgic thinking we have around the seasons.
The cows are found washed up on beaches, and in Lismore, they’re cutting holes in the roof to desperately clamour above the rising waters. In Sydney the rain won’t stop, while Perth baked in its hottest summer ever. Throughout the disorder comes the refrain: “When are we going to go back to having a normal summer?”
The nostalgia for summers past is a trap. If we desperately wish to get back to the past, if we think it’s even possible to return, then we are deluded.
Because there is a problem. The problem is both climate change itself but also our mindset: that the last few years are abnormal, that one day, hopefully soon, we will return to “normal” – and that golden seasonal rhythm we knew in the past will return unbroken.
But for those of us in this age of collapse, trapped in a mental construct of what summer should look and feel like (not like this!), we are surprised and appalled when the predictions become reality.
Roman Stoic, playwright and political adviser Seneca believed Ekpyrosis would take the form of a flood.
This fear is an ancient impulse but now that it seems to be actually occurring, we are in deep denial. Signs of collapse are everywhere, but in our minds we think of this as an aberration – that next summer we’ll return to normal.
