Everything is already burning—and yet, everything continues as if nothing were wrong
~ Contre-Attaque ~
“That everything continues like this, that is the real catastrophe”—With this phrase, the German philosopher and historian Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of the rise of totalitarianism, called for a halt to the runaway train of modernity and capitalism. Like others, he was not content with denouncing the “coming” disaster, but the one that is already here, before our very eyes. Stop the runaway machine that is taking us straight to the wall.
After two months of heat waves and drought, France is experiencing the largest wildfire in its history. 40,000 hectares burned in the Gironde region alone in just a few days, 100,000 across France. The army is deployed. Nearly 200,000 people are displaced, some of them stranded on boats on a peninsula. The government distributes 2.5 million FFP2 masks to protect the population from toxic fumes. These are the figures of a war. Authorities are urgently calling on businesses to supply backhoes and other earthmoving equipment. The sky is orange above the beaches, and red at dusk in Bordeaux. Ember-filled forests are disgorging terrified deer. And then there’s the unknown: a “firestorm” or “pyrocumulonimbus,” which formed on July 24th: a phenomenon never before seen in France, occurring when a fire is so massive that it generates its own weather system.
Everything is already burning. And yet, everything continues as if nothing were wrong. Business as usual. Financial markets are speculating on energy, supermarkets are packed, air travel has never been so high, and SUVs are everywhere on the roads. People are going on vacation after this depressing year. They’re doing what they always do to avoid losing their minds. On the beaches and in the streets, they’re thinking about something else, even when faced with a wall of smoke. Children build sandcastles under an apocalyptic sky. People cough on their way to work. The heat makes people faint on the asphalt. But everything must continue as normal, in a kind of collective denial. Yet we are experiencing a collapse. Now, it’s no longer about remaking the world, but about protecting what can be saved.
Cap-Ferret, which is currently burning, is a bastion of privileged vacationers, considered the “Saint-Tropez of the Atlantic coast,” with some of the highest real estate prices in France. It’s a place of separatism for the wealthy, now being destroyed by flames that firefighters are unable to control due to a lack of resources. Resources that the wealthy, precisely, have refused to provide to public services.
In Spain, 63,000 people are evacuated or confined in the Madrid region, where 25,000 hectares have burned. A national state of emergency has been declared. Houses west of the capital have already been gutted. The prefect now considers it “impossible” to extinguish the fire. In Italy, dozens of fires are still burning, and a firefighter has died in the line of duty.
In Ireland, the Slievenamon Mountains have never seen anything like this. They are usually lush and green, and have inspired Celtic mythology for centuries. But even there, a massive fire is raging and has devoured hundreds of hectares. Firefighters and army helicopters are struggling to contain it, and the smell of smoke irritates the nostrils as far away as Cork, in southern Ireland.
Even in northern Scotland, in latitudes where extreme heat and drought are rare, a wall of smoke is advancing through the vegetation. A massive fire has broken out in the Cairngorms National Park. Hundreds of Scottish firefighters battled to contain the blaze on Saturday.
In Canada, the disaster is escalating. In the province of Ontario, the forests of the far north are being consumed by 177 simultaneous fires. The largest of these has already burned 350,000 hectares, the size of a French department.
Meanwhile, multinational oil companies continue to rake in billions and launch new drilling projects. TotalEnergies raked in $11.2 billion in profit during the first six months of 2026. The French oil firm doubled its net profit in the second quarter, boosted by rising hydrocarbon prices due to the war in the Middle East. And the entire fossil fuel sector is thriving.
Faced with such a clear situation, with those responsible identified and the battle lines laid bare, nothing is being done. The most astonishing phenomenon of our time is that the fire of anger does not spread to ecocide perpetrators.
Machine translation. Top image: Frenchbluesman, Wikimedia Commons
