"We have fire everywhere"

Some amazing writing in this New York Times piece on the Paradise fires last fall. Particularly notable:

"It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce. We live with an unspoken assumption that the planet is generally survivable, that its tantrums are infrequent and, while menacing, can be plotted along some hazy, existentially tolerable bell curve. But the stability that American society was built around for generations appears to be eroding. That stability was always an illusion; wherever you live, you live with risk — just at some emotional and cognitive remove. Now, those risks are ratcheting up. Nature is increasingly finding a foothold in the unimaginable: what’s not just unprecedented but also hopelessly far beyond what we’ve seen. This is a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live. Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the 21st century."

Damn. I get so excited when I see such great work. Writing matters, friends. It does more every day.