The grass was greener
Michel Heitzmann
© Michel Heitzmann - The grass was greener
I followed it all week. The figures grew.
Around thirty fires burning at once in France. Close to a hundred thousand hectares gone.
The largest evacuation France has organised since the Second World War.
In Spain, some forty-five thousand hectares between Ávila and the Madrid region, ninety thousand people out of their houses, an emergency chief admits that the fire is beyond the capacity of his firefighters. Three firefighters dead, one in Italy, two in France.
I now know that the area burned each year across Europe has risen fifty-seven percent in four years.
I read every one of those numbers. I felt, in ascending order: shock, concern, recognition that the numbers are unfathomable, then… nothing.
I never felt a hectare. Nobody has.
It is a unit designed by surveyors and farmers. Or perhaps Elon in Texas or Mars.
A hundred thousand hectares is a thousand square kilometres. Two Lake Genevas on fire.
Did that work? Once.
Now I try it again with the Spanish figure: nothing happens. The translation is a trick that survives a single use.
Thankfully, psychologists have measured this.
Paul Slovic came up with psychic numbing.
We give generously to one named, photographed child in need.
Add a second child, and giving drops.
Present the same suffering as a statistic and the response collapses altogether.
Slovic calls it compassion fade.
Our concern does not scale with the number of people in danger. It degrades.
Noise. The more of it, we shun it to stay… functional.
Trump has figured this out. Nobody cares about the conflicts of interest yet he made $2.2 billion! The figure is so ridiculous it slides straight off, which is exactly why it works.
His disclosure runs nine hundred and twenty-seven pages. Obama’s final one ran eight. Biden’s, eleven.
Noise.
I miss the oral sex Clinton scandal.
Infantino is trying it out too, shamelessly. But he is not as good.
Eight days after the final, he announces FIFA will sell stakes in the World Cup through Joshua Kushner’s firm of Trump fame. Joshua, the largest backer of OpenAI, has figured out that humans will continue running after a ball while perhaps unemployed.
Gianni gives the two hundred and eleven member federations until the nineteenth of September to agree.
Ten billion in funding if they say yes. Two point seven if they say no. UEFA’s answer came on Thursday. Fifty-five member associations voted. Fifty-five to nil. No European team will play a FIFA tournament while the proposal is alive.
Infantino published nine hundred words across a fifteen-page Instagram post (!) to inform his critics that we are consumed by hate.
Hate? Nah, we just don’t like you.
Noise?
Sink your teeth in this instead.
The forest burning in the Gironde is not a wilderness. The Landes is the largest planted maritime pine monoculture in Europe, close to a million hectares (it is large, very large), drained out of marshland in the nineteenth century under Napoleon III to produce timber and resin. It was planted in rows. It is, functionally, a field of matchsticks with bracken laid underneath as kindling.
We drained a marsh, planted a million hectares of the most flammable tree available, called it a forest for a hundred and fifty years, and are now momentarily horrified.
All of this in yet another canicule.
The word comes from the Latin canicula, a cute little dog.
I like dogs.
Sirius, the Dog Star, rises alongside the sun in high summer. The Romans blamed the heat on a star, and gave us the dog days.
Seasonal. Astronomical. Drink water, check on your neighbours, stay out of the sun between noon and four.
Nobody’s fault. Certainly not the dogs’.
I ought to blame the cows.
Noise.
HELLO?
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