My grandmother had the theory that, as we get older, our mind subconsciously cleanses our memories of a myriad misfortunes, leaving a sanitised version of the past for us to feel nostalgic about. The optimism of remembrance, she called it. Little did she know that her reasonable hypothesis would, one day, become the climate change deniers’ mantra.
Until a few summers ago, I dismissed my sense that our bushfires were getting worse as merely Grandma’s optimism of remembrance in action – that I was forgetting how awful bushfires were back in the day. Then, in 2018 I witnessed, from a few kilometres afar, a horrendous fireball resembling a US-style twister only made of flames. In a few short minutes it consumed Mati, a seaside suburb north of Athens, incinerating more than one hundred people, one of them an old friend and her husband. My grandma’s theory no longer seemed to hold water.
Two summers ago, this time from our home’s veranda, my partner and I watched helplessly as a firewall painstakingly destroyed a whole mountain on the other side of
— source yanisvaroufakis.eu | Yanis Varoufakis | 31/08/2023