Devastated nature becomes scenery as indifference takes hold

A visit to Berlin offered a troubling paradox: some of the best responses to the new climate and environmental reality exist alongside a problem that remains colossal and unresolved. The city is pursuing urban resilience, electromobility and green infrastructure. Yet while those efforts were on display, Europe was burning again.

Drought affected half of the European Union and the United Kingdom. Fires consumed hundreds of thousands of hectares, and successive heatwaves left an especially brutal mark. In Germany alone, more than 15,000 heat-related deaths have been estimated so far this summer.

The figures continue to accumulate. June and July formed the hottest period ever recorded in Western Europe. The Danube and Rhine fell to historic lows, while the Po again reached critically low flows. Water shortages and warmer rivers forced several countries to reduce nuclear power generation and completely halted the Romanian Cernavodă plant.

The drought also reached the harvests. Britain is heading toward its worst cereal crop since records began. France could lose about half its corn, while losses in some parts of northern Italy have reached 70 percent. One of the richest and most technologically advanced civilizations in history is discovering that its food supply and power stations still depend on something elemental: enough water flowing through its rivers.

The article’s deepest unease lies in how unsurprising these developments have become. After two decades of gathering evidence in the hope that it would change things, the author describes the exhaustion of seeing all the numbers arrive without a corresponding transformation. Consumption, endless social-media information and the promise of technological leaps dull the response. Artificial systems that write, translate, diagnose and detect patterns command fascination, while nature, increasingly devastated, recedes into scenery.