Fire and Ice

 The news this week presented quite the apocalyptic split-screen. Over in California, Los Angeles is in flames. An inferno has engulfed the city, and as of this writing, it has still not been contained. The cause of the fire was complex, but it was almost certainly exacerbated by dry conditions linked to climate change. 

Meanwhile, Trump is making headlines by fantasizing about an unprovoked war of aggression to seize U.S. control of Greenland—an ice-bound Arctic island nominally controlled by Denmark. An invasion of the island would be a direct attack on a NATO member, and thereby might trigger World War III. 

I thought of the words of Robert Frost: "Some say the world will end in fire/ Some say in ice." Maybe the world will end because we are burning it all to the ground with our addiction to fossil fuels. Or maybe we'll destroy it by trying to seize the Arctic and thereby triggering nuclear winter. Fire, or ice? 

Which one will it be? Frost first pondered the strength of "desire," and said that he could see how it would build the case for fire. Our desire to keep on burning oil for reasons of profit—even as alternative fuel sources that don't destroy the planet become cheaper by the day—could be the thing that dooms us. 

But then Frost adds: he has also seen enough of "hate" to know that "for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice." Perhaps the sort of unthinking nationalist hate that makes a U.S. president-elect casually float the idea of invading a major U.S. ally and treaty partner will be the thing that destroys us in the end. 

Or maybe, it will be desire and hate together. The covetousness that makes the president-elect think that he can bully people into submission and steal their territory just because he wants it. The hate that makes him think he can destroy anyone who stands in his way, in rank indifference to their rights and interests. 

Fire and ice. Which will it be? "O which one? is it each one?" to borrow a line from G.M. Hopkins. Maybe both. Maybe we will burn our cities down with unmitigated climate change and have a nuclear holocaust triggered by unprovoked acts of war and conquest against our closest friends and neighbors. 

I was reading Anna Kavan's apocalyptic novel Ice the other week, which—most prophetically, for a 1967 novel—imagines a world where climate change linked to the albedo effect dooms humanity. Except in the novel, the planet doesn't warm, but freezes. Kavan, it would seem, holds with ice, in Frost's dichotomy. 

But then, as humanity tries to flee the gathering icebergs that are spreading across the Earth's surface, they also provoke a nuclear conflagration. So, in Kavan's novel, fire has its say too. Both have their role to play in destroying humanity, it would seem. Hate and desire can often work together to destroy.

And then, as Kavan wrote: "Instead of my world, there would soon be only ice, snow, stillness, death; [...] nothing but frozen silence, absence of life. The ultimate achievement of mankind would be, not just self-destruction, but the destruction of all life; the transformation of the living world into a dead planet."