“Burning burning burning burning”
T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” Part III
“Climate trauma” is a phrase that has now entered the global lexicon. I tend to be skeptical about diagnosed conditions more specific than the general malaise of the human condition we all experience to various degrees. But climate trauma is something else altogether. It is not a psychological or behavioral affliction arising from some innate disposition, social conditioning, or malfeasance, but a tangible, involuntary outcome caused by accumulated external factors. As global temperatures rise and population densifies in settled areas, the effects of catastrophic weather events like floods, hurricanes, and fires, which are increasing in frequency and intensity, are proving ever more destructive to human lives and livelihoods. This is not news. Or rather, it is news. All the news. All the time.
Take the Camp Fire of 2018. Named after Camp Creek Road, the incendiary point of origin in Butte County, California, this was no picnic with outdoors enthusiasts singing refrains of Kumbaya over hot cocoa under the stars, as its infelicitous name evokes. It was, until the disastrous Maui fires of 2023, the deadliest wildfire in the United States since 1918.
The Camp Fire was ignited by a faulty electrical transmission line in arid conditions compounded by drought. But it was an accident just waiting to happen. The insurance companies, at any rate, can see the writing’s been on the wall for some time: From 1984 to 2017 the area affected by wildfires in the Western United States has increased by 1,000 percent. That, combined with the soaring costs of new construction, has prompted companies like State Farm to place a moratorium on new homeowner policies in states like California. Making a house a home in the country’s most populous state is just too risky a proposition. The Los Angeles fires in January of this year have only made matters worse.
A recent study, purportedly the first to examine the cognitive and neural impacts of climate trauma, concluded that individuals exposed to the Camp Fire are suffering from what its authors describe as “significant cognitive deficits” stemming from the experience quite beyond the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that one might expect. To put it coarsely, victims’ brain functions were fried along with everything else. But it does not take a peer-reviewed, clinical study to understand that traumatic experiences change us. What we do with trauma, however, whatever its source, is the decisive criterion.
Consider Henry Thoreau. Not many readers will know that ten years before he became America’s iconic naturalist with the publication of Walden (1854), Thoreau was responsible for incinerating three hundred acres in Concord Woods near Walden Pond. The fire, of course, like the Camp Fire, was an accident. Thoreau and a friend were cooking chowder over a dry stump after a morning spent fishing when their small fire got out of hand. The timber lost in the blaze was valued at $2,000, a huge sum in 1844. An entire ecosystem (though that word had not yet been invented) was destroyed. As one might imagine, Thoreau became Concord’s resident pariah, earning the nickname “Woods-Burner” from the locals. Yet somehow this twenty-six-year-old Harvard graduate turned his traumatic experience at Concord Woods into a catalyst of remorse and reorientation that propelled him into his bold lifestyle experiment on Emerson’s woodlot at the Pond just one year later.
Thoreau’s own recovery was not the outcome of clinical treatment (though he might have benefitted from that, too), but the product of reading and reflection. “It is not all books that are as dull as their readers,” he declares in his chapter on the subject from Walden.
There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era of his life from the reading of a book.
Because of their transformative potential, books, for Thoreau, “must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Life and literature should both be objects of deliberate effort and attention, as one activity informs the other. Thoreau summarizes his Walden experiment in exactly these terms, as if living were a form of literary composition or interpretation: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he writes. And then he wrote a book about the experience.
The books of antiquity hold special promise: “Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies,” Thoreau rues.
But the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be … They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
Fire might be a source of psychological trauma, as it was for the Camp Fire survivors, and, perhaps, too, for Thoreau. But it is also the proverbial tester and prover of quality. A fire that destroyed the Roman city of Lyon in 64 CE provided the philosopher Seneca with an occasion to make just this point, and to show that trial by fire is more than a byword.
The attitude that Seneca suggests we adopt to cope with the precarity of collapse and the prospect of loss is especially useful in view of our current anthropogenic ailments. His analysis is so attuned, in fact, that it has inspired a scientific model that explains sudden and precipitous decline in such a way as to comprehend it and so to calibrate our inevitable participation in its making. Ugo Bardi, a chemist at the University of Florence and the model’s formulator, calls it “The Seneca Effect,” after Seneca’s observation that “while growth proceeds slowly, the way to ruin is swift.”
“Would that things passed away as slowly as they take to develop,” Seneca laments in a letter to his protégé Lucilius that is the source for this idea. But such is not the case: “Whatever’s been built up over a long period with much effort and the gods’ good graces,” he explains, “a single day scatters and dissolves.” The destruction of Lyon was so quick and so complete, Seneca reports, that “it’s taking longer for me to tell you it has perished than it took for the city to perish.”
Lyon—Lugdunum in Latin—was an important center in Roman Gaul. The emperor Claudius was born there, as was Caracalla later. Founded in 43 BCE in the wake of the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, Lugdunum was at the time of its destruction 100 years old and would have had all the magnificent temples, arenas, public buildings, baths, and grand houses of any Roman provincial capital at the height of Empire.
For Seneca the annihilation of Lyon provides an opportunity to take stock of human impermanence, and, indeed, the impermanence of Nature itself. His farrago of reflections and advice on this topic reads like a letter from the past to the present day:
We should consider nothing unexpected. Our minds ought to conduct advance reconnaissance for every situation. We should contemplate, not what usually happens, but what can happen.
In the very midst of pleasures arise the causes of pain.
Nothing is stable, be it political or personal. Human destinies, like those of cities, turn over in cycles.
We should contemplate all scenarios and fortify our minds against whatever might come: Exiles, tortures, diseases, wars, shipwrecks — think on these things.
We live in an environment that is destined to die.
Be mindful of what can happen and be cautious about it, Seneca infers. To expect the unexpected and to accept it with equanimity, however, as Seneca recommends, does not preclude us from understanding it, or even predicting it. Bardi’s Seneca Effect (2017) charts the various growth and decay mechanisms of complex systems, both those found in Nature and those of human design. His work, a report commissioned by the Club of Rome, uses the same “World3” modeling methods as the landmark Limits to Growth (1972), the Club’s first published report, to show how multiple factors often compound upon one another. Feedback effects, he notes with example after example, from fisheries to fossil fuels to financial markets, can conspire to produce unanticipated collapse.
Bardi’s conclusion, which is not his alone, is that collapse is not a bug. It is, as Seneca also insists, a feature of all systems. But that is not a fatalistic assertion. It’s just the way things are — which we would do well to remember now, today. There is a positive role for us to play in the unfolding drama of complexity. Indeed, as Seneca himself says about the fate of Lyon, “Often a catastrophe has simply made room for greater prosperity.”
We cannot reduce Nature’s systems to our whims, avoid disintegration, or cheat death. But we can conform and cooperate with Nature’s designs to our just advantage. Not all books are as dull as their readers. Seneca and other ancient authors invite us not only to consider the causes and conditions of collapse, but also to explore the possibilities of resilience.
M. D. Usher is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature and a member of the Department of Geography and Geosciences, the Environmental Program, and the Food Systems Graduate Program at the University of Vermont. His books include Plato’s Pigs and Other Ruminations: Ancient Guides to Living with Nature and three books in 91ĚŇɫ’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, including How to Care about Animals and How to Be a Farmer. Usher and his wife own and operate a farm in Shoreham, Vermont.