The World Will End in Fire

Robert Frost had a theory. Two, actually. He gave both sides equal airtime, left the question open, and wrote nine lines that have been assigned in high school English classes for a hundred years. Europe just answered it. The debate is over. Fire won.

Frost wrote that poem in 1920, the same year the League of Nations held its first meeting, before commercial aviation, before television, before the internet, before anyone used the word "influencer" without irony. He was riffing on astronomy — the theory that the sun would eventually expand and incinerate the earth, versus the theory that it would dim and leave everything frozen. He gave both sides a fair hearing, as poets do. He personally voted fire. Ice, he conceded, would also suffice.

One hundred and six years later, the wine region of Bordeaux is on fire. The hills outside Madrid are on fire. A fire in France's Gironde region has burned nearly 104,000 acres. The Avila and Toledo areas of western Spain have lost around 190,000 acres. More than 300,000 people have been evacuated — the largest forced evacuation in France since the Second World War. Europe is enduring its fourth heatwave of the summer. Western Europe had its hottest June on record this year. Scientists describe this summer as "virtually impossible" without climate change. The debate Frost left poetically unresolved has been empirically settled by geography. Fire. Definitively fire.