Looking Sideways: 10 Things
The Alps on fire, freeriding at the Olympics, and a beautiful mid summer banger.
1. Showing up is important, part 2. Last week it was Steve Gibson and the Eco-Koozie. This week it's my mate Gav Fernie-Jones, who gave me a generous public shout-out for the help I gave UNPARALD with their messaging ahead of the Winter Paralympics, and on their campaign generally. Merci Gav.
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2. The hills above the Bozel valley, a place I know and love, have been ablaze this past week. I’ve been chatting to a couple of friends who live in the valley, and their responses neatly encapsulate a debate we’re going to be having more and more in the future.
On the one hand: how did we get here? And what do we do about it?
On the other hand: why don’t the authorities do something about this?
The reason for the latter, in this case, appears to be instructive and alarming: fires like this have apparently become so common across France that this one simply wasn’t a priority. Hard choices - which fires get dealt with, and which are left in the hope that the rain forecast on Friday might sort it - are already here.
(And if you want to learn more about this, I can’t recommend John Vaillant’s magisterial Fire Weather highly enough).
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3. Related: freeride skiing and snowboarding have just been confirmed for the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps, with venues right next door to the - checks notes - currently on-fire Bozel valley.
4. Natural Selection Surf is back, this time in South Africa.
5. New Ken Burns alert! Well, kinda - this week our greatest documentarian was a guest on Empire for a conversation in which he discussed his five decades chronicling American history. I love Ken, and this is great.
6. How predatory end stage capitalism leads to the enshittification of everything, part 1000. This time at the Shitpipes, my erstwhile home break, where the council have flogged the car park to the port authority, who promptly wheeled in one of those notorious predatory parking firms. They immediately ramped the costs up and priced out the community who have done so much to make this unlovely corner of the Sussex coastline a place worth visiting. And so it goes…. sign the petition.
7. In slightly lovelier news, we came back from two months preoccupied with moving house in the UK to find our Normandy garden completely overgrown and a colony of these ridiculously cute little legends moved in (volume up).
8. This week's reading: Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929. What stands out is the weapons-grade, galaxy-sized hubris of the men who sailed the whole world off a financial cliff.(Black Tuesday, the most calamitous crash in the history of capitalism, which led to the Great Depressions, took place ten days after Lamont, Senior Partner at JP Morgan, and one of the men who had systematically sold stocks to the none professional middle classes, sent President Hoover this fantastical analysis, above).
It also felt very, very familiar: the same bulletproof, consequence-free privilege and arrogance Adam Higginbotham laid bare in Challenger, his brilliant account of the Space Shuttle disaster, and one of my favourite books of last year. And the same grim epilogue: in both stories, the people actually responsible walked away with barely a scratch.
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9. (One) of the World Cup-related questions on everybody’s lips this week. The fish openly rotting from the head down, shamelessly broadcast to the world in real time. Thank God the actual football has been up to it.
10. Finally, one of the songs I always find myself returning to as we head into late summer: Jon Redfern's lovely I Love the Sun, a sunlit folk gem in the Nick Drake and John Martyn tradition.
Will have to give 1929 a go. Really enjoyed 'Too big to fail' his very readable look at the banking crash.
Hey Matt
As I write this just down the valley from Bozel, I can see a helicopter shuttling back and forth between a reservoir and a fire that sits in an inaccessible bit of mountain between Meribel and St Martin de Belleville. It's been burning since the 25th like the fire in Bozel but is in a more remote spot and less risky for human infrastructure. They started dropping water on it regularly two days ago while the fight against the fire in Bozel was at its height.
As to why it took so long to take proper action in Bozel, I think it's a bit more nuanced. I haven't seen any of the local coverage talking about the role climate change has played. France is in its third canicule and locally we've seen high temps and low rainfall for months. It's unusual to have fires like this here and we've got two within 15km of each other. The south of France is being ravaged but there is some institutional knowledge and experience down there. I'd guess there is less of that experience in the Savoie. What knowledge there is might well be outdated given the weather conditions we're experiencing now.
I think the initial thought to monitor and wait for rain makes sense for previous climate conditions. We've had rain forecast here on and off for weeks but it often doesn't arrive or is very localised. While it might have been reasonable to expect the fire to be extinguished naturally in the past, we're living in a very different present.
But for the tragic loss of a 22 year old volunteer fire-fighter, this would represent a vital and almost perfect wake up call to local authorities. With 5000 people stranded in Pralognan due to the road closure (likely until next weekend now) and a visual touchstone for all to see, this should be the opportunity for a reckoning of sorts. Episodes like this are made more likely by climate change. They are likely to become more frequent and potentially more consequential.
It’s possible that the fire above Planay could be the beginning of a change. It follows a year of incredible instability in the snow pack. We could start joining these things together and taking action. There is an opportunity to start to cut down the emissions that come from our locality. Local building projects could be mandated to be regenerative rather than concrete and extractive. They could introduce a ULEZ type scheme for the local valleys to cut vehicle emissions year round. Transport links could be upgraded to help de-carbonise arriving and departing here.
Sadly I don’t think the fire will be the catalyst for change this time round. I think we’ll need it to happen more regularly for people to take note and take action.