“The second-largest island in Greece, not far from Athens, Evia has (as I write this) been on fire for a week. It is – or was – a natural paradise of forests, mountains, and clear streams, popular with the tourists who prop up the country’s shaky economy.
“Sadly, it takes something special, something unusual, to stand out from the nonstop evidence of the damage done by global heating. If the Evia fire ferry video seems extraordinary, it’s not only because of what it shows but because of how it shows it – because of its strangeness.
“At first, the video is simply disorienting. It takes a while – it took me a while – to figure out what I was seeing.
“Perhaps what makes the film clip so scary is also a matter of timing. The Greek fire video surfaced around the time of the release of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That document states definitively: We are on the brink of too late. Unless we dramatically reduce our emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels, our world will soon become ‘a hell’.
“The ferry video is a vision of hell. It’s as if Dante filmed the Inferno on his iPhone.” [. . .] –Francine Prose, The Guardian, August 10, 2021 (retrieved November 27, 2021)
