I don’t think this is true. Yes, the fairies are harder to see. But if you’re paying attention, even industrial, tarmac-ribboned, electrified modern England still has plenty of “thin places”: spots where the air is different, and the uncanny is just at the edge of awareness.

Dunwich, on England’s Suffolk coast, is one of these places. But now it is in cinders after a four-day blaze. Amid this summer’s arid, weeks-long drought and successive heatwaves, all of England is tinder-dry. In windy, flammable coastal conditions, all it took was one spark — a glint through broken glass, a careless cigarette, or abandoned barbecue.

The Dunwich fire, though now hemmed in by local fire crews, consumed 150 hectares of heath and woodland, forcing the evacuation of local villages, holiday parks, and other establishments. Conservationists are calling it a disaster from which local ecologies will take 25 years to recover. Oh, my England! But perhaps this can stand as a reminder that even this green and pleasant land, so long inhabited and so deeply over-written and sculpted by successive histories and people, still has its own elemental power; its own quiet but overwhelming force. Its own spirits, not displaced by industrialization at all, that answer to none of us, but only themselves.

If you’ve encountered one of England’s thin places, you’ll know what I’m referring to: an eerie, liminal sense of things just out of eyeshot, of eyes watching you from the grass. This tends to be more associated with Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland: the uplands and borderlands less thoroughly rationalized, mapped, and subdued. But the rich tradition of artists, writers, composers and eccentrics who have fled (and still flee) to Suffolk’s big skies attests to the distinctive way this region’s own special landscape is still thick with fairies.

Think of the estuaries, where sea and sky, fresh and salt, blend imperceptibly into one another. The long cry of the curlew. Half-rotted wood, sunk in mud, clung with limpets and moss. These are English thin places that sing to something just as liminal in the English, as a people: a paradoxical love of home, but also of longing for the open sea. This is a people that looks out beyond the estuaries, the salt tang, and sucking mud — but also back at cottages, cozy pubs, and warm firesides. Suffolk captures that restless yearning for the horizon, long ground into the seafaring English psyche, and the same people’s island-dwelling love of home.

Much more than any twee nonsense about Paddington, or tea, or manners, the paradoxical, slightly melancholy experience of desiring both these things at the same time is at the heart of what it means to be English. And Dunwich is, in this sense, especially liminal and melancholy, because even before this summer’s fire most of it was already lost.

During the Anglo-Saxon period prior to the Norman invasion, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles. A thriving port covering an area similar in scale to, though smaller in population than, medieval London, it was listed in the Domesday Book as having three churches. Historians estimate its population at that time as around 3,000. In the 13th century, a Franciscan friary was built on the nearby headland. But then climate disaster struck.

A storm surge in the late 13th century repeatedly battered the region, flooding the port and gnawing at the coastline. The harbor silted up. The shore changed shape. And, importantly, the river that was the town’s raison d’être moved. Dunwich was suddenly no longer a sheltered harbor, sitting at the meeting-point of the river and the sea. Now the river was more than a mile away, winding through a different estuarial flat. The town lost its purpose. Further floods swept more homes into the sea. No one rebuilt them; people moved on.

Now, Dunwich is a tiny coastal village, home to around 200 people, a chip shop, and (temporarily, once a year) a lot of London cyclists. They gather every summer (the last event was a couple of weeks ago) to ride overnight from London Fields to Dunwich Beach, in the cult-like “Dunwich Dynamo” bike ride, known by the nutters who participate as the “Dun Run”.

The first time I visited Dunwich I was in the heady early stages of falling in love. We arrived there and were caught as instantly by the otherworldly atmosphere, as by the sea breeze. It was a bright day; we sat on the shingle watching the North Sea roll in, blue and brown, as passing dogs leaped in and out of the waves.

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We built towers from the smooth rocks on the beach, dozed, dreamed amid the whisper and roar of wind and water. Hours slipped by. Time works differently there. The fairy denizens of Dunwich may not be those of green cliffs and woodland, of the kind you might still sense in (say) north Wales, or Cornwall. But they’re there. Dunwich attracts a stream of visitors so dedicated that despite its tiny population, its beachside and chip shop do a roaring trade. This isn’t just mad London cyclists. It’s that people come to be, for a little while, at the edge of everything.

A popular local legend has it that on foggy nights, you can hear the sound of church bells ringing over the water, from the town that fell into the sea. I’ve never experienced this, but it feels profoundly true, in the sense that Dunwich is thronged with shades. The ruins of its friary can still be seen, and visited, on the headland — and here, too, many report strange happenings: weird lights bobbing about the ruins at night, said by some to be the mysterious Hobby Lanterns or jack-o’-lanterns, unexplained lights reported to lead travelers toward cliff-edges or other dangers. Others report seeing ghostly monks pacing the ruins, or hearing their chants.

Since that first visit I’ve returned as often as I can just to sit at that eastern edge of England, between sea and sky. The coastline itself feels ethereal: its very history attests to how little faith we really can place on the ground staying solid beneath us. But perhaps this summer’s blazes are less a departure from that ancient Dunwich story, than a continuation of it.

This is a part of England that’s always been thin, elemental, and only tenuously mastered by its inhabitants. War history aficionados sometimes visit Dunwich to explore the concrete bunkers that still stand along that coast, half-eroded by salt and wind, from wartime preparations for a seaborne invasion that, mercifully, never came. Its still earlier ruins were left following an invasion not borne by sea, but by the sea itself.

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All those centuries ago, the devouring sea, and changing coastline, shrugged off an entire habitation. This time, it was a fire that drove its human inhabitants away. I dare say they’ll be back; but perhaps we should heed the warning. We’ve grown used to an England so domesticated, industrialized, controlled and controllable as to render this kind of abrupt eviction by the landscape itself all but unimaginable. We tend simply to take for granted the belief we’ve mastered all those elemental forces, permanently, such that worrying about fire, or flood, or erosion is merely a thing of our more primitive past, or something that happens to people in other countries.

Even contemporary responses to climate change don’t really depart from this complacency. Manmade climate change is real. But wherever some kind of coordinated policy effort emerges, to respond to it, in practice this only ever seems to produce more and different technological efforts: more solar farms, different cars, a thicket of new rules.

What if the response we actually need is to think differently? Periodically some bushy-bearded Merlin type will bob to the surface of the mediasphere to warn that what we should be doing is not building more or different stuff, but attending more closely to the thin places, and what they have to tell us. No one ever listens, or if they do, somehow the product is only ever more or different stuff.

I could respond to the fire in Dunwich with a threnody for a landscape that has shaped my summers, and my imagination of England, for my whole adult life. A place I love deeply, caught as it is between land and water, singing so evocatively of both salt air, deep England, and all our accumulated centuries of ghosts. But I find that instead I read this as a wake-up call from the still deeper England, the land that was there when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and will still be there long after we — and whoever comes after us — are gone.

However mild and generous that land is, for the most part, now and then it too can still shrug, as though scratching an itch — and, in doing so, dislodge whoever or whatever was there at that moment. Anyone who claims the right to call this land home would do well to listen. To spend time in its thin places, hear what they have to tell us, and mend our lives accordingly.

There is not a single disaster the country has faced in recent years that has not, sometimes within hours of it happening, resulted in driving Americans apart rather than bringing them together. Mere weeks after the 9/11 attacks, people were accusing each other of war-mongering, or appeasement, or anti-Muslim prejudice, or complacency about “fifth columns”, or an unforgivable lack of preparedness before the attacks. Hurricane Katrina was followed by bitter debates over the rapidity, fairness and the adequacy of the federal response.

As for the country’s response to Covid, it hardly seems an overstatement to say that the 19th-century debate over slavery was no less vitriolic than the strife, often vicious, incited by masks, lockdowns and vaccines. The proverbial visitor from another planet would have thought that this argument over a health crisis — it killed over a million Americans, after all — was in fact an argument over an election. Maybe the contestations around Covid created the atmosphere for the contestation of an election.

In one perspective, of course, even the most heated differences signify a democracy’s health. Authoritarian regimes don’t tolerate altercations in the name of freedom. But disaster is different. There was hot debate in Britain over the Munich Agreement, but there was no debate over how to respond to Germany’s invasion of Poland one year later. In a crisis, healthy civilizations respond to the crisis. They don’t turn on themselves.

It took no time at all for the recriminations to start flying after the worst wildfires in the history of California broke out in Los Angeles. Within hours of the flames taking hold, the New York Times ran, in short order, articles accusing the LA mayor, Karen Bass, of not having had dry brush near houses cleared away, and of not having sufficient water to fight the fires. The newly minted firefighting experts at the newspaper even accused the LA fire department of not having updated its tactics for fighting fires. This was followed shortly afterward, with a sort of mechanical cluelessness, by an article titled “When Disaster Hits, Trump is the Blamer in Chief”.

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The problem here was twofold. First, these articles appeared while people were being burned alive, while people were watching their houses, their possessions and their memories being destroyed, while LA firefighters were working 24-hour shifts in horrific conditions to save people’s lives and property. The “gotcha” style of American journalism — it wasn’t just the Times — that has prevailed since Watergate surely could have been restrained until the catastrophe had come to an end.

The second problem with the predictable banquet of accusation was that it wasn’t strictly accurate. What the media was covering was not the result of any kind of impartial investigation. It was the result of the usual infighting among a municipality’s politicians and their surrogates. The media were reporting on a political quarrel over who was to blame, not on who was actually to blame. Apparently, the fire chief, Kristin Crowley, had protested Bass cutting the fire department’s budget in some areas (in fact the 2025 budget ended up rising by over 7%). But city officials fighting with a mayor over how much money they will get for their agencies and departments is hardly a scandal. It’s never anything but murky, either.

It’s a time-honored convention for newspapers, in America anyway, to end their news articles with a quote from an expert, or some figure of authority, with which to delicately insinuate a moral judgment. The New York Times does this to a fare-thee-well. Its article critical of Bass’s response ended with the customary authority figure, who delivered his, and the article’s, stern judgment of Bass’s performance. “’This is a massive failure of epic proportions,’ he said.”

It was an impressive way to finish, firm with reassuring finality. There was one problem, though. The authority figure was Rick Caruso, whom Bass had defeated in the 2022 mayoral election. To say that he had an axe to grind with regard to Bass would be an understatement.

To make matters worse, the Times had already quoted Caruso, a billionaire real-estate developer, dramatically lamenting the shortage of water, the Times adding, with nary a sliver of critical distance — the Times’ news articles have always been artfully choreographed — that Caruso himself had hired his very own team of private firefighters. The Times writes: “All night, [Caruso] said, [the private firefighters] were telling him that water was in short supply.” In other words, the great liberal newspaper, almost singlehandedly responsible for the woke divisions that have helped rip American society apart, relied on the testimony of a politically embittered billionaire to discredit the efforts of a publicly elected official. The paper didn’t even inform its readers whether Caruso’s private team had enough water in the end or not.

That was the “gotcha” response to the catastrophe. The political response was even more irresponsible. What was the true cause of the LA apocalypse, according to a chorus of ideologically motivated voices? An unusually heavy season of rain, which created an abundance of foliage, which then dried into an enormous tinderbox during a long drought? The powerful gusts of high wind known as the Santa Ana winds? Gusts reaching 100mph capable of driving embers in countless wild directions at once? The historically unprecedented event of six wildfires raging in California at the same time, which would have exhausted the water supply no matter how full it was? Winds fanning fires into a conflagration that no firefighter could enter, and that no planes or helicopters bearing water and retardant could fly through?

Nope. According to experts, such as the conservative commentator Scott Jennings on CNN (where reporters like Nick Watt and Natasha Chen were risking their lives to report on the fires), it was all the fault of “woke”: “We have DEI… and… I’m wondering now, if your house was burning down, how much do you care what color the firefighters are?”

Jennings, and others like him, including an increasingly deranged Elon Musk, were responding to a sentence on the LA Fire Department’s website that described a commitment to hiring more black firefighters. Even David Mamet, stunning screenwriter and America’s greatest living playwright, whose moral imagination is the product of some sort of divine spark, was swept up in these pages into the anti-DEI groupthink that is now the default response to DEI groupthink.

Like many people, I think DEI has been a poisonous and divisive plague on true fairness and opportunity. But it is hard to see how a conscientious commitment to diversifying LA’s Fire Department, which would require more, not less money, in the budget, could have caused the LA fires, or made them worse once they had begun. Unless Bass had been moving large sums of money away from basic firefighting needs into creating and enforcing DEI policies, which no one has said she did, it is hard to see how her declared commitment to DEI — often boilerplate without meaning anyway — could have affected the city’s response to the wildfires one bit.

So much for how America — or, rather, the people Americans permit to represent reality to them — responded to the fires in LA. We are left with the wildfires themselves. As I write, they are threatening to grow and spread again in a resurgence of high wind. Now is not the time for a literary interpretation of an event that has torn lives apart, and taken lives. But one fact, and one image, beg to be understood in a different key.

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The stark fact is that — and I gratefully get this information from the Times — so far as one can see, most, if not all the people who have been killed in the fires, have been poor, or of modest means, and most have been black. The stark image is of gorgeous mansions burning in isolation, on cliffs overlooking the ocean. They are images of the zenith of American success, which is the consummation of the American Dream, which is to rise above your fellow Americans, your fellow humans, your community; to ascend beyond all those less fortunate, or not fortunate at all, who are the first to suffer and die, down below, and to live in magnificent isolation. I don’t begrudge the magnificence to anyone. I wish it for my children. And my heart breaks for all that the people in those beautiful houses, the fruit (often) of beautiful achievements, have lost.

But the media does their customary thing, breaking the tragedy down to individual stories, stories that you can identify yourself with and thus use to control the inexplicable and incomprehensible by fitting them into the safe confines of your life. You are left with individual stories, cut off from each other, and from a shared reality with each other. You are left thinking what you would do in that situation, how you would feel.

And you wonder if, amid all the unspeakable destruction, an illusion is also being destroyed, and a reality revealed. The illusion is of American happiness as an invincible solitude. The reality is wholly different. Blame comes easily to Americans because we are all alone. Because there is no “we”. Because our isolation from each other is allowing ghouls to waltz into our midst. And this isolation is allowing us to burn, and to watch each other burn. It is allowing some to relish the conflagration. It is compelling the rest of us — but there is no “us”, only “me”, and “them” — to point fingers instead of, as moist as it may sound, linking arms.

Such harrowing accounts are all too common in the vast wilds of Northern California, uniting residents urban and rural, rich and poor, Right and Left. Lands that were filled with fire-tolerant glades of oak under Native American stewardship are now dense pine forests brimming with flammable biomass. Everyone here has a story about forest fires. Locals’ accounts are served with strong opinions on the political failings of both the Californian Democrats under Gavin Newsom and the Trump-led national GOP. Over the last decade, the West Coast has given us a glimpse into the future of ecological calamity. Now, as the islands of Greece crackle and fume, and as California’s latest wildfire sweeps into Nevada, we can already intimate how these infernal events can reshape a community, igniting all of its underlying social ills. 

Judging by California’s experience, one’s chances of recovering from a forest fire diverge greatly along class and geographic lines. Despite some palliative measures, the California and Federal government, ostensibly committed to the victims of climate change, is visibly asleep at the wheel. Sacramento is leaving its urban and rural peripheries, poverty-stricken inner-city sectors and remote townships to suffer the brunt of escalating fire destruction. The Carr Fire was succeeded by the even greater August Complex Fire in 2020 (which engulfed 379,613 hectares to become the largest fire in Californian history). But August’s damage is dwarfed by the relatively small Camp Fire in 2018. The Camp Fire became the state’s deadliest, killing 85 people and bulldozing the town of Paradise. Many of the smaller settlements I drove through still seem like ghost towns: depleted of life not only by fire but reactively high rents and rocketing insurance premiums.

At the site of the Carr Fire, victims talk of a “fire tornado” ripping through their homes. Its path took it through the small Gold Rush settlements of Whiskeytown, Old Shasta, and French Gulch, and towards the heart of Redding. The Carr formed part of a new wave of fires produced by a combination of climate change, human population, dodgy infrastructure, and the hot Diablo Winds that blow in from the eastern mountains and deserts. California has, always, faced forest fires — but these are new beasts. Together, environmental and human forces have transformed wildfires from manageable occurrences into cataclysmic disasters, rampaging through the dense biomass of pine forests and chaparral shrubs that overgrow without controlled burn operations.

There, I meet Jennifer Gibson, the post-wildfire coordination ecologist for the National Parks Service who lost her own home to Carr. Starting in the centre of Redding, we drive out to Whiskeytown Lake. Vast clusters of blackened pines jut up along mountain lines in what used to be dense forests; what once resembled an alpine vista now appears as a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And the people here have a dystopian choice to make. Some choose to stay, embracing the pioneer spirit, rebuilding their houses in less-flammable material. Others believe that much of California will one day be uninhabitable and leave, seeking more northerly and temperate lands to settle. “You could hear the propane tanks going off, the sky was red, ashes were raining down. I wake up, and it looks like a war scene,” Gibson says. “After the Carr Fire, I don’t know where to live in California that would feel safe.” But Gibson’s experience is an economic issue too: the combination of the Carr and Camp fires has pushed up construction contractor prices and rents, forcing many to move inland to Idaho and Montana, where costs are lower.

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We walk up to Gibson’s house — a burnt-down log cabin, with only the stone foundations remaining. “The wind up here was like giant bellows, feeding the fire into a frenzy. All the houses around here were burnt down,” she says. “It hurts coming back, I’m thinking about selling the land.” Dowling tells me that poor government and insurance company responses have led to general resentment, and even conspiracy, against the state and large corporations. “Distressed people have suspicions… a lot of people would substitute the term ‘insurance company’ for ‘the government’… they blame the system.”

It’s not an unfounded sentiment: upon examination, California’s fire problem soon becomes a problem of state capacity. Across much of the American West, fighting wildfires has become a complex and inefficient bureaucratic system of local, state, federal, park and even private services. But the problem spirals well beyond the remit of firefighters. Wildfires are a profoundly political problem, intersecting with high homelessness rates, rural and urban divides, declining corporate-run infrastructure, and conspiracy theories around politically motivated arsonists.

The specific ignition that started the Camp Fire had corporate origins, coming from a faulty powerline owned by California’s largest utility firm, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). Ensuing lawsuits for liabilities of $30 billion bankrupted the group. Indeed, systems failure in outdated infrastructure is an increasingly common cause of wildfire and other environmental disasters, such as the recent Ohio Derailment. As the California historian Mike Davis points out in his essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”, Californians live in a “separate and unequal” system of fire prevention funding, regulation, and media attention. The wealthy in the Hollywood Hills, and what Davis calls “the fire coast” of the Santa Monica Mountains, continue to rebuild larger and larger houses after each wildfire while mouthing shallow support for “green” causes.

In contrast, LA’s urban working classes and peripheral rural towns such as Paradise suffer broken infrastructure and displacement. Some leave California permanently while others, rendered homeless by fires, live in encampments that themselves increase the risk of fire because cooking there is done on open flame. Across both LA and Northern California, I saw huge encampments established in the dry scrublands, where urban infrastructure meets the forest. Many homeless people mention that these areas near flammable scrub are the only places not actively swept by the police or subject to complaints from wealthy house owners. These homeowners, often Nimbys, also reject the planned densification of social housing, and rezoning — all policies that might reduce the likelihood of ignition by safely housing those in encampments.

Many, such as Davis, have tended to see California’s forest fires not just as an ecological problem, but a deeply political one. Davis took aim at policies stoked by an elite that had distanced itself from material and environmental realities. The state capacity built between FDR’s New Deal and Nixon’s environmental legislation has been slowly eroded. Consequently, an incredibly complex and failing system was unleashed by deregulation and a Democratic Party that prioritised its elite urban constituents. Davis, writing presciently at the high watermark of California’s reduction of state capacity in the Nineties, argued that the state was caught in a now-familiar doom loop: “Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale as land-use regulations, and sometimes even the fire code, were relaxed to accommodate victims [prompting further fire].”

Indeed, the irrational zoning laws, prohibition of multifamily apartments, lack of social housing, and high rents across California have led some to identify homelessness as a key ignition factor in itself. “There are social issues we need to take care of,” says Assistant Chief Scott Corn of the Shasta-Trinity Unit of CAL FIRE. “Homelessness and drug abuse — we have seen fires start from those two sources exponentially. People will intentionally light fires because that’s the state of mind they’re in [on opioids and meth]. They’ll willingly tell you: ‘I lit the fires because the voices told me to.’” He explains that most of the fires used to be accidental. “Now, when we go to a fire where no crime was involved… that’s a pretty rare thing.” Illegal, energy-intensive marijuana operations can also malfunction and start blazes — to the extent that local conservatives have formed militias and other groups to shut them down and protect farms.

I head into the mountain ranges around Redding with Dan Dennett, another assistant chief in charge of fuel reduction operations in the area. As we climbed in altitude, lines of black pine stumps and desiccated oak trees filled the horizon. Bundles of underbrush, stacked like funeral pyres, burn on the roadside. Dennett is a strong advocate of a more interventionist approach to the problem: fuel reduction through logging, removing undergrowth, bulldozer CATlines, and fuel breaks. These are all techniques which have been controversial with environmentalist groups and scientific studies, who argue that denser forests actually retain flame-retardant moisture better. “The California Environmental Quality Act had good intentions, but it really handcuffed the timber industry,” Dennett says. “Without logging, there’s too much biomass, and the access roads for the fire service aren’t maintained.”

There’s no consensus on protecting California from fire, only an intense debate, which rages inside the fire-fighting institutions themselves. A number of its participants are engaged in political and economic lobbying, advocating different solutions such as technological fire suppression, controlled burns, rewilding approaches, and what has come to be known as TEK (traditional ecological knowledge). However, defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, who make many of the Forest Service’s aviation tools, compete against these organisations, along with logging consortiums and rancher associations. Despite this, attitudes towards total fire suppression have been souring as many locals embrace more holistic forest “management” techniques such as controlled burns. Some note that as forest fire frequency declines, acreage, time scales and destruction rates skyrocket.

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I later speak to Jaime Tarne, who has been involved with wildland firefighting and the science behind fire management since her first season in 1975 with the Forest Service. Instead of hardware, Tarne focuses on the need for auxiliary aid, mental-health services, and community support, as fires become more frequent and deadly every year. “This is something that, during my career, was ignored. You’re away from your family; you have friends who die. You don’t walk back into your home life. It’s not normal. If you make a career out of [wildland firefighting] you will lose friends.” Tarne says this has less to do with funding than human errors in high-stress situations: “People die because mistakes are made. Mistakes are made about how to fight the fire. Mistakes are made about when to leave. There’s a lot of ego in firefighters — there’s a machismo attitude. There’s an issue of not wanting to say no. But climate change is radically changing the severity of fires.”

Despite the difficulty of these working conditions, technological capacity, sponsored by aerospace companies, is only growing. Out in the remote ranchlands of Shasta County, I witness a hugely complex and coordinated set of aerial drops. Several light aircraft and helicopters circulate over a practice fire, dropping large amounts of water and flame retardants in a billowing orange haze. Both CAL FIRE and the Forest Service seem keen to show me these eye-catching displays. However, access to average firefighters was restricted. The aerial firefighters and smokejumpers I did meet only gave vague outlines about their training schedules.

Firefighters’ first mandate is to prevent property damage and save lives — an admirable mission. But, beyond the short term, many see a “war” against fire as merely palliative, if not inflammatory in the long run. The Biden administration is slowly starting to turn its gaze towards the issue of state capacity, especially concerning the environment. However, the encouragement and funding of what has been termed a “fire-industrial complex” may lead to unintended consequences as corporations funded by government contracts look to maintain the profitable problem of fire just as they once did war. Yet, at the same time, long-term holistic solutions to fire are often not vote-winners for average citizens understandably concerned about their houses, farms, cattle, and livelihoods.

Whichever angle you approach California from, whatever your social priorities, fire is nearby. More and more, conflagrations are becoming a symptom of the wider problems of the Golden State, from the hollowing-out of local government, to the venal corporate agenda that has come to replace it. In this regard, even as fires blaze across the globe, California still leads the pack.