The space race was, of course, certainly more than a confection, a great fantasy to distract the nation from the horrors of Vietnam's jungles and political leaders shot dead on our own streets and cities burning in the conflagration of rage that was so much of the 1960's.
While this fire season is no doubt bad — more than 80 big burns now burning from Montana to Southern California, while the August conflagrations that swept British Columbia were the province's worst fires on record — we're still unlikely to surpass the record fires of 2015, when more than 10 million acres burned.
It's all there, he assured me: evidence of catastrophic flooding unleashed by seismic waves, of pulverized bedrock falling like hail, of forests burning in a worldwide conflagration, of early mammals huddling in their burrows as dinosaurs died aboveground.
In a tweet, Trump blamed "poor forest management" in California for the devastating conflagrations currently burning in the state, and he threatened to withhold federal aid as if in punishment for this negligence.
By dawn on Sunday these houses were burning, and Samuel Pepys, observing the conflagration from the Tower of London, recorded great concern for friends living on the bridge.
When the Maasai were removed from Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania in 1974, poaching increased; the eviction of indigenous people from Yellowstone Park in the United States in the late 19th century led to overgrazing by elk and bison; Aborigines in Australia have used controlled burning to protect forests from devastating conflagrations… the list goes on.
Ms. Mayor noted that Aeneas recommended pouring down pitch on enemy soldiers or their siege machines, followed by bunches of hemp and lumps of sulfur and, finally, burning bundles of kindling to ignite a destructive conflagration.
Local crews succeeded in quenching random blazes and also cooling buildings which were burning too fiercely to be extinguished, thus containing the conflagration as bleating sheep and squealing pigs escaped.
Indeed, the purpose of fire resistance is not only to provide sufficient time to evacuate people trapped inside the burning building, but also to reduce the possibility of any conflagration (Eidinger 2004).
He set aflame a conflagration of race that chases us to this day, burning through our hearts and through our cities.
