things we lost in the fire
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Two years ago, the National Museum of Brazil burned to the ground. The latest in a string of fires at Brazilian research institutes and museums, it lost 90% of its collection largely due to a lack of fire safety measures and years of budget cuts. Lost in the fire: invaluable masks and headdresses, mummies from Egypt and Chile, massive collections of dragonflies and beetles. Lost in the fire: Pompeiian frescoes, audio recordings of indigenous languages that have no living speakers. Lost in the fire: more specimens than the British Museum, entire careers and corpuses, the last fragments of bygone cultures and histories.
Last week a warehouse containing the film archives of the Cinemateca Brasileira went up in smoke. It had caught fire previously, in 2016, and lost some 500 reels of irreplaceable—and highly flammable—film. In February 2020, the warehouse flooded, and films were moved to another area to keep them from further damage. But the area they were moved to was the worst hit: saved from flood, they all perished in flames. Lost in the fire: documentaries, scripted films, advertisements. Lost in the fire: photo processing equipment, personal collections of journalists, the only extant copies of 35mm Brazilian and foreign films.
This past April, a wildfire that began on Table Mountain in South Africa swept into the library at the University of Cape Town, gutting the special collections in the Jagger Reading Room. Lost in the fire: pamphlets and texts from the anti-apartheid movement, the African Studies Film Collection, over 100,000 books, a banned film documenting massacres in Zimbabwe in the 80s.
Yesterday the IPCC released a long report on the climate crisis. Its introductory “Summary for Policymakers” outlines five scenarios of warming, from bad to worse. The best case is bad, and there is no better case:
Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered. Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.
Elsewhere in the report, the panel writes that
There is medium confidence that weather conditions that promote wildfires have become more probably in southern Europe, northern Eurasia, the USA, and Australia over the last century.
In California, the second-largest fire in the state’s history has spread across almost half a million acres and deposited clouds of toxic smoke over Salt Lake City and Denver. Lost in the fire: 433 homes and businesses. Lost in the fire: photo albums, keepsakes, furniture, file cabinets. In Greece, wildfires continue to rage on the island of Evia. Lost in the fire: over 1,000 homes, farmland, livestock. Lost in the fire: hope, agency, security. As one Greek farmer put it: “The fire was our destiny, no one could have put it out.”
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In 83 BC, during a bitter civil war, Rome’s Temple of Jupiter burned to the ground. Lost in the fire: the three Sibylline books. A few years later, priests and scholars traveled the surrounding region—North Africa, Sicily, Greece, Turkey—to collect verses and writings by other Sibyls in an attempt to compensate for the lost tomes.
Soon after the destruction of Brazil’s National Museum, Wikipedia embarked on a similar project, encouraging anyone with photos from the lost collections to upload them to their online commons. Most of the uploaded photos were taken on cell phones, mostly through glass. In some you can see people’s reflections in display cases. In others the explanatory text is too blurry to read.
In one photograph, a dead-eyed fish is preserved in a spherical jar. You can see the photographer’s reflection in the center, fingers curled around an outstretched phone. It looks like a glass eye, dreadful and precious and aswim with death. Such strange and fragile afterlives of the things the fire took.
ben tapeworm