Finding Meaning In The Many Apocalypses Of The California Wildfires

The scenes emerging from California as the Camp Fire rages are understandably described as "apocalyptic." The fire arrived at communities quickly, downing electrical lines and causing explosions, forcing people to abandon their vehicles and flee on foot. Many literally had to run for their lives before the approaching inferno.

The aftermath is evocative and shows just how easily that word "apocalypse" comes to mind. Consider, for example, this video tweeted out by Nick Valencia of CNN:

These abandoned and burned out cars shows you what a panic it must have been for residents trying to escape the Camp Fire. Unreal scenes in Paradise, CA, this morning. #CampFire pic.twitter.com/AhBuWzS0Tx

— Nick Valencia (@CNNValencia) November 9, 2018

Here the reporter drives through the area around Paradise, CA, allowing us as viewers to empathetically participate. We can viscerally see the terror, the devastation. Cars simply abandoned, the blaze having passed and destroyed them, with not a person in sight and the landscape charred by an angry nature.

But why "apocalypse?" What about that word seems so appropriate to this particular situation?

From the example of the recurrent California wildfires, we seem to use the word "apocalyptic" as signaling total destruction. We see a flattened landscape not unlike what we might see after an atomic bomb. And that's not a coincidence, as Prof. Matthew Avery Sutton has discussed. Science Fiction has a field day with this. Almost all fictional "apocalypses" in books, movies, or on TV show us images of desolation, depopulation and abandoned technology.

Even in fictional worlds that have been rebuilt, there are ruins, flattened or empty houses, cars left by the side of the road. A reminder of what was, as if a warning that it could happen again.

And this is precisely what an apocalypse is - not an end, but a moment of transformation.

To return to the wildfires in California, November 2018 isn't the first time that the "apocalypse" or "apocalyptic" has been used to describe the impact and effect of wildfires just in California. Here's ABC News from 2015, the LA Times on the 2016 Kern County Fire, NPR did the same after the 2017 Napa and Sonoma fires in Northern California, and then Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker wrote a lovely (if melancholy) reflection on the imagery of that year's spate of wildfires in California at the end of 2017.

The apocalypse seems to keep happening. And this fits with how the word was originally used.

The Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apokálypsis) meant "revelation," in the sense that something hidden is now unveiled. You can see what was there all along. The is why the last book of many Christian traditions' Bibles (which had a long, winding process of acceptance) is alternately known as the Apocalypse of John, or the Book of Revelation. The vision that John is said to have had is called what it is because it is thought to reveal to his readers the arc of sacred history and the tribulations along the way, as it bends back finally towards paradise once more.

Even then, in its last chapters the Book doesn't really tell about the final End so much as a final beginning, the life that awaits all after God's judgment, the paradise of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

So when we see the word "apocalyptic" used to describe the California wildfires - whether in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, or in the future - we'll continue to understand the suffering and the destruction. But I wonder if there might be another question pulling at us, buried underneath the ash and the tears. Maybe that adjective is doing more work.

Maybe describing a tragedy like the California wildfires as "apocalyptic" is really asking us to think about what comes afterward. Apocalypses are meant to teach, to make you understand something important.  Ultimately, apocalypses ask both participants and viewers: now that the hidden thing can be seen, now that you understand, how will you live differently in a world transformed?