Fire, that trickster’s loot, that gift from the gods, burned more than 4,000,000 acres of my home state last year—a number so vast it is mere abstraction. Most of the impacts of climate change are abstractions until they’re at your own door. How about this: the amount of California that’s gone missing is almost equivalent to the state of Massachusetts in size.
— Lauren Markham for The Longest Year: 2020+ at Literary Hub.
it’s all abstractions, all the way down, each resting on the next one’s back