Edge of Paradise

In this essay, part of Pioneer Works Broadcast‘s “Heat Week” series, Lauren Markham focuses on Greece, where temperatures are climbing faster than almost anywhere else in the Global North. “Many of us travel to Greece to study the past,” writes Markham. “But when it comes to our climate reality, Greece . . . is an oracle, helping us see, in terms both stark and enigmatic, what the future holds.” On Markham’s first visit to the country, she and her husband found themselves unprepared during a heat wave, on a blistering 13-mile hike on Hydra. Though they made it back safely, the experience revealed how quickly leisure can shift to peril—and how much hotter this so-called paradise will become.

The invitation as one climbs the Acropolis Hill is to believe in the origin story—to look backward in order to better understand democracy, civilization, the nation-state, oneself. But up on that hillside in Hydra, I came to understand that while Greece is known for its past, the place offers the most insight into what will become of the sea, as the fish rise to the surface in suffocation; at what will become of the trees, the branches bared of olives; the forests, charred black with fire. What will become of us?