“Our house is on fire while we avert our eyes. Nature, mutilated and plundered, can no longer regenerate and we refuse to admit it. Humanity is suffering—suffering from poor development in the North and South, and we remain indifferent. The earth and humankind are in danger and we are all responsible.”
These now famous words were spoken by Jacques Chirac, the then-president of France, at the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. A quarter-century later, his words are no longer figurative, but tragically descriptive. The wildfires now raging across southern France have turned more than 86,000 acres of forest and farmland into ash, already exceeding the total amount of burned territory in all of 2025.
This year’s fires, alarmingly, are not limited to the southern regions of Provence and Languedoc. They have reached the much-loved forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, more than 4,900 acres of which have been destroyed. The protected woods will require decades to recover. The damage was so extensive as to exceed the fires of 1944 and 1945 in this heavily forested region, deliberately set by the German army to flush out French resistance fighters during the last year of the war. “We had never faced a fire like this in the region before,” President Emmanuel Macron said during a visit to the forest last week.