Given the emphasis on community and belonging in our cultural moment, the impulse to save everything we can is understandable: to restore storm-damaged buildings, hold back the tide, snuff out the wildfires, and show that by outwitting nature we are still our own masters. There’s an implicit guilt behind these salvage attempts: a recognition that our suffering now and in future is caused by what we ourselves have wrought. In Pacifica, on the California coast, the local administration talks about ‘managed retreat’ to describe its medium-term evacuation process in response to wildfires, to the dismay and anger of some residents. The episode of the podcast This American Life telling their stories was headlined ‘Apocalypse Now-ish’. Politically, it is an invidious problem – no politician wants to be accused of ‘abandoning a community’, or to tell someone who loves their home: ‘It’s time to go – and to let go.’

Can we learn to embrace impermanence? Climate realists make a compelling case, reminding us that generations to come will have to ‘find the beauty in our burnt planet’ since they deserve beauty too. The balance to be struck is between acknowledging the worst effects and likely future impacts of climate change, and insisting that we continue to resist them – pushing for changes that will save lives, communities and ecosystems. An honest appraisal of how ‘burnt’ things are becoming should not give way to climate nihilism. Letting go of settlements is not the same as ‘giving up’. In Holderness, people have been learning to let go for thousands of years.