For years, humans have distanced themselves from the natural world, claiming that technological advancements and evolved intelligence set them apart from the rest. But with climate change, gene-editing and artificial intelligence becoming ever more pressing issues, it seems that it is time to re-evaluate this unnatural divide. Here, legendary sound ecologist Bernie Krause discusses how the recent Californian wildfires have awakened many to the clash of modern and natural worlds.

In early October 2017, my wife, Kat, and I lost everything in the wildfires that destroyed large areas of Northern California. Our home in Glen Ellen. Our dear cats, Seaweed and Barnacle. All my detailed field journals going back half a century. Slides and photos of work in the field. Reference books. Nearly seventy years of historic correspondence. The wonderful sounding Manouk Papazian guitar I played at Carnegie Hall as a member of The Weavers. Fine art. Clothes. Furniture. The intensity of the inferno was so great that even the refrigerator and the engine block of Kat’s car melted into unrecognizable puddles of stainless steel and aluminum. Except for us, not one single item that we had amassed over the arc of our lives survived. With no warning from first responders, county, or law enforcement agencies, we were mercifully awake at 2:30 in the morning on the 9th when the hillside outside our front door suddenly burst into flame and we fled Wild Sanctuary, our home of twenty-five years, for the last time.

Kat, who had just returned home from a total knee replacement, was completely traumatized, needing assistance to get to the car. Left behind were all of our personal items: computers, iPhones, glasses, and medical aids for Kat’s surgical recovery, the fire was so intense and aggressive. During our dicey pre-dawn flight, with only the clothes we wore, we came face-to-face with the malevolent eye of global heating and its horrific consequences as we bolted through the wall of fire that had enveloped our driveway—our sole one-lane path to whatever life now remains to us. As we raced toward the car, a fire tornado seethed with a voice of rage, a sound I’d never heard before and hope never to hear again; the combined sucking roar of wind and blistering heat signified by a ferocious expirational crackling surge while the propane tanks of neighbors exploded all around us. The intensity of the inferno was a humbling reminder of feral power and the absolute certainty that natural forces will always triumph in the end. That sound haunts us to this day; I rarely make it through a night without awakening to frightful sonic nightmares.