When Recovery No Longer Means Return
On climate change, environmental memory, and what we mean by resilience
In the summer of 2021, while watching the wildfires in Turkey, I painted Embers of Resilience. At the time, the title seemed clear enough to me. Something remains after fire. The environment carries the damage, yet life continues. The word resilience itself contained the idea of being able to endure an impact and preserve the possibility of continuing to exist. Five years later, I find it more interesting to look at the work from a different point. The painting has physically remained the same, but the context in which we speak about fire, climate, and recovery has changed. Along with it, our understanding of resilience has become more complex.
The summer of 2021 was already exceptional. Copernicus later recorded it as the warmest summer in Europe in the observational record up to that point. The Mediterranean experienced a prolonged heatwave, severe soil moisture deficits, and drought; particularly destructive fires occurred in Turkey, Greece, and Italy. In July and August alone, more than 800,000 hectares burned across the Mediterranean region. In Turkey, extreme temperatures and dry conditions created an environment in which fires, once started, could spread rapidly and become especially difficult to control.
It is important to be precise here. Climate change does not explain every individual ignition: a fire always has an immediate cause, whether natural or human. What changes are the conditions in which fire starts and spreads. Prolonged heat, drought, the moisture content of vegetation and soil, and the condition of the ecosystem all affect how quickly a local event can become a major fire. In the IPCC assessment of the Mediterranean, increasing extreme heat, intensifying drought, and wildfire risk are already considered connected elements of a changing climate system. And this leads to a question that now seems more important to me than the event of 2021 itself. What exactly do we mean when we say that nature has recovered?
The word “recovery” itself implies a point of reference. There is a condition before damage, then a disturbance occurs, after which the system gradually moves back toward what it was before. This model is intuitively understandable to us: a house can be rebuilt, an object restored, infrastructure repaired. A living environment exists differently. A forest recovers within time, and over the years or decades required for that recovery, temperature, rainfall, the duration of droughts, soil conditions, and the frequency of subsequent extreme events may all change. Even if vegetation returns, the environment into which it returns may already be different.
A recovered forest, therefore, is not necessarily an exact copy of the forest that existed before the fire. Its species composition, age structure, capacity to retain moisture, and the relationships between plants, animals, and soil may change. Some changes gradually diminish. Others remain for decades. Under sufficiently severe or repeated pressure, an ecosystem may cross a threshold beyond which its former structure no longer fully returns. Today, this question can no longer be treated as purely theoretical.
In 2025, wildfires affected around 1.03 million hectares in Europe - the largest area recorded to date. Seventy per cent of European rivers showed annual flow below average, while almost the entire continent experienced temperatures above the climatic norm. Copernicus also notes that since the 1980s, Europe has been warming at roughly twice the global average. These indicators relate to different processes and do not in themselves form a simple causal chain. Taken together, however, they reveal an environment in which background conditions are gradually ceasing to be stable.
Against this background, the language of climate science is also changing. The IPCC increasingly addresses limits to adaptation - situations in which the capacity to adjust to change becomes insufficient. Soft limits may still be overcome through technology, finance, or changes in policy. A hard limit means that adaptation can no longer preserve a necessary function or prevent an unacceptable level of risk. For some ecosystems, such limits have already been reached.
Alongside this is another important concept: loss and damage. UNEP uses the term for the consequences of climate change that continue to occur despite efforts to reduce emissions and adapt, including losses that become unavoidable or irreversible. The language of climate policy itself therefore begins to acknowledge that not everything can be restored. It is at this point, I think, that the word resilience becomes genuinely interesting.
It is easy to imagine resilience as the capacity to return to normal. But what happens when “normal” itself is changing? What does resilience mean for a forest if the temperature and water conditions in which that forest developed are gradually becoming part of the past? Perhaps resilience has to be understood as the ability to remain viable, to sustain relationships between living systems, to adapt, and to continue forming a future even when that future can no longer repeat what came before.
This also changes the way we understand catastrophe itself. For a person, a wildfire has relatively clear temporal boundaries. It begins, lasts for a period of time, and ends. Within days or weeks, the event disappears from the news cycle. For a landscape, it may continue for much longer. It remains in the soil and carbon, in charred wood, in erosion, in altered water regimes, in the age of the new forest, in the disappearance of some species and the spread of others. It will remain present in the plants that grow there five, ten, or fifty years later.
And here a concept appears that I find increasingly difficult to separate from the question of time: environmental memory. Perhaps environmental memory is not so much the memory of an event as the continuation of the changes that the event leaves behind. Such memory does not require an observer. A landscape stores it physically. A tree carries the trace of drought in the structure of its growth. Soil retains the consequences of fire. A river reflects years of water deficit or excess. Changes in vegetation can outlast the event itself by decades. The past is not present here as recollection. It becomes part of the conditions from which the future emerges.
It is this thought that brings me back to Embers of Resilience. When I look at the painting now, the fire seems already to have ended. There is almost nothing of the event itself left in the work. What remains is the environment after it. The yellow space retains heat. The dark mass holds the weight of what has happened. Between them is a fragmented area that resists definitive identification. It may suggest earth, mineral, a scorched surface, a broken structure, or a landscape. Something has survived, something has changed, and the original state can no longer be reconstructed even in the imagination.
This is why the word embers has become especially important to me. Embers appear after the flame. They hold, at the same time, the residue of a process, the physical transformation of material, and energy that has not yet disappeared completely. The past event continues to exist within matter. Perhaps this is also how I now understand the second part of the title.
Resilience no longer seems to promise that everything will return to what it was before. It is a much more difficult condition: the ability to continue existing within a reality that has already been changed by what happened. This understanding frees recovery from the beautiful but overly simple sequence of catastrophe, destruction, and rebirth. Natural systems are far more complex. Sometimes recovery does restore many characteristics of the previous environment. Sometimes it takes generations. Sometimes the former structure survives only in part. And there are changes after which further life begins from an entirely different point.
Another question then appears: what exactly are we trying to preserve? A familiar image of the landscape? Particular species? The functions of an ecosystem? Its ability to sustain life? Its capacity to adapt to the next change? Climate change makes this question increasingly concrete, because preserving nature is gradually ceasing to mean preserving a fixed state alone. What matters more and more is the ability of ecosystems to remain alive and functional within conditions that continue to change.
For this reason, I am increasingly interested in thinking about landscape as a carrier of time. It consists not only of what we see now. It contains previous fires, droughts, periods of recovery, the disappearance and arrival of species, human interventions, and natural change. Some traces almost vanish. Others become part of the very structure of the environment. Painting, too, can hold time in a similar way.
A painting remains a physical object, but it does not exist outside the history unfolding around it. Years later, we may discover within it a question for which no precise language yet existed at the moment of its creation. This does not alter the origin of the work, nor does it require us to attribute foresight to the artist. Historical distance simply allows us to distinguish the implications of ideas that were already present within the work.
In 2021, Embers of Resilience emerged from a specific event - the wildfires in Turkey. Today, that origin remains part of its history, but around it a much broader problem has appeared. We are increasingly encountering a world in which recovery is possible, but complete return is not guaranteed.
Perhaps this is why the conversation about climate change is increasingly becoming a conversation about time. About how much of the past can remain within the future. About which changes are still reversible. About what remains after a threshold has been crossed. And about what the continuation of life can look like when the previous state exists only in memory. If return becomes impossible, what does it mean to preserve?
