We’re even finally beginning to believe that the planet itself and its enormous, unfathomable workings are vulnerable, in terrifying ways, to the careless meddling of humans. The Amazon can cease to be a rainforest; the Great Barrier Reef bleaches and dies like any other coral in a too-warm sea. We are learning that there are no guarantees — that importance offers no security from collapse. It only makes the loss more profound.

Another reason this year’s fires raged so wildly across social media might be that people are coming to see them as fitting into a much larger and scarier pattern that demands their attention. If we felt as if we had seen Protsenko’s video before, perhaps it was because it was so similar — the roads and the encroaching fire and the panic — to videos we’d seen of people fleeing Gatlinburg, Tenn., or Paradise, Calif., or Fort McMurray, Canada. It fit the new template for what we expect the fires of our age to look like. They have started to blur together, each of them another window into one very large, very hard to believe disaster.

Many of the Amazon posts simply seemed to reflect the confusion and angst people were feeling — a result of the vast disparity between what we’re seeing and our efforts to make sense of it. People shared the images that felt true to them, the most beautiful and terrifying and heartbreaking, the most capable of capturing how they felt about what was happening. Once again, a cathedral was on fire, and once again, the blaze felt impossible. Once again, it wasn’t.