For three days, dozens of firefighters battled intense heat and smoke to extinguish a gorse fire - thought to have been started deliberately - which raged across the Mournes.
An image of one exhausted firefighter on Slieve Donard wiping sweat from her face as the charred landscape behind her continued to smoulder shows how hard the Fire Service fought to put out the blaze.
The National Trust has said the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty on upper Slieve Donard has been completely destroyed and will take many years to recover.
At the time of writing, devastating fires in Killarney National Park in Co Kerry and Dunmanway in west Cork were continuing to devastate vital habitats.
We talk a lot about the beauty of the Irish landscape. Most of our tourism industry is based on selling the views that so many of us take for granted.
Belfast-born CS Lewis, who lived and worked in England for his whole adult life, wrote about the magic of the Mournes and often went back there in his imagination.
“I have seen landscapes, notably in the Mourne Mountains and southwards which under a particular light made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge," he wrote.
And the area inspired his most famous creation.
In a letter to his brother, Lewis wrote: “That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia."
If our landscape means so much to us, why then, are we so bad at caring for it?
During lockdown, the Mournes saw a huge increase in visitors. Some people who jetted away on foreign holidays every year, and wouldn’t have dreamt of hiking up a mountain, fell in love with the hills on their own doorstep.
Yet the influx of visitors has also seen a sharp rise in littering, dog waste and disturbance to wildlife.
Last year, the National Trust warned that people visiting its sites had dropped "unprecedented" amounts of litter.
Wildfires were reported at several sites, including at Bloody Bridge in the Mournes - the same spot engulfed by the weekend's gorse fire.
Our apparent inability to care for the most precious resource we have goes right from day-trippers to our administration at Stormont.
For years, the north has been the only devolved administration without targets to cut emissions and its own climate change legislation.
The New Decade, New Approach deal, agreed in January 2020 following the three-year impasse at Stormont, committed the parties establishing an independent environmental protection agency and developing a climate change strategy.
Well over a year on, nothing has changed.
In answer to a written question by SDLP MLA Sinéad McLaughlin last week, economy minister Diane Dodds said a lot about very little.
Mrs Dodds’ department has launched a consultation on energy policy, but this was only done at the end of last month.
“My department is developing a bold and ambitious new vision for the Northern Ireland economy,” Mrs Dodds said.
“The ambition set out in this vision is to drive economic growth through a focus on innovation, to achieve a fairer distribution of opportunities for all our people and to contribute to environmental wellbeing.”
So that’s clear then. Incidentally, all departments want a ‘bold and ambitious’ vision. It’s the rare minister, apart from Edwin Poots on post-Brexit checks at the north's ports, who will admit to wanting unadventurous and superficial policies.
Bold new visions, however, mean nothing without action.
Although the Fire Service believes the Mournes fire was started deliberately, a 20 per cent reduction in rainfall this month, compared to recent years, undoubtedly made it easier for the blaze to spread.
We are living in a climate crisis. The threat to our environment is the biggest one we face - much more than the coronavirus pandemic.
Lockdown has shown that ministers can take swift and decisive action when needed. The success of our vaccine rollout has demonstrated what huge strides can be taken when the political will is there.
This is the time when Stormont has to come together to fight climate change. Not in a few years, not in a few months. But now. We, and our environment, have no more time to waste.
