It’s been one week since those in Los Angeles woke up to a generational horror — one sprawling neighborhood effectively eliminated by fire overnight, another devastated by the destruction of more than a thousand buildings and homes, and the city almost immediately submerged in a cloud of retributive finger-pointing and scapegoating so thick it seemed almost intended to distract from the scale of devastation itself.
For those who did want to contemplate it, the public reckoning follows a now-familiar, grim pattern: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer until you’re the one filming,” as one viral anonymous observation put it.
In the meantime, some quote Joan Didion, usually a poetic line or two from her “The Santa Ana” (her more famous essays on the crackups of the 1960s have gained renewed social relevance in the last few years, too). Others cite Octavia Butler, whose “Parable of the Sower” features wildfires in Los Angeles in 2025; in its sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” a fascist is elected U.S. president pledging to “Make America Great Again.” (The Altadena cemetery in which she is buried caught fire last week.) Still others invoke Mike Davis, the leftist firebrand and environmental historian who died in 2022. At times like these, his most passed-around piece is an excerpt from 1998’s “Ecology of Fear,” “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”
Below its headline provocation, “The Case” smuggles in an awful lot of eye-opening fire science (for instance, that an acre of chaparral is the fuel equivalent of some 75 barrels of oil) and pointed social history (that beginning in the middle of the last century, public policy effectively subsidized the development of disaster risk in what Davis calls the “firebelt suburbs” of California).
Ecology should doom development in a place like the Santa Monica Mountains, Davis believed; instead, imperious cultural logic has repeatedly dictated the opposite. “Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale,” he wrote, “encouraged by artificially cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief and an expansive public commitment to ‘defend Malibu.’”
Are we still living under those same social conditions, or do these disasters signal a shift? Will fire in Southern California continue to be not just a recurrent terror but also a predictable force driving displacement and development you might call ecological gentrification?
To me, the answer isn’t clear. Los Angeles is still burning, and I’m not sure whether the fallout from these fires will ultimately extend Davis’s story or mark a break in it. Many homes destroyed in the Palisades and Malibu had no fire insurance cover; most others are likely to see their payouts capped below the astronomical assessed value. The fires may render the state’s “last resort” insurance program insolvent, with unclear implications for those owners of opulent homes turned ash-gray landowners — or for those who might want to succeed them.
And there has been a palpable turn in the city’s perspective, this time — I’ve heard many more locals invoking Sept. 11 than telling me that the region has always had fire. The faultfinding rage has taken, for Los Angeles, a notable right-wing turn, if one that also points in an ambiguous direction — dismissive of climate factors but certain that much more should have been done by local government. Gov. Gavin Newsom has already announced that those rebuilding after the fire will face no red tape — promising a faster recovery, at least for those who can afford to rush ahead with little or no insurance money. But such a program also implies little or no policy pressure to make the new building much more fire resistant than the old.
The natural landscape is changing, too — by force of warming and, increasingly, by fire. In 2020, just as the state’s new fire age was really beginning, Davis published “California’s Apocalyptic ‘Second Nature,” in which he contemplated the ecological transformation brought about by the Dome fire, which killed more than a million yucca trees in the Mojave Desert but ultimately counted, that fire season, as a relatively small-scale burn.
Driving through the Mojave in its aftermath put Davis in mind of the aftermath of World War II, when “the ruins of Berlin became a laboratory where natural scientists studied plant succession in the wake of three years of incessant firebombing,” assuming that in short order the familiar vegetation of the region would return. “To their horror this was not the case,” and the revelation that “dead-zone vegetation” rather than “original” flora would now dominate the region “prompted a debate about ‘Nature II,’” Davis wrote, worrying a similar transformation was underway in the American West. “A new, profoundly sinister nature is rapidly emerging from our fire rubble at the expense of landscapes we once considered sacred,” he wrote. “Our imaginations can barely encompass the speed or scale of the catastrophe. Gone California, gone.”
It is because of lines like these that, in times of fire especially, that Davis is remembered as a kind of environmental prophet. But his project was always political more than ecological, and in his last published essay, he emphasized not human vulnerability to catastrophic nature but the few all-powerful hands now driving our ecological, social and political history.
“In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds,” he wrote in The New Left Review, under the title “Thanatos Triumphant” — a remarkable phrase, given his own proximity to death, which would come later that year. “Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands,” he warned as he drew the essay to a close. “We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History.’” What kind of future can California make for itself? We are about to see.
Further reading
“Unfathomable, unreasonable, unstoppable, and, yet, inevitable.” — Alissa Walker on “the other big one,” in “Zero Percent Containment,” in Torched.
“Wildfire in Los Angeles is inevitability; much of what is most beautiful is meant to burn. The fire would run to the ocean repeatedly if we let it; the most stunning vistas would be erased and regenerated, over and over. Instead we try to hold on.” — Kerry Howley, “Escaping Los Angeles,” in New York magazine.
“It may sound cruel to say this, but you could see this fire coming a decade away, and many did.” — John Vaillant, “We Built Our World With Fire. Now Heat Is Destroying Our Lives,” in The Guardian.
“We have thrown an entire planet out of balance, and now we are suffering the consequences.” — Patti Davis on the dream of Los Angeles, and how it ends, “The Dream of California Is Up in Smoke,” in Times Opinion.
Colm Tóibín’s letter from L.A., The London Review of Books,
Ross Andersen contemplates “the message in the sky over Los Angeles,” and what it means to watch a city of smog become a city of smoke, in The Atlantic.
“Could better brush clearance have helped slow the spread of the Palisades fire?” The answer, Alex Wigglesworth writes in The Los Angeles Times, is ambiguous. (In Heatmap, Katie Brigham asks the question, too.)
Was the fire started by a smoldering burn from New Year’s Eve fireworks? The Washington Post compiles the evidence.
“How Two Words From a 24-Year-Old Pasadena Climate Specialist Saved Hundreds of Lives,” on Edgar McGregor and the power of a timely “Get out!”
At Moving Day, Susan Crawford sketches some possible futures for fire insurance in California. (And a Bloomberg report on the same.)
“I believe that we are marching steadily towards an uninsurable future in the United States and across the globe, because we’re not doing enough, fast enough to transition from fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emitters, which are driving the temperature rise, which is driving the climate change, which are causing the more extreme and severe weather-related events, which are killing people, injuring people, destroying the whole communities and causing insurance companies to have to pay out more and more.” Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner, speaks with The Lever’s David Sirota about the fires and what they portend for the future of insurance.
A new AccuWeather estimate for damages and economic loss from the fires: $250 billion.
A scale comparison of the Palisades fire and the legendary Chicago fire of 1871 (the comparison is already out of date, but the Palisades fire is at least eight times the size).
At The Lookout, Zeke Lunder and Tim Chavez discuss the long history of Southern California fire.
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