The fires raging in and around Malibu are huge, and they’re terrible, and they’re also the latest in a series of catastrophic fires in Los Angeles county and the region, the latest consequence of heat and drought and wind that have long created the region’s volatile fire weather.
The climate crisis has made it hotter and dryer and made wildfire worse here and across the west and around the world, but this region’s ecology has always been wedded to fire. Homes built in and around natural landscapes – canyons, chaparral coastal hills, forests, mountainsides – with a history of wildfire that are pretty much guaranteed to burn again sooner or later create the personal tragedies and losses and the pressure for fire crews to try to contain the blazes. But suppressing the blazes lets the fuel load build up, meaning that fire will be worse when it comes.
It was only last month that the Franklin fire, fanned by the dry Santa Ana winds from the east gusting up to 50 miles an hour, burned 4,000 acres around Malibu in 48 hours. The Station fire burned 160,577 acres in 2009 to set the record as LA’s largest and the Woolsey fire in 2018 burned 96,949 acres and destroyed 1,643 structures, while the 1970 Malibu fire destroyed 31,000 acres, incinerated hundreds of structures, and killed 10 people, fed in part by six months of no rain. Los Angeles has a history of catastrophic fire.
As Mike Davis, in his bluntly titled 1998 essay The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, noted: “Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century.” The case for letting Malibu burn is that it is inevitably going to burn, over and over, but fire departments protect structures as long as they can.
None of these facts make what is happening now less terrible. And it is terrible – to me personally as well; people I know have lost not just their homes but their neighborhoods; friends and family have had to evacuate not knowing if they’ll have homes to return to. But these facts do perhaps make it all less surprising. While central and northern California has been soaked by successive storms since November, LA remained parched, dry season being pretty much the same as fire-vulnerable season in California.
When you’re a coastal Californian almost all your weather blows in from the Pacific, but in the fall with the Bay Area’s Diablo winds and LA’s famous Santa Ana winds, the weather comes as dry wind from the deserts to the east. This is a dangerous time, especially if the winds from the east come before the rains from the west. I remember the October 1991 fire that raged across the Oakland Hills, destroying 3,000 homes in two days. The dry winds fanning the flames reportedly reached 65mph. In 2011, Santa Ana gusts in the LA region were reported to have reached a record 167mph. The winds that fed the current fires were not record speed, but they were scary fast – up to 100mph.
California’s catastrophic autumn fires since 2017 are in some ways not a repeat of history – they’re the violent arrival of a new era, just as Hurricane Helene was when it swept hundreds of miles inland to smash into western North Carolina only four months ago. But you could remember the warnings, which have been abundant from climate scientists, fire experts and climate journalists. And remember that this place was already prone to fire and how the suppression of the natural fire cycle set up fire to be devastating rather than renewing.
I say that not to blame the devastated who have lost their homes or evacuated from them – if anyone’s to blame, it’s the civic institutions that allowed development in dangerous places and, according to the LA city councilwoman serving the Pacific Palisades region, underinvested in infrastructure, including water systems, to fight such fires, and had vehicles out of service due to lack of mechanics.
On 17 December, the city’s fire chief complained in writing that cuts for “variable staffing hours” were undermining the department’s ability to “prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies”. Decisions about institutions and budgets that seem boring in ordinary times are life-and-death matters in a crisis.
Stephen Pyne, a scientist who has devoted his career to studying fire, writes of the current blazes in Los Angeles county: “The unholy mingling of built and natural landscapes guaranteed that fire protection was compromised in its very constitution. Cities want no fire; many countrysides need fire, and if mild fires are suppressed, the unburned fuel encourages monsters. If every urban fire that is put out is a problem solved, many wildland fires put out are problems put off.”
In places we built in, we suppressed fire to protect structures. In wild places, the managing agencies, including the Forest Service and National Park Service and many state agencies, suppressed fire throughout much of the 20th century because they forgot that Native Californians and nature itself burned these places regularly. The suppression of fire builds up the fuel loads so that when fire comes it is devastating. Fire belongs here.
Catastrophic fire erases what was there before. So does forgetting. Memory is a resource for facing the future; it’s equipment for imagining, planning, preparing. Forgetting creates terrible vulnerabilities to the return of foreseen disasters, to misinformation (including Trump’s social media blasts blaming Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom for the fires), and vulnerability to unrealistic expectations – including that each disaster at least since Hurricane Katrina will be the “wake-up call” that will change everything. “Weather can’t do the work of politics,” declares Daniel Aldana Cohen, a climate sociologist in a study of New York City’s response to 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. We cannot know the future, but remembering the past with care and accuracy equips us to navigate it.
That past includes decades of warnings from climate scientists that we are heading into a more turbulent and destructive era. They and climate activists have offered not just warnings but clear knowledge of what to do to limit how bad it gets. We are deciding whether or not to act on that knowledge now, including with who we elect and what we support. We know that the future is being reshaped by human-caused climate change, and we do know exactly what to do about it and who is preventing us from doing it. We are often urged to be prepared for our local disaster, be it blizzard, earthquake, hurricane or fire, but no personal preparation can compensate for the lack of the collective preparation that is meaningful international climate action. The current fires are reminders of the costs of forgetting.
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Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
