"We built a massive civilization in a place where fire is as much a part of the natural habitat as summer rains are in the east," writes journalist and documentary filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse.
Indeed, solely blaming politicians or DEI for the disaster is dishonest. So is blaming climate change. The culprit is the topography of California and the cycles of the natural world that include seasonal dry weather coupled with plenty of fuel (the growth of brush and sage in the hills and mountains) that ignite and burn even without humans and their dwellings added to the mix.
That's not to say that Bass, Newsom, and the whole corrupt, loony bunch should escape responsibility for actions or inactions that made the disaster worse. Empty fire hydrants, the mayor going junketing in the middle of fire season, cutting the fire department budget, and many other stupidities must be addressed and blame assessed.
But the bottom line, as Woodhouse points out, is that LA "is unique among American cities for the degree to which it directly abuts wild nature." Thanks to idiotic zoning rules that grew Los Angeles horizontally instead of vertically, urban sprawl collided with the fire-prone natural world in ways that guarantee a disaster such as the one they're experiencing now.
Even 100 years ago, fire ravaged areas like Malibu and Pacific Palisades over and over again.
Anyone who has lived in L.A. for more than a year has experienced either a season of active wildfires or a season of worrying about whether they would come. Joan Didion has written about it. The area around Pacific Palisades, in particular, has been on fire countless times before. There was a huge conflagration in Malibu in 1929. Then 1930 and 1935. Then 1938 and 1943, and so on, averaging two per decade up to the current day.
Blaming "overdevelopment" is like blaming the victim. Perhaps Los Angeles should not have soft-pedaled the danger of massive fires. But stopping people from living where they want is impossible in America.
In the late 1990s, author Mike Davis wrote "The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster," where he predicted a fire like this. In 2020, he wrote, "After every fire emergency, [Governor of California, Gavin] Newsom and other liberals call for urgent action to reduce emissions. But in doing so, they deliberately elide the question of what needs to be done on the ground, here and now."
Using fires to highlight the need to do something about climate change is an old, boring shibboleth employed by the left. It's a device that's wearing thin as the severity of the fires outpaces any possible explanation having to do with climate change.
Los Angeles grew up in a hurry. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, development occurred so rapidly that urban and suburban density extends unabated all the way up until it collides into wildlands. A long portion of the city’s perimeter is fenced in by the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains. Dense residential neighborhoods and freeways sit directly beneath towering bluffs populated by mountain lions, which occasionally hop the fences of backyard swimming pools to feast on domestic cats and dogs. Where New York has its meticulously designed Central Park, Los Angeles has Griffith Park, a sprawling expanse of wild mountain terrain right in the middle of the city.
These abrupt borders between nature and city are called “wildland-urban interfaces,” and they’re inherently volatile. Man-made sparks from homeless encampments, discarded cigarettes, and downed power lines easily ignite wildfires, while brush fires that start from natural causes like lightning easily make the leap into residential areas and become urban conflagrations.
Many of California's residential developments burning today were laid out in the 19th century. It's not the environment. It's how the natural world developed to make Southern California a place of breathtaking beauty and hellish danger.
