“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote way back in the 1960s. And on X and Truth Social and, indeed, Fox News, they were playing the hits, too — the fires were not the result of climate change or an extraordinary wind event meeting an extraordinary drought but the responsibility of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and the city’s fire chief, until this point anonymous nationally, who had the audacity to be a woman.
It was a remarkable reversal, conservatives demagoguing California fire disaster, but after the conspiratorial deluge of Hurricane Helene, it need not have been surprising. Had the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget really been cut? The fire hydrants were dry primarily because of the demand from the fires themselves, it turned out. There had been no political showdown about a fish called a smelt, and the California supply of water did not hang on its fate. The chaparral was not dry because of water policy choices. The controlled burns that took place last year and the order to suspend them — yes, perhaps shortsighted — had been given to ensure that firefighters were available to work the line on uncontrolled blazes elsewhere.
But you don’t get disasters of this scale without human failure, too. For years now, watching record-setting fire after record-setting fire, doomscrolling through phone footage of panicked fire-encircled evacuations and clocking the number of new cities visited by eerie and unbreathable clouds of wildfire smoke, it has been easy to mark each new disaster, many unprecedented in our lifetimes, with the scream, “Climate change!” It is also not enough. Decarbonization hasn’t yet solved the risk of catastrophic fire, and more rapid emissions reductions won’t dramatically reduce that risk for decades, either. In the meantime, it cannot be the case — must not be — that there was or is nothing more to do.
Global warming has already remodeled the risk landscape in California and indeed well beyond, making gigafire burns and urban firestorms like this one so much more likely. But so has housing policy, which has directed much more development into the path of fire across the vast tinderbox of the American West. The problem of forest management looms larger in Northern California, with decades of fire suppression producing much denser and more flammable forests there, but the job of brush clearing and fuel thinning has been neglected around Los Angeles, too. In a place like Palisades, where the homes became the fuel, a whole program of home hardening is now harrowingly necessary, to make existing homes much less vulnerable even when the embers descend in blankets from miles away.
What would that hardening look like, enacted at the scale of not just a community but a megalopolis, perhaps a whole state or even a continent? The job is in ways both forbidding and banal. Those forests, now intimidating heaps of fuel, must be thinned — in California perhaps almost four million acres annually, nearly equivalent to the state’s worst fire season in modern history. Brushland and scrubland, while trickier, must be managed better too: when possible, with controlled and traditional burning, and, when not, through mechanical thinning and more aggressive use of strategic fire breaks, particularly along ridge lines, and debris clearance especially in those canyons, like firepits, sometimes called jackpots. On the urban side of the what’s known as the wildland-urban interface, we probably need a program of systematically reducing risk to property by property — retrofitting homes and roofs, eliminating flammable flora, ensuring homes sit clear of anything flammable. Beyond that, some way of overcoming longstanding NIMBYish resistance, explained less by partisanship or climate denial than a more quotidian mix of lack of urgency, homeowner libertarianism and simple wishful thinking.
