Quote of the Day (Mike Davis, on How Southern California ‘Transgressed Environmental Common Sense’)

“Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm’s way. For generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense. Historic wildfire corridors have been turned into view-lot suburbs, wetland liquefaction zones into marinas, and floodplains into industrial districts and housing tracts. Monolithic public works have been substituted for regional planning and a responsible land ethic. As a result, Southern California has reaped flood, fire and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets.”— Urban theorist and historian Mike Davis (1946-2022), Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998)

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Peggy Noonan, remembering how her family’s house in New Jersey burned down over 50 years ago, observes that “you never get over a fire.” More problematically, she contends that “All disasters have political reverberations,” and, in particular, that after the Palisades wildfires of this past week, there will likely be “a new shift, a reorientation toward reality.”

I have the utmost respect for the writing style that won Ms. Noonan a Pulitzer Prize, and sometimes find myself agreeing with her arguments. But her most recent column epitomizes so much of the mistaken and misdirected commentary that has raged, high and low, in the wake of this catastrophe that has already burned more than 90,000 acres, displaced 92,000 residents and cost more than two dozen lives.

Although her latest reflections show no understanding of either the long history or still relatively recent events that have led Southern California to this pass, what is truly shocking is that so many other comments in the public and private sphere are far worse—ranging from the wildly irrelevant to the astonishingly ill-informed.

This past Sunday, a priest in my parish related how dumbfounded he felt when a friend called to claim that God was punishing California for all the abortions in the state. From the opposite side of the political spectrum, some have seen this as God’s judgment on the U.S. for abetting the enormous loss of life in Gaza.

A few days ago, a member of a Facebook group devoted to the work of novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis set off a ferocious debate by posting a meme with a fake photo of an Oscar statuette burnt to a crisp—presumably representing divine judgment on liberal, godless Hollywood.

For sure, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass should be embarrassed for making a trip to Ghana that broke her campaign promise to stick close to home—and this at a time when the area’s weather condition had become increasingly vulnerable. But just as surely, her responsibility for the disaster is being exaggerated by rivals past and present, outside and inside her party, who dream of occupying her office themselves someday.

More important, though the level of the disaster might be unprecedented, its occurrence is anything but. It might, in fact, be more proper to speak of the recurrence of wildfires.

Which brings us to Mike Davis and the above quote.

Upon his death two years ago, the British paper The Guardian hailed him for offering “prophetic warnings” about so much related to Southern California’s environment. But I doubt that Davis would claim any such powers of divination.

If anything, he would say, he was only pointing out that disasters had already happened in the state, that they had happened again, and—based on that record and the unrestrained growth spurring it in the first place—it was practically guaranteed that disaster would strike again.

Ms. Noonan faults progressive California politicians for preoccupation with “unquantifiable secondary and tertiary issues” like climate change.

But as far back as 1998, Davis warned that Malibu was already “the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world”:

“At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930.”

What lay behind all this, Davis wrote, was a “selfish, profit-driven presentism.” Politicians and developers rebuffed proposals to preserve parks, beaches, playgrounds and mountain reserves for the community, choosing instead an “artificial borderland of chaparral and suburb [that] magnified the natural fire danger while creating new perils for firefighters who now had to defend thousands of individual structures as well as battle the fire front itself.”

Ms. Noonan sees the three-decade dominance of the Democratic Party in the state as a major reason for the failure to contain the fire. I even agree with her that “A one-party state will yield one-party rule that encourages, sloth, carelessness and corruption.”

But she ignores the long postwar history when Republicans, at the state and federal level, were equally responsible as Democrats, if not more so, for the lack of control on growth. (And, if one-party rule poses grave difficulties for governance, she has been noticeably silent about the dangers posed by the current GOP control of the three branches of the federal government.)

Couple this destructive postwar development trend with the current months-long drought—among the “feedback loops” in the delicate ecosystem that Davis pointed out—and you have the necessary conditions for the most recent natural disaster.

Mother Nature belongs to no political party, Ms. Noonan, and will not be disrespected by either Republicans or Democrats. At long last, after so much time, Mother Nature has imposed such high costs associated with insurance and rebuilding that growth in Southern California may be halted, even reversed.

In the meantime, let’s not blame the most recent conflagration on an angry Almighty. And while we’re at it, let’s lay off the ecological Cassandras that tried to alert government officials, business professionals, and residents about what all too sadly, has now occurred.