“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.
