Quote of the Day (Gillian Tett, on Investors and ‘Once-Unimaginable Disasters’)

“Investors need to get better at imagining — and pricing — once-unimaginable disasters. This is hard. No business school teaches students how to model something like a presidential threat to wipe out a civilisation. And the success of the recent TACO trade will undoubtedly make many even more reluctant to do this. But the grim reality is that even if a ceasefire holds in Iran—a big ‘if’—peace looks elusive.”—British columnist and editor Gillian Tett, “Finance: Six Lessons for Investors on Pricing Disaster,” The Financial Times, Apr. 11-12, 2026

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.

Quote of the Day (Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, on How Megadisasters ‘Permanently Alter the Course of History’)

“Megadisasters are those that have society-altering potential. These are the ones that can overwhelm the very systems designed to respond to disasters. History has given us plenty of examples. Think of the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which wiped out as much as a third or more of Western Europe’s population and reshaped its economic and political systems, or the Irish Potato Famine, which caused the largest mass exodus in the nation’s history. Megadisasters don’t have a temporary impact on society: they permanently alter the course of history.”— Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, quoted in Kevin Krajick and David J. Craig, “How to Prepare for a ‘Megadisaster,’" Columbia Magazine, Spring/Summer 2021

I’m sorry to close out this year on a downer note, but this interview with Jeffrey Schlegelmilch is important for explaining in such clear terms what the world has been witnessing, not just this year but so far in the 21^st century.

Immediately after the above quote, Schlegelmilch points to the source of these large-scale disasters that are happening more often: human activities:

“We are pumping pollutants into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates, leading to more extreme weather events. At the same time, we are building in flood zones, in forested regions susceptible to wildfires, and in other hazard-prone areas. This dynamic is not unique to climate change. Other disasters, like pandemics, have components where societal development is increasing both the threat and our vulnerability. New diseases are emerging because we’re encroaching into wildlife areas and coming into closer contact with animals that harbor exotic pathogens, and the diseases are spreading faster through human populations because of our global connectedness.”

It's one thing when this happens elsewhere in the nation on the evening news, and quite another when it occurs locally, even on your own street. Such was the case at the start of September, when Hurricane Ida struck my hometown of Englewood, NJ.

Across the street from me, several residents of a housing project were evacuated when an adjacent creek overflowed and surged through their apartments. They were not able to move back in until the end of September.

The situation was—and remains—worse at a senior citizens’ project at the end of the block. The picture accompanying this post, taken a day or so after the waters from the brook had receded, only hints at what happened in and around this complex.

Not only were multiple cars damaged (or even lost), but the flood damaged electrical systems in the basement of the building, including the elevator controls and hot water. As a result, residents were hurriedly moved to CareOne facilities, then to area hotels.

Initially told to take only enough to last them a few weeks, these seniors didn’t have enough time even to take winter coats. It turned out they needed these, as their time away now looks like it will take many more months. (This article from the Bergen Record just before Christmas tells of their plight, as well as the commendable effort of the NAACP to alleviate it by collecting coats for them.)

Some of this situation was the unforeseen consequence of one of the “human activities” cited by Schlegelmilch: building in a floodplain. Nearly 50 years ago, these two projects were constructed along the brook, in an attempt to deal with urgent housing problems of the time.

To make the projects possible, bulldozers rechanneled and tamed the brook by scooping out hundreds of rocks and pebbles, with walls built higher and fences erected to prevent the flood damage that had occurred regularly in previous years.

And that’s how it was for nearly the following half-century. But Hurricane Ida, with its force of historic proportions, overwhelmed defenses deemed close to impregnable back then.

The citizens displaced by the storm face an uncertain future, exacerbated by the disruption of routine, isolation and loneliness prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But one also has to ask: If a disaster such as Hurricane Ida (or, for that matter, COVID-19) can happen once, what’s to prevent it happening again,  particularly when so many deny that interlocking crises like this even exist?  No matter how high and strong our barriers are and how much we spend, will it be enough if there is a next time?

Or, maybe I should say: when there is a next time.

Quote of the Day (Jean Kerr, on Self-Possession in the Face of Calamity)

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation.” —Irish-American humorist-playwright Jean Kerr (1922-2003), Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957)

Quote of the Day (Historian Charles A. Beard, on the ‘Achievement of the Human Spirit in Spite of Disasters’)

“[A]s I look over the grand drama of history, I find (or seem to find) amid the apparent chaos and tragedy, evidence of law and plan and immense achievement of the human spirit in spite of disasters. I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves in the mire and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amid the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail.”—American historian Charles A. Beard (1874-1948), letter of June 25, 1931, quoted in Will Durant, On The Meaning of Life (1931)

Quote of the Day (Richard Feynman, on the ‘Way Nature Works’)

“Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen.” —Nobel-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988), The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist (1998)

Quote of the Day (Timothy Egan, on Settlement as an Environmental Delusion)

“It is human nature, if not the American way, to look potential disaster in the face and prefer to see a bright and shining lie. The ‘taming’ of this continent, in five centuries and change, required a mighty mustering of cognitive dissonance. As a result, most of us live with the danger of wildfire, earthquake, tornado, flooding, drought, hurricane or yet-to-be-defined and climate-change-influenced superstorm. A legacy of settlement is the delusion that large-scale manipulation of the natural world can be done without consequence.”—Timothy Egan, “A Mudslide, Foretold,” The New York Times, March 30, 2014

As I write this, President Obama was expected to visit today with friends of the victims of last month’s mudslide in Oso, Wash., as well as first responders on the scene. Yesterday, NPR reported that the official death toll from the disaster had risen to 41, with another four people still missing.

You have to ask yourself why an event such as this occurs, particularly, as in this case, where there had been prior worrisome incidents. Perhaps the reason, as discussed in this blog post by David Ropeik for Psychology Today, lies in the “Risk Perception Gap,” or the self-delusional mental calculus that leads people to choose to go on “living in a place they like, but which could kill them.”

My guess is that the only way we will be able to free ourselves from such delusions is if the insurance costs of living in these environmental danger zones became too exorbitant. At that point, the conservative reluctance to have government save people from misfortune will meet the liberal desire to protect the environment, and, at long last, bring about necessary change in where construction is allowed.