Mike Davis was right about L.A.'s wildfires - so what?
Returning to 1998's "Ecology of Fear"
A real Mike Davis kind of day.
A friend in Los Angeles, a fellow Davis acolyte, texted me that amid the city’s recent fires. It prompted me to pull from my bookshelf Davis’s Ecology of Fear and reread the most prescient, enduring, and controversial thing Davis had ever written: an essay titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”
Davis highlighted a 1993 fire started in Eaton Canyon, in Altadena, that destroyed almost 200 structures. Thirty-two years later, Eaton Canyon ignited again, and so did Altadena. Davis counted no less than 13 fires in Malibu that exceeded 10,000 acres between 1930 and 1996. This week’s Palisades fire adds to that tally.
Davis knew this week was going to happen because a version of it has happened many times since the 1920s, when Malibu was first developed. He also knew we’d never learn our lesson. Each conflagration over the decades only drove us deeper in the hills and scrubland that had burned naturally for forever. We should have never settled (and resettled) in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades and the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
But how do you tell someone who has lost everything, even someone in the wealthy and exclusive Malibu, that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place? How do you tell a displaced Palisades resident that suppressing wildfires only makes them worse? It’s cruel, and it pins systemic failures on individuals. It’s no different to the east.
During college I spent a lot of time in Pasadena, where my father worked and where I went to Rose Bowl games and watched the parade and used fake IDs to get into the bars on Colorado Boulevard. I learned how to play the horses at Santa Anita, and driving on the 110 in a winter downpour probably seeded my disdain for cars. Watching the Eaton fire burn Altadena and threaten Pasadena, though wealthy and exclusive in their own right, made me want to vomit. It’s a special place. How can they not stop the fire? I thought, at the same time as I knew why they couldn’t stop it. Mike Davis told us why.
What solace is that?
Christians return to Scripture to remind themselves of moral lessons. I return to Mike Davis’s City of Quartz. His 1990 masterwork is my Bible, and it’s what made him famous, but it contains sentences like this: “The new financial district is best conceived as a single, demonically self-referential hyper-structure, a Miesian skyscape raised to dementia.”
The Los Angeles establishment that Davis excoriated in City of Quartz welcomed him into the fold, as he was named a Getty Scholar and won the MacArthur Fellowship’s “Genius Grant,” and his writing was better for it. His prose in Ecology of Fear, published in 1998, is more patient and confident. He invented fewer words. This allows the truth to stand on its own feet, giving “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” its urgency and clarity.
“Malibu… is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world,” Davis writes in the introductory passage. “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…”
It’s as if he wrote that this week. The Palisades fire, now the most destructive in Los Angeles history, scorched the Santa Monica Mountains, whose entire western surface area “has been burnt three times over the twentieth century.” One Calabasas resident lost his home in a 2018 fire. The fires this week threaten what he had rebuilt. “Never thought I’d see it again,” he told The New York Times.
It’s an understandable sentiment, but Davis makes a correction. “Stand at the mouth of Malibu Canyon… for any length of time and you eventually will face the flames. It is a statistical certainty.” That’s because the Santa Monicas, more than any other range in Southern California, align with the Santa Ana winds. Factor in a lot of fuel—dense and dry vegetation—and add a spark and you get explosive wildfires.
Richard Henry Dana, for whom Dana Point in Orange County is named, sailed past a blaze on the Malibu coast in 1826. It’s no different two centuries later. “The speed and heat of the fires is so intense that firefighters can only attempt to prevent lateral spread of the fire while waiting for the winds to abate or the fuel to diminish,” Davis quotes a report from the Environmental Protection Agency. This description leaves out the homes. Defending and extinguishing them one-by-one in difficult terrain is an all together different challenge.
Social media and the news focused on many perceived failures in preventing, preparing for, and fighting this week’s fires: empty reservoirs, low water pressure, budget cuts, brush management, environmental protections, water rights, California Democrats—because Republicans surely would have resourced and prepared the government.
Certainly, relevant agencies could have done more or better, but all of these factors/excuses ignore nature. If it wasn’t the Palisades fire, then it would have been another fire a week or a month or a year later, and in ignoring fire ecology we make the fires worse. “‘Total fire suppression,’ the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel,” Davis explains. “A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
Overnight, the Extremely Online became fire experts, as well as forensic detectives. The fires were so destructive and widespread that they had to be intentional, inspiring analysis of Zapruder-like drone and Ring footage. “Although probably not more than one in eight blazes is caused by arson, Anglo-Californians have always criminalized the problem of mountain wildfire,” Davis writes. “The majority have never accepted the natural role or inevitability of the chaparral fire cycle.”
It’s almost non-human to accept Davis’s assertions: that there is nothing we can do to stop the fires, and that we shouldn’t stop them even if we could. It’s like we’re jealous of the fire. No, only we can destroy the planet. It’s also disorienting to recognize that we are not, at least for a moment, central to the story of life. So instead of confronting these thoughts, we assign blame and dunk on others based on our ideological bent. It gives us the illusion of control.
Then there’s the argument that we shouldn’t be in the hills in the first place. Malibu and its environs are beautiful, but it wasn’t tasteful frontiersmen who settled the area. It was developers, with compliant elected officials aiding and abetting. We are in the hills because of corrupted and literally destructive systems of consumption.
Mike Davis does make a strong case for letting Malibu burn, and it is wholly unsatisfying, if not downright offensive.
To give his critique moral heft, Davis compares the attention and resources wildfires garner to the neglect of urban neighborhoods:
Once again, politicians and the media have allowed the essential landuse issue—the rampant, uncontrolled proliferation of firebelt suburbs—to be camouflaged in a neutral discourse about natural hazards and public safety. But “safety” for the Malibu and Laguna coasts as well as hundreds of other luxury enclaves and gated hilltop suburbs is becoming one of the state’s major social expenditures, although—unlike welfare or immigration—it is almost never debated in terms of trade-offs or alternatives. The $100 million cost of mobilizing 15,000 firefighters… may be an increasingly common entry in the public ledger. Needless to say, there is no comparable investment in the fire, toxic, or earthquake safety of inner-city communities. Instead, as in so many things, we tolerate two systems of hazard prevention, separate and unequal.
He’s right again, and I agree with him intellectually, but willingly letting homes and communities burn after a fire has started is heartless and politically untenable. Even if a Sisyphean task, the fires must be fought because no matter their relative wealth, human beings call Malibu and the Palisades home. Generations of families were raised there. They’re an important part of the cultural and economic fabric in Los Angeles. We Californians need to have a civic and political discussion about managed retreat. It’s not while the Santa Monicas are on fire.
It also presupposes austerity or zero-sum politics, a “mindset” in American politics that I despise. We have enough resources in this country for everyone. Arguing that a group should be denied resources is a terrible way to build power. It immediately creates enemies, which the left literally cannot afford. Power is money or people, and Malibu and the Palisades have a lot of the former. I love class warfare, and I’ll be first at the barricades should the revolution finally happen, but ultimately what matters is outcomes. If we want more resources in urban communities—and that’s basically the raison d’etre for this newsletter—then we must be ruthless and honest about power dynamics. Davis was a master polemicist. He never offered many viable solutions. That’s the American left in a nutshell.
And this essay isn’t going to change that. I have no way forward on how to implement controlled fires or more equitably distribute resources, and in any event being right is a cold comfort. Our country seems unable to recognize, mourn, and accept, let alone forgive. Whenever we are inflicted with a collective trauma our instinct is to respond with aggression, to posture and retaliate.
Watching the Eaton fire threaten Pasadena reminded me of when one of my best friends and I visited my dad and tied one on at Barnie’s Beanery. We got hopelessly lost on the walk home, believing we were following the San Gabriel Mountains in the right direction. Neither of us had an iPhone yet and rideshare barely existed. We tried waving down cars as if they were taxis. (No one stopped.) We still laugh about it today, and on my computer I have a list of happy hours in the San Gabriel Valley I made in 2012.
Then someone close to me sent me right wing, anti-California social media posts relating to the fires. I’m still wondering days later what the point of that was. To convince me to vote Republican? To make me feel bad? To make them feel superior? We put a lot of value in being right. I wish we put as much value in being good.
so what? A lot I would say. What am I missing here.
…..wildfires, using Davis as the lens through which to see the truth of the matter. Great piece.