Los Angeles is burning.
At least two people are dead and more than 80,000 people have evacuated their homes. The images and videos of the Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst Fires, each of which is currently at zero-percent containment, show a wave of destruction: a vast swath of Pacific Palisades reduced from three dimensions to two; a long line of freeway-side Malibu homes ablaze mere feet away from the indifferent Pacific Ocean; overhead views from airplane window of what looks more like a roiling caldera than the second-most populous city in the U.S.; palm trees atilt at 45-degree angles in the fierce wind; a bulldozer clearing a thicket of Teslas and Mercedes-Benzes, abandoned because the people fleeing in them realized they would have to run for it to survive; power lines snapping like fireworks; two people and a dog in a gorgeous, well-appointed kitchen framed by generous windows offering 270-degree views, views currently showing a ferocious tornado of fire whipping at inhuman speeds right outside. Their voices are soft, in deference to the force of the blaze and to its suddenness.
It is tempting here to describe the fires and their violence as "apocalyptic," or to compare them to something out of a disaster movie—that is, to abandon earthly, corporeal language for something more biblical or cinematic. There's a comfort in that framing, the solace of accepting one's fate. There is, however, a cynical edge of nihilism to this mode of thinking and talking about these fires specifically and fires generally that I think should be resisted. If the fires are envoys of a force that is fundamentally beyond our comprehension, let alone control, what is the point of grappling with them or even understanding them? The fire, generally speaking, is not strictly containable, but it also isn't a force that we can't influence or respond to, and if we are to make any sort of dignified, resilient life for ourselves in a smoky future, it will require a new degree of solidarity.
The two main fires in the city, the Palisades Fire in the west and the Eaton Fire in the east, roared to life and spread rapidly on Tuesday because of extremely fast winds ripping down the canyons and out toward the ocean. Locals have been lucky enough to avoid a bad fire season for four years thanks to a nice string of above-average rainfall years—though in that time, the invasive, explosive vegetation grew thick. You do not need to have read Ecology of Fear to know that fire in the hills, fueled by the Santa Ana winds, is an eternal condition of the Southern California chaparral biome. No fire department can tame the wind, and homes built in some of the most obviously fire-prone areas in the state are going to burn. This is essentially the Mike Davis thesis.
The evolution in the case of this week's fires, the apocalyptic bit, is that as the planet warms and Southern California desiccates, wildfires will continue to burn faster and in places that seemed invulnerable not so long ago. By its nature, climate change will force upon us all manner of previously unprecedented disasters, straining extant firefighting frameworks and expanding the fire belt. Today is Jan. 8, which, for those unfamiliar with the solar cycle, is in the middle of winter, traditionally a time of lower temperatures and wetter conditions even in Southern California. Fourteen Decembers ago, similarly fierce Santa Anas blew through Los Angeles. The winds downed power lines and destroyed over 40 buildings, though they did not spark destructive wildfires, because they came on the heels of what would turn out to be the last good rainfall year for half a decade. It would be foolish to anticipate that the trend of the next 14 Decembers will be anything but dry.
Up against unprecedented challenges and the looming specter of climate change, how has the city of Los Angeles responded? By further arming its police department. As many have noted, the L.A. city budget signed into law by Mayor Karen Bass back in June included a $17 million cut to the L.A. Fire Department, cuts to other city infrastructure services, and a $126 million boost for the LAPD. Those numbers alone don't tell the whole story—fire management at this scale is typically managed by state and federal agencies—but there's a larger-order lesson here about what those in power actually see as important and worth protecting, about their willingness to let most people suffer to ensure their own security.
I don't think it is unreasonable to contextualize the LAPD increase within the regime of fire management, because the police play the important role of protecting the interests of capital and enforcing its asymmetries along geographic lines. That is especially important in times of crisis, such as, you know, a pair of huge urban fires, which explains LAPD chief Jim McDonnell making a big show about looting.
The way Bass and the city government have further empowered the already over-militarized LAPD is a useful place to start thinking about what new frameworks of solidarity might look like, as the metastatic nature of the LAPD shows how broken crisis management is under our current system. It is characterized by reaction, by a posture of fear and defense. By its nature, it is incapable of meaningful change or of fostering any sort of collectivism. And why would it be? It assumes the logic of capital, of hoarding and margin-seeking. In less abstract terms, the future of crisis management will be the rich guy who rails against property taxes and environmental protections then asks for private firefighters and, this time, getting them while those deemed economically unviable burn.
This is why I find myself frustrated with the idea that the fires currently raging in L.A. are either a basic matter of forest management, of controlled burns and smarter housing policy, or essentially untamable and therefore something we have to accept. I don't think it should be acceptable that people's lives will be mangled like this. I know conditions will only get worse, but that doesn't mean the way we deal with them will also have to degrade alongside them. Even if the engine that is accelerating the crisis is climate change—a force that is hard to honestly think about without spiraling—and even if every trend in American political and cultural life is drifting away from meaningful collective action and toward bitter individualism, the only way we get through this is together. That is too far off and too opaque a prescription to be directly meaningful here, but whatever the actually survivable version of the future ends up looking like, it starts with an honest understanding of the problem.
