The L.A. Apocalypse Was Entirely Predictable [View all]

Today on TAP: The hills above my hometown regularly catch fire, and developers regularly build there nonetheless.

by Harold Meyerson January 9, 2025

It is a truth almost universally denied that the apocalyptic fires engulfing Los Angeles—my hometown—are merely a magnified version of the normal.

Donald Trump blames Gavin Newsom, because that’s Trump’s knee-jerk (or just plain jerk) response to any California misfortune. In a similar display of politically targeted bile, Rick Caruso, the Bloomberg-esque Republican turned Democrat who lost the most recent L.A. mayoral election to mainstream Democrat Karen Bass, blames Bass. Any day now, Wall Street Journal editorialists will blame the New Deal and some Latin Mass Catholics will blame Pope Francis.

If there’s one person whose analysis we should take seriously, it’s the late Mike Davis. In 1998, Davis followed up City of Quartz—his critically successful dissection of Los Angeles—with Ecology of Fear, which looked more specifically at the apocalypses that were and are a constant feature of L.A. life. (I edited a number of such Davis articles at the L.A. Weekly during the ’90s.) In the decade since he’d written City of Quartz, Los Angeles had experienced the Rodney King riots, the Northridge earthquake, recurrent fires and floods in the hills surrounding the city, and the decimation of the area’s middle class with the huge post–Cold War downsizing of the region’s largest employers, the Pentagon-funded aerospace companies. Plunging himself into obscure archives, traversing L.A.’s tinder-dry hills and firetrap tenements, Davis chronicled and explained Los Angeles’s unending physical and social combustibility with the zeal and scholarship of a peer-reviewed Cassandra.

Chapter Three of Ecology of Fear is entitled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” It begins by noting that L.A.’s pre-European residents, the Chumash and Tongva Indians, annually set small fires in the hills of Pacific Palisades and Malibu to clear out the brush that would explode if left in place. Mike notes that Richard Henry Dana wrote in his seafaring classic Two Years Before the Mast that when he first sailed up the California coast in 1826, he saw a fire engulfing Topanga Canyon. Mike then documents the 13 fires that had burned at least 10,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains just west of the Palisades between 1930 and 1996. Mike makes a compelling case that the dry hills surrounding Los Angeles, running from Pasadena in the east to Malibu in the west, will regularly ignite when the Santa Ana winds blow, and that building houses in those hills all but guarantees that many of those houses will burn, particularly when those winds soar above 50 miles per hour.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-01-09-la-apocalypse-was-entirely-predictable/