
Los Angeles is burning in the middle of winter. The fires are still not fully contained, and the Santa Ana winds fuelling them returned this week. Over 40,000 acres have been burned, 200,000 people have been evacuated, more than 12,000 homes and buildings have been destroyed and more than 27 people dead, with many more missing. This is just one city. Previously, the most lethal wildfire season California had experienced since records began was in 2018. Across the state, fires destroyed almost two million acres and killed 103 people. Subsequent fires in 2020 and 2021 destroyed larger areas but killed fewer.
Yet those blazes ignited in scorching summer heat. Los Angeles has been burning at a time when seasonal rainfall should dampen wildfire tendencies. But southern California has not experienced anything like normal rainfall for years, and this year it is far below normal. Rising temperatures and droughts have caused wildfires in the state to grow in severity and in scale: from 1972 to 2019, the area burned by wildfires increased five-fold. Ordinarily, the winds that drive the flames would at least be blocked and channelled by the San Gabriel mountain range. This year, the currents are so strong that they were able to rush over the peaks and descend to the other side. As a result, the fires were blown well beyond the hills and forest areas, surging to the coast and the urban flatlands.
These aggressive weather patterns have been stoked by the human misuse of a delicate ecosystem. It is a dark irony that the inauguration of Donald Trump (who is now threatening to withhold aid from California unless Gavin Newsom changes course on his management of the fires) prompted a series of fossil-fuel industry parties across Washington DC earlier this week. For Trump is a direct beneficiary of the same combination of institutional paralysis, neoliberal decay, climate denial, conspiracism and centrist complacency that is as much fuel to the fire as the wind and heat.
One other thing that is unusual about this year’s fires is that, this time, they have hurt the rich. The glamorous beachfront properties of Malibu are a known wildfire risk, and are protected by private emergency services. But for the first time, the fire levelled the wealthy residences of the Pacific Palisades. Of course, the real upper crust, such as the Silicon Valley bosses, tend to live in less vulnerable places like northern California’s Palo Alto, Atherton and Woodside. But even those closer to the action can afford a degree of complacency. For example, the New York Times reports on a director who refused to evacuate his home in the Hollywood heights, preferring to watch the blaze and wait for a “$300 Amazon Fresh delivery” that was scheduled that day.
Those without private emergency services relied on a public system that was pared to the bone. This wildfire came months after an austerity budget in which Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass cut firefighters’ funding by $17.6m. She was warned of the dangers by fire chiefs, but pushed on with what was part of a wider package cutting $323.3m from the budget. The one protected area was policing, which saw an increase in funding of $126m. This was a budget reflecting the priorities of the rich: low taxes, strong police and weak public services. LA was primed to burn – by a combination of climate change, real estate development in fire-prone areas, the neglect of low-income neighbourhoods and the neoliberal evisceration of public resources. And, as ever, the disaster capitalists have come out to play in the rubble. Some Los Angeles landlords have raised rents by up to 124 per cent, while investors are trying to purchase property cheaply from the victims, part of a wider practice of driving up rents by buying up property.
A disaster of this kind was not only predictable but predicted. The late Californian Marxist Mike Davis is now widely and justly lauded for his prescient analyses of the state’s ecological danger, above all in the landmark essay of his book Ecology of Fear, which makes “the case for letting Malibu burn”. There he drew attention to the very lethal vortex of environmental deterioration and savage capitalism that has just turned much of Los Angeles into a burned offering. Yet efforts are now being made to avoid that conversation. While the centre complacently insists that cuts made no difference to the handling of the fires, the far-right falsely claims that Bass blew a load of money on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI), or implies that the money went to the homeless. Indeed, this prompted a spot of vigilantism as residents carried out a citizens’ arrest on a homeless man they claim was an arsonist: police have found no evidence for this.
Why should anyone listen to them? Wouldn’t surviving a capitalist climate disaster radicalise people? Not necessarily. In Lucy Walker’s award-winning documentary about the 2018 wildfires, Bring Your Own Brigade, it is often the survivors whose homes have been reduced to dusty craters who bitterly deny climate change. Perhaps, however, they might have a realistic sense of government failure?
Notably, most of the deaths in the 2018 wildfire season occurred in the bucolic town of Paradise during the Camp Fire in northern California’s Butte county. Unlike most of California’s exurbs, Paradise was not a refuge for the wealthy and white. It was a source of cheap homes for pensioners and younger families priced out of Sacramento Valley. And there had been ample warnings, including from a Butte county civil grand jury report, that the roads in the area were almost useless for evacuation. The report also called for a moratorium on building new homes in fire-prone areas. Authorities ignored it, and the flimsy emergency infrastructure all but collapsed when the fires hit.
Did this trigger a discussion about class and austerity? To the contrary, one of the most popular rumours about the wildfire was that federal park managers, obsessed with nature and ignorant of fire management, had refused to allow a Cal Fire bulldozer operator to create fire lines. Apparently, they didn’t like the idea of churning up the beautiful ground or cutting back brush. In fact, there was a bulldozer operator and he was given clearance to act. It is unclear whether it did much good. Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE) argue that such methods do more damage in the long term as they change the biochemical composition and moisture-richness of the soil, making future fires more extreme. However, the rumour served those who reject environmentalism, and particularly the interests of the wealthy, Trump-voting northern Californians who don’t want to shell out to protect poor areas from the flames. Likewise, the rumours about Antifa arsonists causing the wildfires in Oregon in 2020 were ingeniously congruous with the interests of the rich.
Also at stake here is a defunct model of fire management. Lately, the right-wing press has credited Trump with having warned Governor Newsom about the wildfire danger. He claimed in 2019 that he told Newsom “from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him”. He also issued an executive order to increase logging on the grounds that this would curb wildfires in overgrown and fuel-dense forests. In fact, logging and “cleaning” the forest floors removes a source of moisture that retards flames. The evidence is that protected forests experience much less severe fires. As fire management expert Stephen J Pyne has been arguing for decades, suppression is bad management. It derives from an inappropriate importation by colonists of European fire practices, and it makes wildfires worse. California’s chapparal biome is adapted for fire: it burns, because it is meant to burn. It is human action, above all climate change, logging, real estate sprawl and dysfunctional public infrastructure that makes it more deadly than it need be.
Briefly, at the outset of the Biden administration, it appeared that there was an alternative to this deadlock between complacent centrism and conservative scapegoating. The Democratic left, pushing for a Green New Deal, sought an ecological programme that cut across the denialist coalition on class lines: providing jobs, safety and affordable homes while funding resilient infrastructures. All of this, along with a moratorium on construction in fire-prone areas, would help in California. But such hopes were killed off early, as Biden’s proposed initiative was pared back to subsidies for green industrial development. Crucially, despite the administration’s restrictions on drilling in Alaska, oil production soared to record highs under Biden.
Now Trump has declared an end to even those exiguous restraints, a national energy emergency, withdrawn from the Paris Accords and suspended offshore wind leasing from the continental shelf. Absent a populist rupture, the wildfire frontiers are left to cycle through panic, worsening disaster, delusional vigilantism, official inaction and predatory capitalists making a killing from the tragedy.
[See also: An abomination of an inauguration]