It's been a whirlwind few months since my last post here on Gnamma. There is an anti-democratic, technocratically-fueled coup happening here in the USA. (The best aggregator on this topic, to me, has been kottke.org. Yet another country in the Americas falling to a coup supported by USA business interests, only this time... it's the United States itself?!). This shift in the American federal ruling has enormous consequences for... well, probably all of us... but definitely folks like me who were considering working for the federal government! Alas, this is not quite the topic of my newsletter today—I wanted to mention it in hopes that you're finding your strategies to keep alive and upright. Instead, I want to roll back the clocks a couple months and talk about the fires that roiled the Los Angeles metro area in January.
Screenshot from the Hughes fire, north of LA close to I-5.
Let's remind ourselves that these fires were enormous. Hundreds of square kilometers of burned areas. Tens of thousands of burned structures. Not as many immediate deaths as you might think—the count seems to be somewhere between 20 and 50—but still, plenty of direct deaths. Plus, there are likely hundreds-to-thousands more human-years of life expectancies shortened by exposure to smoke and other toxins that will remain in the soil (or groundwater). Plenty of lives ruined by financial burdens of what was lost and what will be endured. And emotional burdens of many sizes that will be carried by people and communities for decades.
But as the Eaton Fire developed into the largest and most fearsome of the January 2025 fire-fest, engulfing the foothill suburb of Altadena, I was forced to acknowledge my snobbish argument. Fires are really heterogeneous in their true impacts, and this fire wasn't one of the annual burns in some bucolic canyon of the Southlands, exactly: it was surging through the (relatively) densely-settled flatlands of a more working-class community. (There is a race element here too, both in the immigrant populations of Davis' essay and in Altadena being a longstanding African-American community, but I don't think I'm equipped to handle all that effectively... here's a start.) The quantity of structures burned in the Eaton Fire gives me the sense that this was essentially a sub/urban fire that got way, way out of hand, feeding off fuel from home gardens and tree-lined streets.
Now, we can't give Altadena a free pass, exactly, for its choice in location. The unincorporated area is up against the dry south-facing side of the San Gabriel mountains, giving fires a large "wild-urban interface" to burn, immediately downhill of the Santa Ana winds, which are known to fuel fires during the season of peak dryness in Southern California. The region around Altadena has ignited many times previously—most recently the Kinneloa Fire in 1993. So while Altadena isn't exactly a total wildfire hotspot like Malibu, it is sitting in a hot seat.
I TA'd a class on natural disasters in my first year of grad school, and one of the key lessons of class was this equation: RISK = HAZARD * EXPOSURE. Translated into a sentence, "the risk of X is the combination of the chance of X occurring in addition to the extent of what is exposed to X." For example, the hazard implicated by the king tide (the highest tide each year) is once a year and its exposure is all the stuff at that elevation. If we are in the mentality of minimizing risk, the chances of natural hazards happening only change usually only due to slow-moving environmental patterns: if the hazard is flooding, then the chance of flooding depends on season and long-term hydrologic trends. If the hazard is earthquakes, it depends on tectonic plates! If the hazard is fire, it depends on fuel loading, ignition sources, and winds. "Exposure" is about what people put in places affected by these natural processes (because a "hazard" is just a natural thing that we interpret as bad). This exposure component is the lever that we can more immediately control. In the century of Los Angeles' development, we have built right through landscapes that simply have the right environmental conditions for fire, exposing ourselves massively to fire.
Fire Hazard Severity Zones Map
Above is a map from CalFire on fire hazards, with three tiers (yellow/orange/red). You will notice it covers a ton of California. What's not are its tall mountains, wet forests, flat valleys, and unvegetated desert. The truth is that vast parts of the state, especially the populated parts and with their Mediterranean climate, are in "Fire Ecologies". These are ecosystems with dynamics driven by fire, places where occasional burns (with certain intensities and years between burns, the "fire regime") are what makes the place "work" ecologically. (Fire ecology is a whole field unto itself!) Fire-driven impacts allow for more species diversity in these ecosystems, and the ecological dynamics impact the landscape by influencing how landforms evolve over time, how water flows through the environment, and how substances get cycled through the environment. Fire opens up vegetation canopies for new generations of plants to grow and can help key nutrients re-enter the soil. An interesting new theory theorizes that fire smoke delivers key nutrients so plankton can thrive in the coastal ocean.
So let's also remind ourselves: fire is not bad.. Fires are an unavoidable ecological necessity, but the toxins, the financial costs, and the emotional wreckages will remain long after the embers go dark. We may try to squelch fires by punishing utility companies and arsonists, but fires were burning in California long before people were here, just at a slower pace. (Various works suggest that contemporary wildland management and settlement patterns have just made the large fires more frequent and more intense.) Fire will continue to show up across the state, but we need to figure out how to put fewer people (and plastic doohickeys) in the way.
I am inspired by looking towards other places that have learned to deal with their native natural hazards. Venice (the Italian one) has found a way to endure its regular flooding and aqueous environment with an "amphibious" approach to life (words of Lodovica Guarnieri) with its perched architecture and rubber boot-proud denizens. Lower Louisiana, pounded by storms and river floods, is has a culture of living with water, improving drainage while acknowledging inevitable flooding. Japan has a longstanding history of architecture prepared for earthquakes. (Does anywhere in tornado alley have an approach to twisters of the same flavor...?)
All natural disasters have their own psychologies, and I do think that fire can feel particularly apocalyptic. Still, we need to do all we can to learn to live with fire, including looking towards Australia for advice, which is ahead of the USA on the pyrocene trajectory by a bit. Approaches range from building structures and enacting urban planning in ways that reduce burn intensity, or improving the mixture of materials that burn when—not if—these places burn. Or, building on Pyro Futures, a 2024 exhibition on California fire culture, we can change our stewardship practices to permit more intentional low-level burns, reducing risk of the large catastrophic burns and building "fire-adapted communities" in the words of the former U.S. Forest Service director. All of this first requires first a psychological change in handling fire, with less fear and more of a dance of pragmatic approaches. Reiterating: we can subsidize construction from less-flammable and less-plastic materials; incentivize maintenance of defensible space; modify zoning regulations to encourage housing density away from the wild-urban interfaces; simplify the processes for prescribed burns echoing indigenous practices; and better communicate the risks that homebuyers must assume in choosing to buy property in these places.
Photo by my talented friend Injinash... from 2024.
I realize this newsletter likely comes across as removed and academic, talking about optimistic and rapid policy change, fire ecologies, and the need to let the landscape work itself, while people are still displaced and recovering. But I mean what I write and I believe that rebuilding hastily and sloppily, without attention to these environmental patterns and worsening fire risks, will only bring the region deeper into its entrenched environmental technical debt. I have personally grieved for Altadena, as a place I remember for its charm and history in my years in Los Angeles, and I was immensely moved by visiting the town a few weeks ago and seeing the damage firsthand. It was a true disaster, all the way through. But fires of the future will only be disasters if we don't learn to live with them.
Smoldering,
Lukas