With gratitude to my friends, my sisters, and my current teacher and fellow learners.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who need to carefully marshal their time and attention.
Some things to do for people at various distances from the LA fires
What I’d do if I were the mayor of LA
Some thoughts on multisolving (and Multisolving)
Why I’m reconsidering my position on time travel
THINGS TO DO
If you’ve had to evacuate: If possible, get and stay in touch with people who’ve lost what you lost, maybe people from down the street. It’ll be good to talk to someone who gets it, even if you’re talking about other things.
Bonus round: Walking through the steps of this post on how to check the accuracy of information or news might also help you steady your nerves, if that’s something you need.
If you’re housing someone who had to evacuate: Actually, do a similar thing. Get and stay in touch with friends, family members, members of your congregation, etc. who are also housing someone. This will help you sort out your patience and your boundaries—and they might know about guidance or resources that you can share with your guest.
If you live in a city or town near the fires: Urge the mayor, council, & county government to designate and/or support Safe Lots / Safe Parking Areas for people who’ve evacuated & are living in trailers, vans, and cars. Your county may already have such a thing! Write or call, remind them that these lots are part of their planning, and urge them to keep police and ICE at a distance.
Bonus round: If you search for “safe parking area [YOUR COUNTY],” you may also be able to connect with organizations that support people staying in these sites, and help them offer services and supplies.
If you’re a resident of any part of California: Write to Governor Newsom calling for a rent and eviction freeze in the region for 12 months after the fires are declared 100% contained. The LA city council just delayed a similar proposal; you could also tell them to move it through.
If you live elsewhere and have some money to share: Donate it to one of these displaced Black families from Altadena and Pasadena. A friend whose building burned down a couple years ago confirms that cash right away makes a big difference.
If you live elsewhere and have some time to share: Join tenant organizers in reporting rental price gouging near the fire area.
And lastly: if you live at a distance, and you’re already showing up hard somewhere / for someone (recall that you are also someone), it’s fine to ask yourself, “Is this what I want to keep doing?” and it’s fine for the answer to be, “Yes,” or, “Yes, for now.”
SOMETHING TO READ
“What would you do right now if you were the mayor of LA?” my friend asked me.
My brain shorted out on “right now.” If I were the mayor of Los Angeles, what I’d want most would be a time machine. I’d want to go back and make better evacuation plans, but also I’d want to zone differently, build differently, manage fire differently. (And then how far back do you go? Which ancestor do you talk out of making the journey to a continent that everyone you know assures you is there to be invaded, used and burned?)
When I told my sister this, she said, “The time machine is the future.” That is, any given place, its people and its leaders, has a chance to plan now for the future of now—for what’s next. For the people of LA County, that could mean changing what they build and where. It could also include setting up community land trusts to guard against gentrification, or community recovery and building circles similar to West Street Recovery. It might involve building out disaster mental health care, as people did in Sonoma County after a series of fires there.
If homes and other buildings are rebuilt—or built in new places—to be more energy-efficient, fire-resistant, or even all-electric, the city and state will need to take steps like these in San Francisco’s Mission District to make sure that the clean energy transition is for everyone, and not just another tool for displacement; they’ll need to make those buildings both accessible for disabled people to use, and possible for disabled people to evacuate. And throughout this process, the city and state could and should pull from their immense police budget to help fund these changes, and keep police presence and ICE cooperation to the barest minimum. Los Angeles can use this moment to figure out better ways to build what keeps people housed, power the things people use, and prioritize the services people actually need—all the while with the fire and the way out in mind.
In her book Multisolving, which I’m reading right now, Elizabeth Sawin writes about the systems we live within and can, with effort and intention, steer or shape. She writes that when you go to steer a system whose changes are reinforcing themselves—what she names a reinforcing feedback loop—“You are responding to the momentum and the dynamics, not the problem’s current condition.” In other words, rapid change means making your decisions about what to do now based on how fast things are changing and what’s interacting to make that change so fast.
Sawin says understanding systems and the way they change can help us do that. She has built that understanding in partnership with a number of towns and cities, as well as smaller groups, that are trying to change on purpose: change their economies, change their priorities, change their governance. The dynamics in what settlers have made of Southern California come from centuries of neglect, opportunism and violence, and consensus about what should happen in a fast-compounding future is tough to build when people are reeling in the present. It’s especially tough if they haven’t been active or intentional parts of shaping that present—if they were focused on trying to find a place they could afford, leaning unquestioningly on police presence, grudgingly accepting the length of their commute, excluded from zoning hearings by weak outreach, or kept out of organizing meetings because a group refused to mask.
It might hurt, but does it hurt more, to spread out your thinking? To ask how moving money out of the police budget might benefit both people who get profiled and people using—or supplying—the many city services that could be paid for with that money? Or how returning strategic sections of land throughout the city to Tongva, Tataviam and other nations’ care—with the money to back it up—enable better decisions about where to put buildings and plants and improve people’s incomes and begin to set right some old wrongs?
What can a mayor do anywhere? There are questions and lessons in every system about power and leverage and political capital, about when to invite and when to accuse, and about tying what you want to what someone else wants. (These are also elements of multisolving, as I understand it.) But making a habit of assessing the elements in play without assuming that A) there’s only one way for them to interact, 2) they’re already doing it, and D) iit sucks—you can practice that right now. And you can look for the element of the system that you’re best placed to steer, the vaults you might open. I never thought I’d say this, but: let’s fire up the time machine.
Here’s a reflection question adapted from the first chapter of Multisolving, and a practice based on one taught to me by my friend Faith.
QUESTION: If you think of a system as “an interconnected set of elements that function together,” which systems did you participate in as you went about your day today?
PRACTICE: The next time you interact with water in any way, pause to envision—as clearly as you can, and without judgment—where that water came from in order to reach you, and where it will go after it leaves you.
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.