CALIFORNIA BURNING.

In 1998, Mike "Ecology of Fear" Davis offered "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn."

Sometimes the easiest questions have the hardest answers, e.g. "Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?"

I don't know, people might build there because a maritime temperate climate where houses don't require furnaces or air conditioners has an appeal.  And so they have.

Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930.

Those luxury residences often belong to people you might have heard of.

The indefatigable May Rindge continued to fight the road builders and developers in the courts, but in the end the costs of litigation forced her to lease choice parts of Malibu beachfront to a movie colony that included Jack Warner, Clara Bow, Dolores Del Rio, and Barbara Stanwyck herself. The colony’s unexpected housewarming was a lightning-swift wildfire that destroyed 13 new homes in late October 1929. Exactly a year later, walnut pickers in the Thousand Oaks area accidently ignited another blaze, which quickly grew into one of the greatest conflagrations in Malibu history.

*The 1930 Decker Canyon fire was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a fierce Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames, 1,100 firefighters could do little except save their own lives. As the firestorm unexpectedly wheeled toward the Pacific Palisades, there was official panic. County Supervisor Wright, his nerves shaken by a visit to the collapsing fire lines, posted a hundred patrolmen at the Los Angeles city limits to alert residents for evacuation. Should the “fire raging in the Malibu District get closer,” he gasped, “our whole city might go.” Ultimately, this apocalypse (which may have given Nathanael West the idea for the burning of Los Angeles in his novel Day of the Locust) was avoided—no thanks to human initiative—when the fickle Santa Ana abruptly subsided.

Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor sees the same perfect storm at work.

In the simplest of terms, it continues to appear to be the case that this is a tragic confluence of extremely dry conditions and unusually strong Santa Ana wind in the broader context of a specific pattern of urban development in the greater Los Angeles area. Moreover, climate change has made a situation that was already prone to wildfires much worse.

In other words, there was a lot of dry fuel already present. Then the winds provided a delivery mechanism for spreading a fire. So all that was needed was a fluke (a spark) or carelessness (a cigarette butt) or negligence of some kind to provide a flame.*

To me, it seems that these ingredients mean that there was little in the recent past that could have been done to prevent this tragedy (in much the same way that nothing could have been done to prevent the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina).

He summarizes, "I am not sure what lesson will be learned that could have prevented all of this. No rain + California’s scrubby hills + dry winds (up to 100 MHP) + sparks equals the conditions for massive wildfires."

Mr Davis expands on that equation, with emphasis on the coastal ecosystem that evolved to burn.

Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”

A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil.

Well, you have to have ignition, but it's less likely that embers from a firework will lurk for a day or two in Death Valley before the next big breeze sets it off.  In Pacific Palisades, or Pensaukee, or, as Claire Lehmann notes, in Australia, once the big breeze hits, it's too late.

Joel Shepherd, an author and volunteer firefighter in Adelaide, Australia, explained to me: “When conditions are bad enough, no amount of firefighters can stop it. Where I live, all the experienced fireys say privately that if we get really bad conditions, just leave. Trucks can pick individual houses and try to save them, but when entire neighbourhoods go up in flames, it just endangers crews.”

People believe that with enough firefighters and equipment, any blaze can be contained. But DEI, or no DEI, when fires reach the tree canopies, and when embers are spread by hurricane winds, very little can actually be done. As Shepherd told me, “More people should know how little chance the firefighters have of stopping the really big fires because a lot of people have a false sense of security, and the politicians never want to admit that nothing we can do will stop the really bad fires once they’re going.”

Well, no, not even all the water in Green Bay could protect New Franken.

Malibu, though, well, Mr Davis's provocative "let it burn" is experience talking.  After the War came another fire.

Indeed the conflagration, which coincided with a waxing of Cold War anxieties, had unexpected political repercussions. “If the government could not defeat wildfires in the Santa Monicas,” critics asked, “how would it deal with possible nuclear holocausts?” Accordingly the Eisenhower administration acknowledged the Malibu blaze as “the first major fire disaster of national scope,” and Congress—more concerned with the credibility of a vast civil defense establishment than with the tragedy of local homeowners—debated how to provide “complete fire prevention and protection in Southern California.” (Large Malibu fires, moreover, would later be used by researchers to model the behavior of nuclear firestorms.)

According to fire historian Stephen Pyne, the Malibu blaze also marked the transition from the traditional forest fire problem to a “new fire regime” characterized by the “lethal mixture of homeowners and brush.” This artificial borderland of chaparral and suburb magnified the natural fire danger while creating new perils for firefighters who now had to defend thousands of individual structures as well as battle the fire front itself. “Whereas it was often remarked that chaparral, particularly that composed largely of chamise, is a fire-climax community, it is now joked that the same is true of the Southern California mountain suburb.”

Ultimately the 1956 fire—followed by two blazes, one month apart, in 1958–59 that severely burned eight firefighters and destroyed another hundred homes—proved the beginning of the end for bohemian Malibu. A perverse law of the new fire regime was that fire now stimulated both development and upward social succession. By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale as land use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire “victims.” As a result, renters and modest homeowners were displaced from areas like Broad Beach, Paradise Cove, and Point Dume by wealthy pyrophiles encouraged by artificially cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief, and an expansive public commitment to “defend Malibu.”

In that "public subsidization of firebelt suburbs" is a political economy problem that provides material for another day's post.  We'll close today with a look at fire suppression.

As Western states contend with increasingly catastrophic wildfires, some are looking to the Southeastern U.S., where prescribed fire is widespread thanks to policies put in place decades ago. From 1998 to 2018, 70% of all controlled burning in the country was in the Southeast.

While a continent apart, both regions have a similar need for fire. For thousands of years, forests and woodlands experienced regular burning, both sparked by lightning and used by Native American tribes, which prevented the buildup of flammable growth. Without fire, the landscape is prone to intense, potentially devastating wildfires.

Despite that risk, Western states have struggled to expand the use of controlled burns. This month, the U.S. Forest Service suspended them because of the extensive fires burning in record-dry conditions.

Now, several Western states are moving to adopt the fire policies pioneered by Florida and other Southern states as a hedge against the future. They include training problems for burn leaders and providing liability protection for them. The bigger challenge is changing the culture around fire, so that residents know that tolerating a little smoke from good fires can help stop the destructive blazes that cloud the air for weeks.

Several lessons in that brief passage: one, that lessons learned from Peshtigo are still valid; two, that "Indigenous ways of knowing" oughtn't be diminished by the antics of culture-studies types; and three, California are you listening, there's less carbon emitted from controlled fires than you get when Malibu Canyon does what it does.  A BBC post summarizes today's class: combine rapid fuel growth, strong winds, flying embers, and hills and canyons that funnel the winds, and catastrophic fire happens.  At the margin, climate change might play a role.