Comment: The California Fires

Southern California is a state of amnesia. After moving here less than two years ago, I have trouble remembering what happened last week, yesterday, or even over breakfast. At first it bothered me—I thought it might be the sun, the swimming pools, Hollywood, Disneyland, the smog. Then I forgot about it. Sometimes I console myself with Montaigne, who long ago confessed just how bad his own memory was, while pointing out that memory and intellect are entirely different things. I bring up Montaigne not to vindicate myself, but to complicate the picture. Contrary to what the rest of the country seems to think, southern California isn't stupid; it's just forgetful. And if the place nourishes a culture of forgetting, if it discourages rumination on the recent past, there are good reasons.

About a month ago, a wall of fire descended on our town. I found this disconcerting. After all, as one local developer put it, "Claremont is a college town, a tree-lined town, a small town that has been planned with real intelligence. It feels the way Southern California is supposed to feel." But in the early morning hours of 26 October, Claremont—now more inferno than paradise—didn't feel like southern California is supposed to feel. A midnight gloom had descended and ash was raining down from the foothills. To the north of town, huge flames consumed the dry chaparral, racing toward cul-de-sacs and palm trees. Coyotes, rodents, and deer ran across suburban lawns, while a few determined homeowners trained garden hoses at trees and roofs. The fire, now creating its own wind, propelled large embers down wind-tunnel streets. These landed in eaves and trees and shrubs, igniting some houses and sparing others.

Most of this I learned from my neighbors. We were in Palm Springs, watching everything on the local all-fire-all-the-time television station. After two fire seasons here, I have only just started to appreciate the sophistication of California's disaster industry. Growing up in Minneapolis, I used to marvel at idle rows of city plows and eager drivers, all lying in wait for that first blizzard. Similarly, in southern California the media bides its time with car chases and convenience store robberies until something epic happens. Like most locals, I mostly watched the fires on television. It was mesmerizing. Breathless reporters shadowed firefighters from the violent blazes around San Diego to the burning homes in Palmer Canyon to raging forest fires near Lake Arrowhead. For added effect, Governor-Elect Schwarzenegger proclaimed, "I play heroes in my movies, but you guys are true heroes."

The local media also likes to trot out experts from local universities during disaster time, even if it ignores them in the off-season. Richard Minnich, for example, a fire ecologist from the University of California, Riverside, seemed ubiquitous on the commentary circuit. For about two decades now, Minnich and others have argued that the traditional techniques and strategies of fire suppression in southern California have been largely self defeating. Once upon a time, before the forty-niners followed their fortunes westward, southern California's foothills burned with great regularity. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, parts of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains northeast of Los Angeles were still burning virtually every summer, sometimes for months at a stretch. Chaparral, the scrub vegetation of evergreen shrubs that fueled these blazes, regenerates itself through fire. As chaparral ages, more and more dead wood accumulates, setting the stage for brushfires. Brushfires, in turn, create the conditions for chaparral to reproduce itself; it can stump-sprout after burns, and its seeds sometimes need fire to germinate. Older regimes of fire management allowed the chaparral to burn, so that the hillsides of southern California blazed with regularity in a relatively predictable cycle of fire and renewal.

Before the twentieth century, fires went mostly unchecked in the mountains around Los Angeles, smoldering in the hills during much of the summer before being...