LA Story

Failing to make sense of the Greater Los Angeles wildfires

I have nothing useful to say about the fires that are still tearing through the suburbs of Los Angeles.

Hollywood sign (Source: Thomas Wold, via Wikimedia Commons)

I know LA. I’ve passed fleetingly through, but that’s not how I know it. I know it from TV and from the movies, from scenes implanted in my mind and memory throughout my formative years. I know those names, those streets, those trees, those beaches.

The city is practically a character.

How often do you hear that line when critics describe movies and shows shot on location? And how true is it? Cities *do* have character. For the last two years we’ve been getting to know Melbourne’s trendy inner north. We found out before Christmas that we have to move out of our rental home, but we’re going to stay in the area and explore a new nook, since the kids are pretty settled at school and we all like it here. Before that we lived in the beautiful, fire-prone Blue Mountains west of Sydney, and 12 years before that we lived in Sydney’s own trendy inner west. Those who know me will chuckle at the thought that I’ve spent this much time in trendy areas, for trendy I ain’t. But I do have the less heralded coolness of someone completely oblivious to trends.

I’ll have a half double decaf half-caf with a twist of lime.

LA Story came as a shock. Before it came out I only knew Steve Martin from a string of A and B grade comedies. Dr Hfuhruhurr, I presume? My teenage mind struggled to make sense of this arty new film but a restrained version of Martin’s distinctive brand of humour shone through in his script, brought to life by Martin and a great cast including Victoria Tennant, Sarah Jessica Parker and Richard E Grant. Little did I know Martin had already had practically a whole career before becoming a movie star, growing from a magician and small time comic to selling out stadiums while being anything but mainstream.

Be so good they can’t ignore you.

Steve Martin’s line was good enough for an academic self-help guru to write a bestselling career advice book with the same title. Don’t follow your dream, get good at something and the dream will follow you. Steve Martin got good at a lot of things and he hasn’t stopped. The whole family fell in love with Only Murders In The Building, binge-watching it during lockdown. COVID not only punctured assumptions about what was socially and politically ‘realistic’, it greatly accelerated the forgetting of another disaster that had just unfolded from our back deck, the Black Summer fires of 2019-20.

To prevent cascading disasters, cure cascading amnesia.

The collective consciousness of this corner of humanity won’t linger long on the LA Fires. After the algorithm sends feeds, fingertips and eyeballs elsewhere, those in the fire game will continue to ply their trade. Some may be reaffirmed in their conviction of its importance, others grateful (and a smidge guilty?) for the extra attention that temporarily follows a wildfire disaster. Researchers will have a new data point to probe. The Santa Ana winds have smashed open a window of opportunity for us to change direction. Can we deliver pithy, coherent policy proposals to the right people? Don’t wait too long to answer, because the shards of that shattered window are unnervingly reassembling themselves, T-1000 style, to prevent any further changes to the status quo.

Brother, can you paradigm?

The fire world is awash in calls for new paradigms. So is academia. We all know things can’t keep going on like this, but there’s little else we agree on. We’re hungry for change, but we don’t want to bite the system that feeds us. In a symbiotic twist, we also feed the system. In my case I feed it papers, PhD students and grant applications. I came across a philanthropic call recently, for game-changing, cycle-breaking projects. $200k a year for three years sure would be nice, thank you very much. Could me and a postdoc break a cycle or two for that amount of cash? Could we smash a silo or two, straddle a discipline or two, cross a sector or two, connect a knowledge system or two? I resent that I spend so much time thinking about how to get resources, when I could be spending it thinking about how to get along with fire. I prefer not to think of the alternative explanation, which is that I prefer playing a game I know how to win, and getting grants is easier than solving fire.

Distilled or distorted?

On Friday the Australian Science Media Exchange put out a call to us experts (i.e. academics who signed up to their list and self-identified as fire know it alls) asking for useful quotes about the LA fires, in case any journos came calling and needed a quote. My first thought was that David Bowman had already covered it pretty well in his Conversation article. But something made me go ahead. Whether it was duty (share my publicly funded knowledge), strategy (the more messages in the more places, the more chance they’ll be heard), arrogance (listen to meeee), procrastination (do I need to explain?) or something else, I decided to contribute. Probably my favourite part was reading all the other responses that rolled in. It’s fascinating seeing what a hodgepodge of agreement, subtle differences in emphasis and highly divergent take home messages there was across the respondents. Here’s what I wrote

The devastating LA wildfires are a reminder of the threat fire can pose to urban environments. For the best understanding of the drivers and consequences of the LA fires, we should listen to those living and working in affected areas. Nevertheless, fire is a global issue and many features of these fires are shared by other communities and landscapes around the world, including in Australia.

This includes the juxtaposition of dense urban settlements with flammable vegetation, the interplay of terrain, weather and climate change, the exclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledge, and our ability to respond to, recover and learn from an increasingly rapid succession of disasters. In many ways, fire is a microcosm of the sustainability crisis. The good news is, if we can genuinely confront fire’s complexity and collectively chart a path towards coexistence with it, we will have a head start on solving many of our most pressing problems.

A visitor from Mars

Of course, it’s only a few scientists that participated in that roundup, and even if you expand it to all the media articles coming out at the moment, I hazard a guess that there are relatively few disciplines represented. This is why it gives me great pleasure to leave you with this terrific thread from fire management observer, anthropologist and master of the baseline fadeaway, Tim Neale, which he deposited at Bluesky yesterday. I can’t take any credit whatsoever for it, but it makes my wild claims about the benefits of multiple perspectives on fire look pretty good!

Hello, so, I'm an anthropologist who has studied wildfires for over a decade and, just recently, handed in a book manuscript for peer review on the pathologies of wildfire management in Australia and, to a lesser extent, Canada and the US. It's called "How to Control Fire" (TBC).

The book makes a few arguments that are maybe relevant to the present moment, and I'll put them out there in case they are helpful to people watching these horrible fires unfold in Los Angeles.

1) for >70 years, wildfire management has centred on the dream of "control." It operates through "command and control" + is increasingly militarised. The dream is a modernist one: that flammable lands might be made predictable + benign. Probabilities cornered, consequences known, risks neutralised.

2) when our attempts at control fail - which is inevitable - we tend to blame rogue actors + double down on this dream. Someone “failed,” we say, and government agencies need to do better. But then we either give those agencies more money, responsibilities, and resources or try to outsource it.

So, we just need more control next time? More surveillance, more fuel treatments, more firefighters, more planes. More (of the same). In Aus, this refrain has built a multibillion dollar sector that can prevent + mitigate a lot of fires. But it cannot stop them all. It cannot change the weather.

3) but there are no solutions. Fire is an elemental process - chaotic, wilful, necessary - and we can mitigate its risks but not eliminate them. There's a lot of money to be made selling us fixes. Try my drone or AI. Buy my satellites - they’re magical! They’ll stop the next one. But they won’t.

Some people may remember that after the 2019-20 Black Summer season Twiggy Forrest promised >$70M to stop dangerous fires with tech by 2025 (the effort was closed down in 2023). Yeah.

4) of course there might be some guilty party, in any given case. A power line coupling may fail. Or there was an arsonist. Or, more often, dry lightning. But trying to blame (or control) these things can be a distraction from all the other things that create the conditions for disastrous wildfires.

Other things like zoning and land planning, road infrastructures, building codes, public warning systems, utilities funding, climate change, invasive species, privatisation, insurance, and on and on. This is another reason why there are no fixes. There are too many causes, each adding to the risk.

5) (almost done): emergency management is very stressful work, and is designed to protect the status quo and reestablish it in the aftermath of emergency (see “Performing Control”). That's how it started, that's its guiding logic, that's its job.

This is why I (+ others) are sceptical of calling the present moment a "climate emergency". We need radical change in how we address landscapes that burn. But our systems are built to respond to emergencies w/ the restoration of order. Look to responders for help - but not substantial change.

6) there has been some great reporting about incarcerated firefighters in CA. Started in WWII this program has since grown to ~33% of state firefighters. 14 other US states have initiated similar programs, mostly in the last decade (see: the work of Lindsey Feldman).

We can understand this in a number of ways, including - alongside paywalled fire maps, private weather forecasts etc - as regressive uses of state power to avoid empowering communities to know + manage risks.

The use of unfree labour is abhorrent. Firefighting, risk mitigation + (good, current, clear, accessible) information about fire risks should be resourced and administered as a free public good.

Now that you’ve made it this far down the article, you may have noticed there aren’t any embedded links. This was unintentional at first, but once I realised I decided to persist. I thought it might be nice if we just sat together for a moment. But Tim did something rare for an academic (well, maybe not rare for an anthropologist), which was end his message with a call to action. So let me honour his thread by including his links, for those interested in investigating.

• Support outdoor workers https://www.inclusiveaction.org/workeraid

• Support immigrant workers impacted by the fires https://secure.actblue.com/donate/lafires2025

• Support displaced black families https://tinyurl.com/56mztws8