The current southern California wildfires are all too predictable. A combination of arid landscapes, hot weather and some source of ignition – usually people – and once again we have massive fires looming on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
There are, however, things worth keeping in mind that make this more than just an another example of the terminal nature of the California condition.
For starters, these fire are earlier than usual for the fire season to get going – the Santa Ana winds are not yet a factor – so whatever damage we are seeing now is only a fraction of what we will see when the humidity drops and the winds kick up a month or two from now.
At the same time, it’s worth recognizing why we are seeing so many fires. For the most part these things are lit by people, and not always arsons. As the case more than a hundred years ago in the U.S. Northeast, the introduction of humans into a fuel-laden landscape – in this case California chaparral – is inevitably going to produce wildfires. What is different, however, is how quickly we have brought new ignition sources into so many places in California in so little time.
I spoke about this at a conference in Northern California this weekend. I started by describing the way in which fire suppression, fuel loads and complexity create analogies in the causes and responses to financial and wildland crises/conflagrations. It extends from type transitions, to fire adaptation, and the inevitability of crises, etc. But it crosses powerfully and unexpectedly from the metaphorical to the real and the economic.
How? Because fires are increasingly happening in and around the landscapes into which we recently introduced houses. So much of the new housing that popped up in the last few year at the urban-wilderness boundary in and around cities like Los Angeles was subprime. It was the only place so many houses could be slapped up so quickly.
The following figure overlaps a map of subprime percentage with the location of two current fire in the Los Angeles area. As you can see, we brought new people, blinking and unaware, into a landscape to which they represented new sources of ignition. We cannot be surprised at the result, even if there is a species of poeticism in seeing the metaphor of conflagration be made concrete by unwitting subprime homeowners.
Related posts:
I’m so glad I found my suloiton online.