Reading List: On the California Fires
These Are Some of the Pieces Helping Me Understand What Is Happening
Edited to add a reading at the end.
The California wildfires have now been coopted by the Trump misinformation complex, with the incoming president and his acolytes asserting that these deadly and devastating fires have been caused by:
poor forestry management
Failed water management
Democrats
I am not a scientist, but those I’ve seen writing in major publications don’t seem to put much stock in these arguments. Yes, better forest management is always useful, but given the size and scope of these fires, and realities of climate change, focusing there sees either foolish or purposefully ignorant.
I don’t want to belabor an argument I made the other day, but I thought pointing to what I’ve been reading about the fires as a suggested reading list might be useful. These are not definitive — too early to offer conclusions — but these are the pieces informing my thinking.
Peter Kalmus, writing in The Guardian, makes the connections between the fire and capitalism. He argues that “planetary overheating”
is really just the most geophysical symptom of extractive colonial capitalism – “billionairism” – a system designed to pump wealth from the poor to the rich, creating billionaires, the healthcare crisis, the housing crisis, genocide, hierarchies like racism and patriarchy, and a great deal of suffering.
The Southern California fires — we are now at six or seven, I think — are not a direct result of climate change. No weather event is. But the damage we have done to the environment has changed the climate drastically, making extreme weather more likely and more extreme. And the changes we have made stem from decisions designed to create wealth. Workers — like the firefighters risking their lives — do benefit, but the riches generated by decisions on development and energy production tend not to trickle down from the wealthy or powerful.
Kalmus also wrote an essay for The New York Times, that explains why he left California two years ago. It is a good piece, but the Times cut a portion of his argument. He told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! “this is still just the beginning” of the story.
It’s going to get way worse than this. Two years ago — well, 2020, when the Bobcat Fire happened, the whole time I was living in Altadena, it was getting hotter and more fiery and drier and smokier. And it just didn’t feel like I could stay there. Like, I could — you know, when you have a trendline, things getting worse every year — right? — like, where’s the point where something — where it breaks? You know, like, you keep going, keep pushing the system, getting hotter and hotter, getting drier and drier — right? — like, emitting more and more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, eventually things break. I didn’t expect my neighborhood to burn this soon.
He adds that this has been a bipartisan disaster, that “both the Democratic presidents, Obama, President Obama, and President Biden, they were very proud to expand fossil fuels,” even as they sought to mitigate climate change. Trump, Kalmus said, “says this is a hoax,” and he is “gaslighting the people who are following him.”
I don’t know how long it’s going to take for conservative working-class people to believe what’s right in front of their eyes, that the planet is getting hotter, and that we have to come together and stop listening to these clowns who say it’s a hoax. I mean, look at — it’s all around us.
The Times’ opinion pages — once a bastion of liberalism — have bent over backwards in recent years to offer conservative voices (remember Tom Cotton demanding military action against antiracism protesters) and hamstringing liberal voices.
Still, the paper can muster some excellent coverage — like this excellent primer on what’s happening. Detailed. Just enough distance. Written to explain complex issues to novice readers. It’s evidence cautions against easily casting blame.
One last piece comes from Mondoweiss, the leftist pro-Palestine site. Ahmad Absis connects the fires in L.A. to the fires in Gaza — the TV images of Southern California looked very much like the images of Israeli destruction in Gaza. Read it here.
What we are witnessing may seem like a once in a generation disaster, but we should realize that these disasters are coming at us at warp speed. We call them “natural disasters,” but that is only partly accurate. Man is creating the context in which the planet burns.
You can read my piece — “Extreme Weather? It’s the Climate, Stupid?” — from earlier in the week here.