by Leanne Ogasawara
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1.
It happened so fast: winds whipping up to 80 mph in Pasadena. And then within hours, Altadena was burning.
Thankfully, we were not in the evacuation zone. But we were close enough to be scared. Our immediate problem—beyond the heartbreak of hearing of friends who had lost their homes—was the thick smoke. The hazardous air quality continued for days with emergency evacuation alerts waking us from sleep and scares about the water making things feel even worse. But then, of course, we were so grateful to be safe at the end of each day, when so many had lost everything.
As we waited for the air to clear, it seemed like an appropriate time to re-read Mike Davis’ classic Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Published in 1998, it contained no mention of climate disaster or a heating world—and yet, despite this, how well the book has stood the test of time.
Even when I was a kid, people in LA wanted to live in the canyons or along a ridge with a view. Over the last ten years, my husband and I have searched high and low for a new home—but the best ones always seemed to always be located on some gorgeous hillside thick with chaparrals. LA has seen a population explosion and this has meant a massive building spree of suburbs creeping into the hills, as well as so many fantastically expensive homes in canyons and on hillsides—all this making any kind of forestry management and fire control impossible.
Davis writes:
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.”
When I was a kid, fires were also a frequent occurrence—but there were animals in the hills, like goats and sheep, that kept the brush back. There were large fire belt areas under state management as well. It wasn’t just over-development, but I also grew up in a comparatively benign period weather-wise, in LA. In my childhood, we got a lot of rain. I have vivid memories of weeks of rain in winter. Of splashing in puddles and of earthworms wriggling around in the early mornings after a rain shower. But when I moved back from Japan to LA in 2011, after two decades away, the absence of rain bothered me terribly. My son never had a need for an umbrella, and I will never forget the first time I took my pup out in a very rare rain shower (which was not actually that rainy), and he just stood there looking confused. I was surprised reading Davis’ book to learn about the long periods of drought in California’s history that can be understood looking at the archaeological record, making me realize that my childhood was a glorious time of rain.
Compared to my youth, the last decade has not only seen a lack of rain, but it has also bore witness to climate driven rising temperatures, massively over-development in vulnerable areas, as well as a lack of investment in electrical infrastructure. This last issue is relevant since a faulty transmission tower is almost surely the spark that ignited the Eaton Fire.
Looking for a new home, this state of disaster was constantly on our minds. How to find something out of the way of fires? Maybe in town where I can walk to buy food and flowers, visit the dentist on foot. We are still sharing one car, after all. And we wanted to have our power delivered underground. Isn’t there are more rational way to live? More like the Europeans or the Japanese? Because let’s face it: the North American level of consumption is no longer sustainable, if it ever was in the first place.
I don’t think the Japanese or French level is either, but it is a start.
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2.
Between repeated deadly wildfires, windstorms, mudslides, and earthquakes, it is kind of mind-boggling that I never really associated my hometown with disaster until recently.
Rather than LA, it was Tokyo that scared the hell out of me.
When I first arrived in the city, a book came out called Sixty Seconds That Will Change the World: The Coming Tokyo Earthquake.
SCARY STUFF!!!!
People will tell you, living in Japan means living with earthquakes and fires. And it’s true. Japan is one of the most seismically active places on earth– with Tokyo being particularly vulnerable to strong and persistent activity. The country accounts for about twenty percent of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude six or greater. Being from Los Angeles, I was no stranger to earthquakes. But in Japan, tremors were a weekly occurrence. To most foreign residents, this is terrifying considering the tremendous number of people who are packed together so densely in the mega-city. It hit home after the staggering destruction following in the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear facility disasters.
For a few elderly Japanese, the memory of the city in ruins destroyed by a large earthquake, is still a vivid one. 140,000 people died in the Great Kanto Quake of 1923. 38,000 alone were said to have been engulfed in an instant when fire swept through a large plot of land where they had fled in a panic. But whereas when Carthage was destroyed, it stayed down; Tokyo, like the ancient mythological phoenix, rose up and immediately rebuilt itself
More than earthquakes, though, it was always the frequent catastrophic fires that came to define the city. Tokyo was a city built of wood, and fires during the Edo period had poetically been referred to as Edo no hana (the “flowers of Edo;” from 火事と喧嘩は江戸の花). In addition to likening them to “flowers,” the people of Edo also referred to these devastatingly frequent fires as “resembling the autumn leaves.” In contemporary Japanese writing, Edo is still sometimes referred to as the “city of fire.” One would be hard pressed, in fact, to not find some mention of Tokyo as a city of perpetual “destroy and rebuild” whenever it is mentioned in texts (no matter what language)—whether it is the Edo of three hundred years ago or the great megacity of today’s Tokyo. This is one of the most enduring images of the city and perhaps best captures the unique character of her people.
This is after all the city of Godzilla.
Like London or Paris, Tokyo is made up of people from all over Japan. However, there is a long-held conviction about the native-born people of this samurai city. Known as Eddoko (children of old Edo) in contrast to the refinement and elegance of the eternal old capital of Kyoto—Edokko are famous for not only embracing transience –but of always taking pleasure in the face of it. They are also known for their vigorous commerce and vitality despite the constant threat of earthquake and fires. This spirit of “play” in the face of transience was what gave birth to the celebrated “floating world” (浮世) of the Edo period.
Fires and earthquakes, massive tidal waves, floods and nuclear meltdowns…. With so many people packed in an urban center that is the nexus of business, government, culture and finance, Tokyo’s vulnerability to disaster has long been a defining element, which Tokyoites have embraced. But while Tokyo seems to relish this quality of transience—at the same time, while I was there, at least, federal and municipal government worked enacting policies taking a more measured approach to development, earthquake safety and infrastructure.
In LA, it seems that most problems are simply brushed under the rug.
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3.
The last time I crossed the Pacific was about twelve years ago, when I was invited to give a talk at an academic conference called Rethinking City and Identity 反思城市与身份认同 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I was invited to speak about Tokyo. And I titled my paper “Tokyo: City of Flowers and Fires.” In my paper, I wanted to both highlight the city’s appreciation of transience and disaster, as well as introduce some of its more forward thinking policies. After the conference, flying back to LA from cutting-edge Shanghai, with its high-speed trains and gleaming modern airport, I felt like I was like traveling backward in time. Are there many airports as dismal as LAX? And how about those roads we have leading away from the airport? It was like being back in the late 1970s.
This brings me to another theme explored in Davis’s book: inequality. To do this, the author looks at two fires that happened almost simultaneously in the mid-90s. One in wealthy Malibu and one in the garment district downtown—a place of sweatshops and disregard. Responses to the fires and their human cost could not have been more different. No one is writing about this kind of unequal responses in LA to the latest round of fires—Altadena versus Pacific Palisades and so I can only hope things are better than in Davis’ time. After all, LA is no longer home large factories downtown anymore. Still, massively unsustainable inequality continues—and we see this in development choices and policies that have been pursued in California over the previous decades.
I read a very disturbing article in Jacobin regarding the use of prison inmates being used to fight fires at $10 a day:
It’s hard to imagine a grimmer symbol of our literally burning late-capitalist hellscape than a locale that’s home to so much lavish and conspicuous wealth bringing in incarcerated firefighters to risk their lives for less per day than their free equivalents would make in an hour — if only the city had been willing to spring for a few more of them.
We look to our leaders to lead…. But so much meaningful change can take place in communities and in cities. One of the reasons behind the Shanghai city conference was the thinking that it is on the level of the city that significant change can best take place. I hate to bring in a wealthy neighborhood to this conversation, but the best evidence for this thinking I have found was in fancy Montecito, where residents worked together to take fire prevention seriously:
From 1999 to 2017, the town spent $1.6 million total clearing brush, maintaining evacuation paths, building fuelbreaks, and working with homeowners to make sure they’d cleared vegetation around their houses. When the Thomas Fire came through in 2017—a worst-case-scenario fire for the region, with wind speeds around 75 miles an hour—Montecito could have lost 450 to 500 homes, Kolden’s research showed. Instead it lost just seven. Yards in Montecito do look a little different from others in California. (the Atlantic)
The LA wildfires have many causes and many factors that are exacerbating the existing conditions—not the least inequality and greedy over-development. At the same time, we have seen a massive irresponsibility by both energy companies and politicians regarding energy policies and infrastructure; for as the great Alexander Humboldt wrote:
In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation.
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4.
As the world continues growing hotter, it seems nothing is changing to mitigate any of this. At least not in California, where people (the “haves”) tend to point the finger of blame to everyone but themselves—before boarding another flight or driving over to Costco to load up. It is frustrating.
Several years ago, I wrote in these pages about the effort to reduce my own carbon footprint by 20%. Taking my cue from a book by the Union of Concerned Scientists, I worked to do this—and honestly it was simple, but it did take money (money for solar panels, a more efficient air conditioner, diet changes and consumer choices by buying local, etc.). These efforts were voluntary, like massively reducing unnecessary air travel, and there was the usual American buffet of approaches and choices encourages individual convenience over community engagement and solidarity. This is isolating, even if scattered people here and there were experimenting. This is in stark contrast to a similar endeavor I experienced in Japan, when our town committed to reducing over all waste by 35% and we all worked together to get it done, sharing ideas about energy reduction tactics as well.
When I first moved back from Japan, I was honestly stunned by the out-of-control level of consumption I saw compared to my old life in Japan. And that was living with my mother, who is an extremely frugal and energy-conscious person. Remarrying, what I have found in my own life is a kind of acceleration in consumption. Just think of mass tourism, online shopping and offshore manufacturing.
I am borrowing the term “acceleration” from the most thought-provoking book I read last year called Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, by Kohei Saito. I had bought the book in Japanese when it came out in 2020, but the compelling recent translation by Brian Bergstrom did not make me even once run to my Japanese copy. The book presents a Marxist argument for degrowth as a means of mitigating climate change. Saito takes a hammer at what he calls “greenwashing” —talking about the ways that neoliberal approaches to climate change are much like buying Indulgences in the Middle Ages, where we buy an electric car or yet another canvas grocery bag to alleviate guilt and then carry on as usual. Or worse: carrying on as usual, pointing the blame elsewhere knowing full well that the real ecological cost of manufacturing, energy, and logistics chains is being brushed under the rug through offshoring. So Saito’s point is strong: to make changes, first we need to change ourselves—and that begins with opening our eyes and –yes–slowing down. Because it’s true, less is more.
The fires in LA are a city-wide tragedy, but my heart especially broke from the losses in Altadena, that increasingly rare economically and racially diverse town emblematic of the dying American dream. This is not a rich city that can throw money at the problem. So many homes were lost that no one in the world thought were vulnerable, and so many families of more modest means have been thrown to the curb. (Great essay by Xochitl Gonzalez in the Atlantic here). And while there is an understandable desire to quickly rebuild and recover what was lost in the tragic Eaton and Palisades fires, since this is the American way and we want a Hollywood ending, perhaps it is wiser to take Saito’s advice and think about things first by slowing down.
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5.
Thesis: Top-down government leadership is necessary to enact laws and policies that address systemic problems to decrease our carbon impact. Because the US lacks top-down leadership and is instead ruled by corporate interest, if consumers do not vote with their wallets and force corporations to change, the government will never change.
My husband and I were drawn to higher density living, where many decisions like about trash and safety are made in a collective. It was a big step downsizing from a home with a pool to a condo but we love walking across the street to shop for food and knowing we are part of something that at least resembles a shared community. He flies continuously for his work, but at least I have been able to cut my air travel way back—and at least pretend I am living more like I did back in Japan.
Unlike Japan, which in its embrace of transience and vulnerability is also quick to host conversations about safety and disaster prevention, we Angelenos tend to forget fast and keep moving. But judging by the frequency of these fires, I think it is time to start having a community discussion of how we got here and where we want to be in 20 to 50 years. And to start making some serious changes. In how we manage the land and where and how we build the homes in wildland-urban interface areas, in our power infrastructure, in housing and insurance policy and associated inequities, and in our infrastructure: water, first responders, and especially the power grid. Leaders need to step up.
If not now, when?
**
Reading:
A chapter from Davis’ book “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” in Longreads 1998
In excerpt from another book I recommend, Obi Kaufmann’s The State of Fire: Why California Burns, in the LARBs.
Excellent New York Times article about facing realities and managed retreat here.
Link to ON FIRE: The Report of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission
Also my essay about lithium mines and flowers and the book The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives which was a National Book Award longlisted title.
My Substack Dreaming in Japanese with my list of 2024 top reads