Wildfire has struck Los Angeles again. Squeezed between Malibu to the north and Santa Monica to the south is the Pacific Palisades. Years ago, I spent time in nearby Brentwood. My hosts had searched for some years and when this hillside home came on the market, they packed up their house in Belair for proximity to the cool ocean air and the views.
The Pacific Palisades enjoys this cooler coastal climate. Temperatures and air quality are the envy of this enclave in the City of Angels.
What makes this fire so important is its location. Here you can find some of the most exclusive real estate in California. It is a lush well manicured almost subtropical community. Overcast and drippy fogs feed the landscape. Palm trees thrive here. Jacaranda, sycamore, eucalyptus, live oak all flourish and abound in this region. So too do irrigation systems. Water comes to this community from Northern California and the Colorado River.
California’s agriculture uses the lion share of all the water, the Pacific Palisades uses a smaller fraction. If you pull back the camera and view the region from a wider perspective water use here provides numerous benefits to the population.
It has hardly rained here since March of 2024. While major headline making rain events have hit regions to the north those storms bypassed Los Angeles. Above the Pacific Palisades in the mountains a mixture of different smaller shrubs and bushes have seen significant precipitation in 2022 and 2023. While the rainfall is welcome the fuel build up is not. All that new growth, that so called fuel build up becomes this desiccated bone-dry crazy dangerous inflammable terrain.
Impossible to stop embers from the wildfire travel on the Santa Ana winds. Earlier tonight there were reports the fire could spread into the heart of Santa Monica. Many tens of thousands have had to flee the Pacific Palisades, in Santa Monica the impacted population would measure in the hundreds of thousands. The scale and scope of an out of control fire in the heart of one of the most densely populated regions in the state of California is historic, it is a game changer, it is that all hands on deck moment.
Los Angeles has never seen a fire event on this scale. No damage reports have been issued yet, but the event is on track to burn more homes than any fire in the state’s history.
We think of the wild lands-urban interface as a single row of homes immediately adjacent to an undeveloped hillside, in this case the wildfire is no longer a threat to only the adjacent homes but these wildfires are threatening the entire metropolitan Los Angeles basin.
Homeowners insurance had already become a problem. Many insurance companies have pulled out of the market. Higher premiums were already on the rise. Insurance for property is on the verge of becoming not just unaffordable but unavailable. The state has flirted with being the insurer of last resort. The price tag of an event on this scale would bankrupt the state.
Pentagon planners whose charge it is to forecast future threats to national security see our systems breaking down. Our hotter, drier climate is destabilizing California.
Without access to affordable homeowners’ insurance the real estate market breaks. Natural disasters have always been with us, but destructive events on this scale are next level. Try as we might we are not prepared for what is coming at us, there is the reality that we simply do not have the physical and financial resources to manage these events.
At the Pentagon they are charged to imagine trying to deal with regions of the world that become ungovernable. What that looks like isn’t much different than what has already unfolded in November when the United States voted Trump back into office. Republicans will continue to press ahead with their policy preferences, but those choices will face hard reality while they try to cope with these enormous global climate change triggered events.
In some way we can see Los Angeles as Western Civilizations westward most expansion. There is no further west for humanity to expand into. There is not another continent to conquer, not another chunk of virgin redwood forest to cut down. Los Angeles is our most current expression of our modern world. We go to Rome to see the old stuff. We come to Hollywood to see the world’s movie stars.
The sun will rise, the smoke will clear, the winds will die down and the damage reports will fill the pages of our papers. It is likely the total will shatter records. Plans for rebuilding will inevitably begin, the Pacific Palisades will not in our lifetime ever resemble what it once looked like, those days ended in this wildfire. That is one gut punch. Finding temporary housing for the displaced is going to put pressure on the region’s economy. Rentals will become that much harder to find, construction crews will be in short supply.
Events on this scale are becoming far too frequent. It is our misfortune that as a species we seem incapable of organizing ourselves, our ability to act is limited. We know why the planet is getting hotter but older legacy fossil fuel energy stakeholders continue to block our building out a new energy system. You know the story; it is the issue of our time.
What the Pentagon is concerned about most are these destabilizing events where regions of our world become ungovernable. Here in the most populated state in the union we will once again be cast into the role of pioneers, of setting an example that the rest of the country can follow. Indeed the whole world is watching. Let’s hope we might manage to make it through to a better day.
Finally what this climate change comedy screenwriter is about is finding stories within these events that contain a kernel of hope. I am trying to create a path to a better future. There will be plenty of time to find a good story to tell in the tragic events of the last day. This is not that moment. It will come and finding a path forward, a promising path, a hopeful path to a better future will be based on our spirit, our ability to laugh in the face of difficulty, and to bring to the fore our better natures. That is what a climate change comedy writer is all about.
