We built our cities to burn
My first day in Los Angeles delivered both a 4.1 earthquake and a hurricane. A month later, at a safety training, a firefighter told me those events wouldn’t hold a candle to a wildfire. "One day," he warned, "Wind will carry embers just right. A blaze will leap from canyon to the coastline, and nothing — no department, no crew — will stop it."
That day arrived last week.
Hills erupted into fiery red battlegrounds. Canyons, dry and ready, caught fire like matchsticks. Families scrambled as their neighborhoods transformed into chaotic Jackson Pollock abstracts -– an entire world smeared in ash and flame. Climate change frames every stroke.
How does something unfold unsurprisingly yet feel so unimaginable?
Climate change always starts far away, captured on shaky phone footage that shifts closer and closer. Scaling hills, climbing mountains, and flickers through your window, until, one day, you’re the one filming.
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12 minutes into the Palisades Fire. Image credit: Tim McCune from Santa Monica, CA
Today, as these flames continue to crackle, two narratives have emerged: one built to excuse and one designed to distort. Climate disasters have a way of exposing not just structural weaknesses but ideological ones too. Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist once rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” to soften its urgency. That same instinct — to reframe and redirect rather than confront — has shaped the stories told about these fires.
Conservatives call the fires a failure of progressive governance. Diversity initiatives, housing regulations and environmental priorities, they claim, have left the city unable to manage basic safety. When authorities caught an arsonist near the fires’ origin, the right quickly seized on it as evidence that the fires had nothing to do with climate change, conveniently ignoring the tinderbox conditions that allowed a single spark to ignite an inferno.
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28 minutes into the Palisades Fire and it's jumped to another mountain. Tim McCune from Santa Monica, CA
On the left, the narrative takes the opposite shape: inevitability absolves responsibility.
The fires, they argue, are an unstoppable force of nature, and the blame rests solely on rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns. Pointing fingers at systemic mismanagement — cut fire department budgets, water misallocation, unchecked development in high-risk zones — becomes an uncomfortable proposition when accountability might land closer to home.
The truth burns somewhere between those extremes. Here in LA, the firefighting budget sits slashed. Water reserves remain mismanaged. Development sprawls unchecked into fire-prone landscapes, daring nature to retaliate. Meanwhile, insurers retreat, leaving homeowners to wrestle with skyrocketing costs or policies that promise little protection. The systems meant to guard against disaster buckles under the weight of what they’ve long ignored.
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Firefighters fighting the Hughes Fire. Image credit: Forest Service photos, Stuart Palley | Public Domain
The state’s FAIR Plan, a safety net for homeowners denied private fire insurance, teeters on the edge of insolvency. Designed to prevent economic collapse in risky areas, the plan now carries exposure wildly out of proportion to its assets. Claims from this fire season alone could overwhelm it, forcing emergency assessments on insurers and policyholders alike.
The FAIR Plan represents a broader gamble California has made for decades: to sustain development and growth in fire-prone areas by absorbing risks that the private sector refuses to touch. Yet as claims climb, the cracks in this system widen. The state’s decision to mask the true cost of living in high-risk zones — a decision mirrored in flood-prone Florida and hurricane-battered Louisiana — feels increasingly unsustainable.
My dad, watching Phoenix gridlock worsen year after year, always asks: "Why don't they build highways for the traffic they know is coming?" I think about his question now, watching California burn. American cities share the same fatal flaw: we build for the disasters we've survived, not the catastrophes scientists promise.
We’ve poured billions into emergency response while underfunding prevention. We’ve subsidized rebuilding in fire zones while cutting prescribed burn budgets. The math crumbles under scrutiny — every dollar spent on prevention saves six in disaster response, yet our policies prioritize reaction over proaction.
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Firefighters fighting the Hughes Fire. Image credit: Forest Service photos, Stuart Palley | Public Domain
Los Angeles embodies this contradiction. The city mandates retrofitting buildings for earthquakes but allows continued development in severe fire hazard zones. Property owners must clear brush but face no requirements to install ember-resistant vents or fire-rated roofing. Even still, property owners don’t clear their brush. The smoke still darkening our skies further clouds judgment while exposing our selective relationship with risk.
This fire's path tracked precisely with climate scientists' models, which predicted longer fire seasons, more extreme fire behavior, and faster spread rates. Yet we treated these forecasts as academic abstractions rather than blueprints for action. The same pattern repeats with rising seas, intensifying storms, and expanding drought. We acknowledge the science while ignoring its implications.
The true cost extends beyond burned homes and evacuated neighborhoods. Smoke exposure will drive up respiratory illnesses. Property values will shift as insurance becomes unobtainable. Small businesses already struggling post-pandemic may not survive another disaster-driven closure. These cascading effects disproportionately impact vulnerable communities, the same communities least responsible for climate emissions.
As flames still move through our canyons, we must confront an uncomfortable reality: our current approach to climate resilience protects neither people nor property. It merely preserves the illusion of control while postponing inevitable changes. Real solutions demand restructuring how we build, where we build, and how we manage the wildland-urban interface. They require ending subsidies that mask true risk and implementing policies that reflect scientific reality rather than political convenience.
The next fire approaches. Our response must evolve beyond reactionary measures to fundamental reform, or we'll watch this cycle accelerate until it consumes everything we've failed to protect.
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