The Fires and The Shrinking Pie

Shrinking Pie, Smaller Forks, Better Manners

A fire-fighting helicopter drops water near the Mandeville Canyon neighborhood and Encino, California, on January 11, 2025. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

The calamitous Los Angeles area fires are still burning, and more high winds are forecast starting Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. The lives blasted, the houses burnt, the communities destroyed, can’t yet be tallied in full, because more fire and destruction is on the way.

Counting the costs, auditing the magnitude, the bookkeeping part of the judgment, is the mandate of elected officials, journalists, the public, and the insurance industry. For now, it looks as though California’s Governor Newsom favors rebuilding in the same fire-prone areas.

CBS reports that the California legislature is moving quickly to authorize billions of dollars to rebuild in the burned areas.

"We will move quickly to approve some billions of dollars in funding," California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas told reporters at a news conference outside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena Thursday.

He said some of the major concerns facing LA are the cleanup of toxic debris removal — so people can safely get back into their homes — and rebuilding of homes as well as tenants protections.

"This is the number one issue we're hearing from Angelenos right now: how to find housing, how to stay in housing, how to rebuild housing," Rivas said. "We want those affected by these fires to know that immediate help is on the way."

Why does it make sense to rebuild in fire-prone areas? Won’t they burn down again?

Reasonable people - and those who have chosen to ignore reason -have been analyzing the systemic causes of the catastrophe. No oxygen will be granted here to the unreasonable, except to note that the Delta smelt is not the cause of Santa Ana winds, drought, climate change, or of an imaginary water shortage.

One real cause of the roaring fires is that the Los Angeles basin has had no measurable rainfall for eight months. Another is that the Santa Ana winds have become unusually strong – 80 miles an hour – and long-lasting. Note, however, that the Santa Ana’s have been a known condition in the South Coast for 5,000 years, and the strongest Santa Ana wind event occurred in 1957, with gusts up to 97 miles per hour.

The biggest problem is that people built houses in the chaparral.

To build houses in a fire-prone environment requires that a large group of people, and their water and sewer companies, and their schools and police and fire and roads and insurance companies, trivialize the danger and marginalize the costs. How that mass delusion came about is a question for anthropologists and psychologists. The fact remains, from Santa Monica to Malibu to Pacific Palisades and Altadena, that is what people have done.

In Malibu alone, more than $300 million evolved to ashes in the Palisades Fire. Since 1929 there have been 23 fires in Malibu. People have rebuilt Malibu over and over again because of the overpowering pull of Home.

In Altadena, the Los Angeles Times reports that predatory land speculators have been harassing property owners, even as their houses were burning down.

“As families mourn, the last thing they need is greedy speculators taking advantage of their pain,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement Tuesday. “I have heard first-hand from community members and victims who have received unsolicited and predatory offers from speculators offering cash far below market value — some while their homes were burning.”

Such offers spurred the advocacy group SGV Progressive Alliance to stage a protest Saturday afternoon to send a message to developers that Altadena is not for sale, said Melissa Michelson.

“The message is for the community to stand strong, not sell your property to the first buyer that comes your way,” Michelson said. “The concern is the displacement of the neighborhood and the neighbors who’ve been there for so long. We don’t want the neighborhoods to change.”

Home. We don’t want the neighborhoods to change. People don’t want to move to Switzerland, or the Netherlands, which have more water, better health care, and a better quality of life. You may be forced to move, as millions of people have been forced to do in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, due to wars, deportations, poverty, floods, fires, dictatorships. But you will be homesick. If you can scrape together the money and have the privilege of return, you will go Home.

More than 105,000 people have had to evacuate Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Topanga since the Palisades Fire began on January 7. The death toll is currently 27, with 31 people missing. But Home is where the heart is, and people want to feel it. We get homesick without Home. And we have children, whom we raise to love their home.

This leads to another problem - population.

When I was born, there were 2.3 billion people on earth. This was just after a world war that killed several million people, and after starvations in Ukraine and India perpetrated by Stalin and the British, respectively, that killed more millions, and mass starvation in China due to the Japanese invasion and bad weather and no planning, killing more millions.

And after all that human misery and death, the human population today is 8.2 billion. Per the United Nations, the world’s human population is projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100.

The planet is finite, and has become too hot, so we can't create a bigger pie, (“Make the pie higher!” proclaimed ex-president George W. Bush). In fact, the planet-pie is shrinking in its ability to sustain the web of life, let alone human populations. So we need smaller forks, and better manners.

How could we do those things?

We need to learn how to improve the security, health, and well-being of the people alive today, and of the people who might be alive in the coming 25 years, if we don’t destroy the atmosphere’s and the planet’s ability to sustain all life forms.

We could slow and end population growth with voluntary, not sadistic, reductions in child-bearing.

We could figure out how to reduce violence. And inequality, corruption, fossil fuels, plastic, and environmental degradation.

We need to teach civics and critical thinking. We need to teach real history, not the lies we were taught in K-12 because school book boards of directors don’t want children to know the truth. We need to change our values, and teach ecological restoration, gardening, and sustainability.

The poet Gary Snyder once said “Find your place on the planet and start from there.”

If your place is Altadena, and you’re going to rebuild, start there.