I get up early, and the windows in our dining room face almost due East, and this morning the sun rose slowly, shrouded in haze, and an angry red. Our neighborhood cars are covered in fine white ash, and while the smell of smoke isn’t as strong as it was yesterday afternoon, it’s still strong.

I live nowhere near the fires; the closest one is probably 60 miles upwind from me, across the entire urbanized Los Angeles basin.

But it’s a reminder that Los Angeles, like almost all cities, is a made place (Doty in his great poem “Two Cities” talks about the “made world’s angled assault on heaven“), dependent on managing Nature as best we can to allow us to live here.
John McPhee talks a bit about it in his book ‘The Control of Nature’. The lengths we have to go to preserve our habitable bubble – the web of infrastructure that keeps the harsher forces of nature away from my house – against storm, fire, and the assaults of nature which would manifest entropy by wiping our homes down to sand and rubble.

Now, particularly in Los Angeles, we have a problem in that we do three things:

# We build outward along the city margin, which means we are in increasingly inhospitable terrain (the hospitable terrain having been developed decades ago). We do this for two reasons; because people seem to want semi-rural homes, and because they don’t want denser cities. They want the experience of looking out their yard at a wild canyon, covered with chaparral, and seeing a coyote or a bobcat. They just get upset when the canyon burns, taking their home with it, or the coyote views Fluffy the cat as an appetizer. They don’t want to increase the density within cities, because the congestion will be worse and the character – the suburban, detached home nature of much of Los Angeles, changes to an urban one as the density passes certain thresholds. And part of why they came to Los Angeles was to get away from an urban environment.

# We don’t spend money on the infrastructure that would make building out into the margins safer. Here we have an unholy alliance between the Left – the environmentalists who want to minimize the footprint of humankind on the wild places as we build them out, and the Right – who don’t want to burden developers with expensive improvements.

# We have starved the core public services – fire, police, emergency medical response – to feed the other, more politically rewarding parts of local government. And we’ve especially starved the preventative public services – like the folks who monitor brush clearance, or the public health and mosquito abatement folks – because they’re unglamorous and don’t ‘show well’ at budget time.

And so we burn.

If I had to characterize myself right now, I’d say I’m a ‘Pat Brown’ liberal. This state has twice as many people as it was designed to hold – as the man-made infrastructure that supports our habitable bubbles was designed for – and that can’t last.

While his era was one of pouring massive concrete infrastructure from one end of the state to the other, this era will be about sensors, electronic control systems, and small-grain solutions to the problems that could be solved in the 60’s by the liberal application of concrete.

But if we don’t invest in our infrastructure – if we don’t act to protect the bubble that we all live within – we’d better get used to camping in stadiums.