Fwd: Should we be calling these disasters “wildfires”?
Loretta Lohman
Should we be calling these disasters ‘wildfires’?Today is the first anniversary of the Los Angeles fires — both the deadliest and most destructive disaster in the city’s storied fire history and a gruesome marker that the American West has entered an entirely new fire regime. By that I don’t mean just that things are getting steadily worse in the fire-prone West. I mean that we are reckoning with an entirely different kind of fire, though hardly anyone outside the various burn scars seems to realize it. We call these things wildfires, reflexively, as I wrote in an essay on Monday marking the anniversary. But what if that’s not what they really are, at all?
It’s been seven years since I began writing about the forbidding future of California fire — not all that long, particularly when measured in the geologic time scales that megafires conjure in the mind. But it has been a staggering period for burning and destruction, for wildfire pollution and wildfire panic, both in the American West and beyond. The year before I wrote that first story, California had set a record for area burned — nearly two million acres, or almost 2 percent of the unfathomably massive state. The year after I wrote it, 2020, another record was set, more than twice as high: just under 4.4 million acres. The next year, more than two million acres burned again, and in 2024, more than a million acres burned — a mark that would have been harrowingly exceptional a couple of decades before, reached for the third time in five years. In total, in the decade that began in 2016 and ended last week, more than 13 million acres burned in California — 21,000 square miles, adding up crudely to more than one-eighth of the entire state. All nine of the largest fires in California’s modern history burned in that decade, and so did five of the seven most destructive fires since 1932 and four of the six deadliest. As Americans have started to reckon with a future of inescapable fire risk, we’ve tended to treat those two sets of measures as effectively equivalent, with acres burned a useful standard for the severity of a fire season and one that can easily serve as a proxy for the more directly distressing outcomes of fires — homes destroyed, lives lost, communities ruined. We’ve also tended to think of this as a neatly bundled risk we could address in a bundled way, largely by clearing out the country’s wild lands of built-up fuel. The Los Angeles fires made me think about all this quite differently, by illustrating horribly and unmistakably something about the new age of fire that had been overshadowed by recent discussion of climate change and forest management: The disasters that have scarred the West and terrified the country over the last decade have rarely been “wild” at all but rather urban fires, burning not through wild lands but the built environment we think of as inherently safe. The ragged landscape of the American West does still burn prodigiously, and up in Canada especially you can regularly observe the classic wildfire nightmare: monster burns consuming the endless forest horizon and tearing through hundreds of thousands of acres before threatening remote communities as a kind of collateral damage. But increasingly, true fire disaster seems to take a different shape, in a different setting, produced by different causes and potentially demanding a very different set of responses. Santa Rosa and Paradise, Boulder and Lahaina and now Palisades and Altadena: None of these disasters began with “wild” ignitions. Some of them were sparked right in the middle of densely settled communities, and others just outside them, often in nearby parks that seemed to locals not like feral nature but quite familiar and even landscaped urban greenery. Typically they did not burn through vast expanses of forest or brush before tragically encroaching on human settlements. Instead, the predominant fuel was those settlements themselves — those homes, those cars, those communities. And the wild-land firefighting which we’ve come to glamorize and valorize in this country even as we make its labor conditions even more punishing — it’s not all that much use in an urban firestorm like the Palisades or Eaton fires, when dozens of homes might go up in flames almost simultaneously, the embers carried efficiently from house to house through communities planned without real consideration for fire risk or wind patterns. But if these aren’t wildfires, well, what are they? Who or what is responsible? What explains their sudden, menacing regularity? What are we supposed to do about them, and will it ever be enough? “I think we’re going to burn up Bel Air and Beverly Hills next,” the pyrogeographer Zeke Lunder told me. “And then I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
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