The L.A. Fires Reveal the Need to Rethink Our Climate Disaster Approach

The fires in Los Angeles the past couple of weeks have been the deadliest, most destructive in the county’s history. In one of the most densely populated areas in the country, blazes, spread by strong winds, have burned down thousands of structures and forced more than 200,000 people to evacuate. Whole communities, such as Altadena, have been devastated. While the fires are still burning and the full scope of their damage is hard to predict, when it comes to natural disasters, we all too often rely on short-term fixes and preventative measures but fail to address their root causes. 

Natural disasters have an afterlife, defined by their political and cultural ramifications. In Galveston, Texas, for example, a hurricane in 1900 devastated the city, leading investors to instead develop Houston. The 1927 Mississippi Flood helped Herbert Hoover win the presidency in 1929, but his neglect of African Americans in the aftermath also led many voters to later abandon the Republican Party in 1932 and vote instead for Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. But one of the most important afterlives of a disaster is how we do or don’t prepare for the next one. 

Our response to natural disasters generally falls into one of two categories: Resilience, preparing communities and places for natural disasters when they occur; and adaptation, changing the underlying behaviors that make a natural disaster more likely to occur. We’ve generally done a good job of embracing resilience. In the wake of Chicago’s fire in 1871, for instance, the city took steps to professionalize its fire department and develop better building codes, ensuring that fewer flammable materials were used. After the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the city built a seawall to reduce the likelihood of another destructive storm surge.

In 1889, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was devastated by a flood that killed 2,200 people, and was caused by a badly maintained dam at the South Fork Hunting Club, a nearby private resort. The residents of Johnstown couldn’t get immediate justice, and the members of the South Fork Hunting Club used their wealth to bury reports of their role in weakening the dam. Yet liability laws changed in the wake of the flood: American courts embraced strict liability, meaning that defendants were responsible for the consequences of an activity even without negligence or criminal intent.

It’s clear that resilience and preparedness are important, but history also shows they have limitations and can even backfire. The Great Lakes suffered from disastrous million-acre fires from the 1870s through the 1920s. States created short-lived fire warden systems and cities trained firefighters, but funding waned or fires would simply overwhelm the existing systems. In the 1880s, the Army Corps of Engineers had built levees to prevent future flooding by the Mississippi River—but they only built levees. This decision caused the high walls surrounding the river to actually channel floodwaters and made the river stronger. Inevitably, disaster struck. The 1927 Mississippi Flood was the worst river flood to strike the U.S. in its history. At one point, 14 percent of the state of Arkansas was underwater. Hundreds drowned, and hundreds of thousands were displaced.

This brings us to the second tactic of battling climate disaster: adaptation. It’s where we have traditionally struggled. Adaptation requires us to change our underlying behaviors, and resilience can stop us from doing so by providing a cushion for those behaviors. The Dust Bowl is instructive of this phenomenon. Even in the 19th century, people such as John Wesley Powell warned that parts of the United States were too arid to support intensive agriculture. But farmers were lured in with promises of cheap land, railroads, and a pseudoscientific belief that “rain follows the plow.” Heavy cultivation disrupted ecosystems by removing prairie grasses, which meant that when drought finally struck in the 1930s, the topsoil simply blew away. Over a hundred million acres were affected, and cities as far as Boston were hit by “black blizzards” of dust. 

While the Roosevelt administration created a soil conservation service and encouraged farmers to engage in more sustainable agriculture, the same old patterns of farming continued—and so did droughts. In the 1950s, Texas was struck by another drought that devastated farmers. The solution? They began pumping groundwater and developing reservoirs. Groundwater is a finite resource, and today, many Texas reservoirs are in stark decline, as they are around the country. Today, many of the same areas afflicted by the Dust Bowl are still under heavy cultivation, relying on fertilizers and groundwater to keep going as droughts worsen. What’s more, they’re in competition with subdivisions who also need water. 

These were steps of resilience. Adaptation would have meant abandoning or reducing the scale of farming in the United States. More food is grown than we ultimately need or can eat so that agribusiness can make a profit. Adaptation would mean rethinking why we grow food, and accepting that a pattern of endless growth is unsustainable in farming. Land would need to be returned to an uncultivated state—in effect, rewilding. 

Adaptation is what we need most desperately. What brought an end to a generation of disastrous fires in the Midwest was the end of agricultural settlement. Fire warden programs—resilience-building programs—were not enough: People had to change how they lived. By the 1930s, states such as Wisconsin enacted zoning laws that removed millions of acres of land from potential farming use. Logging continued, but under more managed conditions and supervised by state forestry departments and the U.S. Forest Service. When fires did happen, they did not become the devastating conflagrations that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In looking at the Los Angeles fires, what seems clear is that we cannot afford to fall into the trap of relying solely on resilience. Resilience was a workable solution when climate was more predictable, but once-in-a-generation fires now happen regularly. Los Angeles faces fire threats year round. The fact that hydrants ran dry in the Palisades drew national criticism from conservatives who were eager to blame the fire on Democratic mismanagement, but the simple fact of the matter is that it would take vastly larger water supplies and infrastructure to support this scale of firefighting.

This is not an argument against climate resilience, far from it. Communities need to do everything they can to harden themselves against future disasters. However, to fight climate change we need to embrace true adaptation, which means drastically cutting carbon emissions and keeping temperature increase down. We’ll have to consume differently and build differently because continuing our habits as we did in the 20th century is no longer an option.