I already wrote about the role of Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom in this entire mess, and I commend that piece to all those who want to watch me pour accelerant on two careers already on fire. For now, however, I would like to recommend this lengthy and thoughtful piece by Claire Lehmann at Quillette: “Three Hard Truths about California’s Fire Crisis.” Lehmann is Australian and thus writes about the lessons of Los Angeles through the lens of her experience with the catastrophic fires that wracked her hometown of Adelaide in 2020. Readers will find much to agree with, I suspect, but much that also reads like a counsel of despair: Governments need to have the courage to step in, she writes, and privilege the realities of climate change over mere property rights. It reads uncomfortably like the excuse-making for bad government that she denounces elsewhere. I stopped short where Lehmann writes:
The challenge of implementing controlled burns shows how politics fails us regardless of ideology. It doesn’t matter if it is a left-wing or right-wing government, almost all governments fail to provide enough controlled burns.
And this is where she loses me as well as anyone who has paid attention to how American governments operate on the state level. It is a question of competence, yes, but when Lehmann compares Australia to California she is comparing two essentially left-wing governments — like and like — which is no doubt why she throws her hands up in resignation. That is needless defeatism, as the record shows. The proper comparison, rather, would be between California’s fire management and that of its inverse, the red-state bête noir that is Ron DeSantis’s Florida.
The simple truth, as even NPR admitted with disbelief, is that Florida and other southern, Republican-run states — with every bit the same level of dangerous seasonal fire exposure — are light-years ahead of sclerotic California when it comes to fire mitigation. And it is very much a matter of governance, not resignation to fate. Florida and other southern states prove, with their smartly and lightly regulated regimes of controlled burns of brush and deadwood, that you can prevent massive fires with intelligent policy. As Lehmann’s firefighter friend aptly points out in her piece, “politicians never want to admit that nothing we can do will stop the really bad fires once they’re going.” Which is why politicians in more practical (read: Republican) states have figured out that the best way to avoid that situation is to prevent the really bad fires from getting going in the first place. California forgot this, but it can remember it again.
Los Angeles is indubitably fire-prone. But force majeure is not the same as fate. Even my city once rather infamously burned to the ground — mostly because it was made out of wood at the time. Our response was to rebuild it out of less flammable materials such as concrete and steel — now we have no problems whatsoever; Chicago is a metropolis of model governance. Heck, Moscow has burned down so many times throughout its history — most notably in 1812, when it razed itself in response to a flood of obnoxious and unwanted French tourism — that one almost begins to understand why Russians are the way they are. But our American experience has shown us that blaming “climate change” or “acts of God” is a cheap response, an act of avoiding responsibility. If Florida and Georgia can figure this out, then the only thing preventing California from doing so is Californians.
So they never will, in other words: There Is No Bottom for Blue California.