The San Diego fires show nothing more clearly than capitalism’s irrational relationship to nature. Giant development corporations, like the Irvine Company and DR Horton, grow houses in Southern California like Monsanto and Cargill grow corn in the midwest. Their goal is to maximize profit, so they plant monocultural stands of sheetrock and 2x4s, plowing subdivisions into a matrix of dry chapparal and coastal sage scrub. Both ecosystems have adapted over millenia to the local reality of fire. Both burned regularly in their pre-capitalist state, but the fires tended to be relatively small and cool, partly because local tribes used small-scale controlled burning to diversify habitat. As a result the regional landscape was a complex patchwork of tracts of varying maturity and fuel load.
With the advent of large-scale development and fire suppression, the fires have become bigger and hotter. Unburnt brush that has built up over decades now fuels intense, fast-moving conflagrations. They typically start in the foothills then race toward the coast, with wide drainages acting like wind tunnels, concentrating October's dry Santa Ana winds. These firestorms are hot enough to kill native plants, which are then replaced by invasive annual grasses. These fast-growing weeds cover hundreds of square miles and they die every fall, just in time for the next round of Santa Anas. In other words, the firestorm of 2007 was an unnatural disaster brewed up by billionaire developers and politicians who put millions of people in harm’s way.
San Diego Union Tribune Fires Archive
Los Angeles Times Fires Archive
Invasive Plants and Wildfires in Southern California
Mike Davis on fires:
The Collision of Capitalism and Nature
Who Really Set the California Fires?
A market-driven recipe for disaster
Firebugs: Build it in California's foothills, and it will burn
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