Wildfire: Even in a blue city in a blue state, disaster does not force its residents to focus on climate change
Residents of California’s San Gabriel Valley had been coexisting with wildfire danger for generations before this week’s firestorm. Even relative newcomers, like me, know the house will shake when helicopters carrying water to fires in the foothills fly low overhead, or how to tape plastic to the windows and hose down our eaves.
We’ve swept ash and burnt leaves that have rained down in our yards. We trim the trees and hope our insurance companies won’t drop us. We nervously watch the hills. And even in this place where there is little dispute that the danger is only getting worse due to climate change, we don’t leave.
My family’s house in a small town near Altadena wasn’t touched. The fire hose left by a hydrant, just past the police barricade on our street, went unused. The fire didn’t make it that far.
But when our neighbors in Altadena began returning to their homes on Thursday, I wanted to know how they were processing the dangers of a changing climate in a place where the fire blew through like a hurricane, tearing into them and their families and their homes. In Washington, President Joe Biden was invoking William Butler Yeats and tying the wildfires to climate change. But I discovered that in fire-gutted, heavily Democratic Altadena, where that kind of message might typically travel, climate change was nowhere near top of mind.
It was the wind, they said when I asked them what they blamed, picking through the rubble of their flattened homes, or hugging their neighbors in the middle of streets filled with sooty air. It was God, or population growth, or the way that Californians tucked their homes into the foothills. It was a lack of investment in infrastructure, or the fire hydrants that ran dry.
It wasn’t that they disagreed with Biden on climate change. In this unincorporated area north of Pasadena, where some precincts went for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by more than 60 percentage points, nearly everyone I spoke with said they agreed with him.
It was that in our time of partisan stasis, they didn’t appear to see the point of even raising such a seemingly intractable concern. Part of it was the shock of the event — the overwhelmingness of surveying the damage, of grappling with their loss. And part of it seemed to be a kind of fatalism, a feeling that the more existential the threat, the less our society or our political system seems able to address it. [Continue reading…]