We Can't Live with Fire, But We Must

Fire goes where it wants. Can we adapt to it?

I have typically made the drive north from San Francisco to Lake County, California only when it’s on fire.

I remember carefully navigating a winding, unlit road in the middle of the night trying to meet up with a camera crew to cover a wildfire for NBC there, and coming upon a lone police officer idling in his lit-up cruiser, guarding the county line. California has the strange distinction of allowing accredited journalists unrestricted access to wildfires, and I could see the faint glow of flames silhouetting the hills behind him. He waved me through, but reluctantly. As I shifted gears and pulled away, I asked him if he had any advice. “Be careful,” he told me. “There’s no one out there.”

A scene from the aftermath of a wildfire in Middletown, California, part of Lake County, September 14, 2015

A year later, a colleague told me that developers were planning a luxury resort and residential community not five miles from that encounter. I was shocked. Lake County is one of the poorest in the state, and as I drove back through its hills to interview the builders, they were still blackened by fire.

But the people behind these plans were serious, and they met me at a makeshift depot where row after row of trees sat waiting to be planted on the grounds. The development was to be called Guenoc Valley, a 16,000-acre combination of hotel rooms, cottages, and hundreds of residential lots in the middle of an area I had personally seen burn more than once. Speaking to the residents of nearby Middletown, every single conversation began with a recollection of their last time being evacuated, and the status of whatever application they’d filed with FEMA. So, driving into the Guenoc Valley grounds, I immediately asked the developers what their plans were for dealing with the wildfires that would inevitably sweep down from the hills, across the grasslands, and through whatever they built.

Site of the proposed 16,000-acre Guenoc Vally development, just miles from where wildfires have burned nearby Middletown many times over the years.

It turned out they’d thought quite a lot about this, and that the whole place was designed with fire in mind. Early-warning sensors were to be built throughout, and every structure would include state-of-the-art external fire suppression systems. The idea was that fire could, in fact, go ahead and roll right through without harming anyone or anything. Livestock would graze and lessen the available fuel for fire, they told me, and fire gaps formed by the 72 miles of roads on the property would keep fire from growing to the point that they’d threaten the trees or buildings.

I imagined residents of this new luxury development sipping wine from their porches and watching fire sweep through the grasslands around them, their external sprinkler systems dampening the flames as they licked around each house. Would it somehow be possible for Californians to live among the flames as the Dutch have learned to live among the floodwaters?

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Fire is, in fact, as fundamental to the ecosystems of California as water.

In 2015, Al Jazeera sent me to cover the ways climate change affects Giant Sequoias, the largest organisms on Earth. And because the essence of television is finding imagery so arresting you can’t help but watch, I proposed to the scientists that I interview them in the canopy. They were extremely reluctant, and eventually consented only if I agreed they’d take no responsibility for my safety. I didn’t understand what that meant. It turned out that the climb involved ascending a rope shot over the top of the towering tree with a crossbow, and I had to get trained and bring my own gear. So, after buying equipment from Yosemite’s climbing store and taking a daylong crash course with a very hung-over climber, my camera operator Evan and I began a terrifying unassisted climb. Halfway up, Evan rightly decided that this was an unnecessary risk. But I felt I somehow had to follow through — this is the madness of deadline reporting — and in spite of a deep fear of heights I PTSD’ed myself up the tree. Shaking with terror, I struggled to hold a camera steady while the UC Berkeley dendrologist calmly answered my questions.

My ascent of a Giant Sequoia, September 10, 2015. Not visible: my outright terror. Photo: Evan Groll

I barely remember our conversation — I was so frightened I literally sweat through my sneakers — but he mentioned something that has stuck with me ever since. In order for these vast trees (the oldest of which predate the birth of Mohammed or Jesus) to release their surprisingly tiny pinecones and reproduce, he said, they have to catch fire.

After that I began regularly reporting on wildfires — you can hear some of those anecdotes in my video post from last week — and I learned that while we associate fires with tragedy, the real tragedy is how often we’ve extinguished them. In 2020, for NBC News, I visited an experimental forest near Tahoe where UC Berkeley researchers light intentional, small “prescribed burns” to simulate the natural ones that used to sweep through the state regularly before European settlers arrived here and built permanent structures.

Interviewing UC Berkeley researcher Rob Yorke in the midst of a “prescribed burn,” December 10, 2020 Photo: Bita Ryan

I learned through this reporting that forests in California were once between half to a third as shady as they are now; their canopies were so sparse that on average a walk in the woods here would have carried the risk of sunburn. (One way scientists determine this is by comparing modern photographs of California wilderness with 19th-century paintings of it; the landscapes only vaguely resemble each other.) But because we’ve had a centuries-long policy of putting out every fire we encountered, the vegetation has grown too thick for forest fires to just roll through the way they should, burning off ground cover and rejuvenating the landscape.

Today, all that fuel (and drought amplified by climate change) has made wildfires intensely destructive. Studies show that the average wildfire today is at least 30 percent more severe than it was even 20 years ago, and where fire once helped Giant Sequoias reproduce, today this new category of inferno damages and sometimes kills them.

But even if we were in the age of small, seasonal fire, letting it go where it wants wouldn’t be safe for the 40 million of us living in the modern landscape, as the horrific destruction in Los Angeles has shown.

More than 100,000 people have been displaced there. That’s a tragic number. And yet displacement used to be the natural order of things. Once upon a time the Sierra Mono, Southern Sierra Miwok, Chukchansi, Yokut, Ahwaneechee and other tribes of the Yosemite valley would simply leave when that region caught fire, and return the following season. That’s not an option for people living in the path of the flames today. UC Berkeley fire scientist Scott Stephens told me that on average, when California existed in its natural fire balance, he estimates that 10% of the state would burn each year. Today, he, said, if 10% of the state caught fire it would be the most destructive natural disaster in US history.

As our population grows, our consumption increases, and we encroach on irreplaceable habitat, we as a civilization are increasingly faced with dilemmas that may truly have no solution. Fire feels like one of them. We must let it burn, but fundamentally, given the manner in which we live, we cannot.

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The Guenoc Valley project billed itself, when I profiled it for NBC News, as a new standard for fire resilience planning. Personally, I liked the idea that we could somehow build architecture that would make it possible to enjoy settled modern life while maintaining the seasonal-burn cycle of ancient people. But the project ran aground. Local authorities reviewed and approved the plans, but a lawsuit ground the whole thing to a halt on the basis of limited evacuation routes. Environmental groups charged that even if the buildings would be able to survive a wildfire, the limited roads around Middletown (population 725) couldn’t handle potentially thousands of new residents and hotel guests evacuated by the fire department once a fire did arrive.

In 2023 the California Attorney General forced the developers to redesign the project for greater density and a smaller footprint, and last year they unveiled redesigned plans that also included building a new road out of the development and keeping on-site shuttle buses staffed and ready to evacuate hotel guests on a moments’ notice.

Will this thing be built? I don’t know. Should it be? No really, I don’t know. In a state that needs more than 1.8 million new homes by the end of this year to even begin to crack the affordable-housing crisis we’re stuck in, it doesn’t feel like luxury homes for telecommuting millionaires are the path to that number. But the architectural notion of fire-resilient living is worth thinking about. Because as LA is showing us, we need to rethink how and where we live.

A journalist friend covering the fires there described to me what it was to watch luxury homes in Pacific Palisades burn. Typically, he pointed out, you can’t see the those homes behind all the dense vegetation planted to keep them private. But with all of that burned away, he could see enormous glass-and-steel pieces of futuristic engineering crack and melt in the heat, jammed together as they are in the twisting hills there. We can’t live the way we have. In fact, it turns out, we can’t even live the way the wealthiest among us have. Fire is part of California, and it will go where it wants here. The question is whether we can find a way to live in its path.

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A Note on Big Tech’s Trump Shift

Mark Zuckerberg’s video announcement that he’s yet again shifting his content-moderation policy made me nuts, as any friends I have among you might expect. It may be that there are perfectly reasonable academic conversations to be had about whether relying on the community to police misinformation on social media is preferable to employing fact-checkers. (I don’t agree with that, but okay.) The bothersome thing here is the tone of a man who can finally relax and do what he’d always wanted. For years I’ve listened to People in Tech reassure me that regulation isn’t necessary, because the leaders of tech companies follow a powerful moral compass. But the founder of Facebook, who has changed his policies with every incoming administration, reminds us that any moral compass we may believe such leaders possess spins frantically around the slightest magnetic shift. And beyond that, his announcement signals that the “let’s-save-the-world” neoliberal idealism that was once a required recruitment tool for scarce young talent turns out to have been only a matter of strategy, and is now a thing of the past. Now, a libertarian/authoritarian bent that seems to have been in the psyche of industry leaders all along has been given voice by the rise of job-killing technologies like AI and Musk-inspired enthusiasm for laying off, well, everyone. I debated whether to spend the weekend angrily typing this one up, and I may get into it down the line, but in the meantime I recommend Max Read’s very smart analysis of the whole situation. Here’s a bit of it:

A period of tech-industry labor unrest--walkouts and protests at tech megaplatforms over sexual harassment, racism, and defense contracts1--has given way to a “reset” marked by mass layoffs and corporate clampdowns. A looser tech labor market (and a general national atmosphere of reaction) has shifted power back to management, and a highly visible clique of tech workers with quasi-libertarian, open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science politics, clustered on Twitter in communities like “tcot” and “tpot,” has presented executives with the tantalizing (if still ephemeral) prospect of workforce free of Obama-era idealism and political consciousness.

It’s worth your time. And if you want to further consider the state of billionaires in general, here’s my writeup from a couple weeks ago about why they obey in advance.

Thanks for reading. See you later this week.