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from the Socialist Worker Party's website;

Mike Davis on the wildfires in Southern California
"A market-driven recipe for disaster"

November 7, 2003 | Page 5

LAST WEEK'S devastating wildfires in Southern California burned more
than 1,200 square miles of land, an area almost as big as the state of
Rhode Island. Some 20 people are dead from the fires, which struck in a
200-mile-long arc that reaches from the U.S.-Mexico border south of San
Diego to the suburbs northwest of Los Angeles.

Mainstream media accounts focused mainly on how the blazes got
started--especially charges of arson in several cases. But the real
causes of this catastrophe lie deeper--years of destructive land
development driven by the profit-first priorities of the free market,
and the failure of politicians to do anything about business practices
that are devastating the environment in numerous ways.

Left-wing author MIKE DAVIS has written extensively about California in
such books as City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear. Here, he explains for
Socialist Worker's KEITH DANNER what's really behind California's
latest not-so-natural disasters.

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THIS MEGA-conflagration, an order of magnitude larger and more
destructive than any previous Southern California wildfire complex, is
the product of market-driven urban sprawl interacting with
anthropogenic climate change. Both are reflections of the deepest
contradictions of late-capitalist urbanization. The conflagrations, in
turn, are the shape of our future.

Suburbanization of the forest belts

SINCE THE last big regional fire season in 1993 (1,000 homes destroyed
in Pasadena, Malibu and Laguna Beach), more than 100,000 new homes have
been built in the firebelt ecologies of inland Southern California (An
equal number, or more, have likewise spread through the fire-prone
foothills of the central Sierras outside Sacramento and Fresno).

Two social processes are responsible for this explosive suburbanization
of foothill and mountain hinterlands. First, wealthier (but generally
not ruling class) households are aggressively seeking luxury country
lifestyles (horses, view lots and so on) in low-tax unincorporated
areas. Secondly, ordinary professional and working-class people are
being driven inland by inflated land prices in the coastal zone.

Both processes, as many studies have shown, are directly subsidized by
poorer residents in older, inner-ring suburbs or inner cities (they, in
effect, subsidize their own decline). A rational, socially and
environmentally responsible system of human settlement would halt
growth at the edge and re-urbanize (not gentrify) metropolitan cores.
It would set aside hazardous wildlands areas as a permanent commons,
not a reserve for private land development.

The sprinkling of thousands of new homes in the chaparral and forests
radically undermines fire prevention. Forestry and fire officials,
finally accepting the wisdom of native Californians, now agree that the
best strategy for preventing catastrophic wildfires is frequent,
small-scale prescribed burning of old brush. It is, however, virtually
impossible to carry this out on an adequate scale because of opposition
from nearby homeowners fearing runaway fires or smoke pollution.

Moreover, when fires inevitably break out, firefighters are under
enormous political pressure to defend each and every structure. Yet the
fighting of a wildfire is essentially a war of maneuver, not a war of
position. As the recent fires have shown, such home-by-home defense is
both futile and incredibly dangerous when confronted with the power of
firestorms moving along 25- to 40-mile fronts and throwing flames 300
feet in the air. Such fires are simply unstoppable (a change in the
weather, not human efforts, finally slowed the two huge San Bernardino
and San Diego fires).

The impact of climate change

THE SECOND "deep" factor, of course, is the increasing frequency of
extreme weather: droughts, record-breaking temperatures (especially
off-season) and even torrential precipitation. Although it is possible
that the recent protracted droughts in the Southwest and parts of the
South are simply normal Holocene fluctuations, it is more likely that
they are expressions of human-forced climate change. This decade, after
all, is the hottest in at least 1,000 years.

Protracted droughts--often punctuated by brief periods of hard rain
that only produce bumper crops of fire-starter undergrowth--are
bringing about dramatic ecological changes in the forests of
California, the Southwest, even Appalachia. The bark beetle
infestations that kill pines, always a problem following dry years,
have now reached catastrophic levels. The forests that burned in the
Laguna (outside San Diego) and San Bernardino Mountains were already
essentially dead or dying. A dead forest, of course, poses an
apocalyptic fire potential.

Thus, rampant, unregulated growth of metropolitan peripheries into
foothill fire ecologies, in an epoch of extreme weather and ecological
degradation of forests, is a recipe for fires of unprecedented ferocity
and scope. The problem, of course, isn't confined to California. It
exists throughout the American West, as well as Mediterranean Europe,
where second homes and tourist resorts in similar ecologies have
produced recent fires of unparalleled destructiveness.

Political inevitability of firestorms

SO THESE are the parameters that make metropolitan firestorms on a 1
million-acre scale possible. But what made the Southern California
fires, in particular, almost inevitable?

First, the White House claims it favors a massive national program of
forest clearance to remove dead wood and "excessive growth" to prevent
fires. In reality, it only wants to provide reactionary and politically
powerful lumber companies with access to old-growth forests and
millions of healthy trees.

When, in April and May of this year, the (Democratic) governors of both
California and Arizona begged Bush to declare federal emergencies in
the dying forests of Southern California and the Mogollon Rim, the
White House fiddled for six months until Southern California, at least,
was already burning. The requests were rejected.

This is all the more significant in that the fire catastrophe in the
San Bernardino area was foreseen fully a year in advance, and even
conservative Republicans were screaming for federal action. But the
diseased dead trees of the San Bernardinos have virtually no commercial
value, and no wood products corporation was interested in removing
them.

Secondly, a significant part of the California National Guard, I am
told, is in Iraq and unavailable for disaster relief or fire duty. At
the most critical moment of the San Diego burn, much of the fire line
had to be pulled out, simply because the crews were too exhausted to
sustain the efforts.

Thirdly, the middle-class and affluent homeowners, whose properties
typically generate the greatest fire protection costs, are the least
likely to want to actually pay any of those costs. It is darkly ironic
that neighborhoods like tony Scripps Ranch or Poway in San Diego
County, which just a few weeks before the fires were hosting
Schwarzenegger fundraising parties and ranting about the oppression of
taxes, were the first to shriek about inadequate fire protection.

Indeed, the popular solution for wildfire among Republican
fundamentalists is to militarize the firefighting: creating a Strategic
Air Command-type fleet of helicopters and air tankers ready to douse
flames at a minute's notice. This is advocated by people like Rep.
Duncan Hunter, the far-right chair of the House Armed Services
Committee, whose 52nd congressional district in San Diego's East
County lost 1,600 homes. Such air armadas, of course, would be
immensely expensive, but because they would be military, they would be
subsidized by taxpayers elsewhere, not by local wealthy residents. They
also would not work--but that's another discussion.

In San Diego--where more expensive homes meet fire ecology than
anywhere in the world, except perhaps New South Wales--conservative
homeowners are notorious for voting down fire bonds. San Diego is the
only urbanized county in California that lacks a county fire
department, and--as firefighters' unions have pointed out for
years--it is drastically understaffed in comparison with areas of
comparable populations (and usually less catastrophic fire problems).

In a piece I recently wrote for the Nation magazine, I quote local
academics and activists who explain that this reluctance to invest in
an adequate fire protection infrastructure is related to the heavy tax
subsidies which support San Diego's sports franchises (the dismal
Chargers and Padres) and its major hotels and theme parks. About $1
billion has been siphoned off in corporate welfare in the last decade
or so.

What solutions?

AND, OF course, we ultimately come back to local political systems,
especially county governments, that are owned--lock, stock and barrel
(with surprisingly few exceptions)--by developers and major landowners.
All the good ideas about regional planning, open space conservation,
building affordable housing in the urban core, etc., will come to
naught until the political infrastructure of developer power is
directly assaulted.

The history of Southern California proves this cannot be achieved by
environmental groups alone. Environmental activists, of course,
daydream about blowing up the growth machines, but seldom consider
allying with the one social force capable of bringing about serious
reform: labor.

I believe that socialists in the labor movement must fight unceasingly
for unions to take an active and distinctive role in land use politics,
while simultaneously agitating in environmental movements or Green
parties to ensure every land use or conservation demand incorporates a
profound social justice dimension (like re-employing inner-city youth
in ecological restoration). Working-class residents of inner-city
neighborhoods and older aging suburbs have, of course, the greatest
stake in stopping sprawl and the export of their tax revenues and jobs
to the periphery. There is a tremendous need for popular, radical
education about this connection.

I am claiming, in other words, that there is no simple technical "fix"
for the increasing frequency of "unnatural" urban fire, flood and
earthquake disasters--apart from making issues of urban form and land
use into class questions and tasks for the labor movement.