Ignoring Nature, We Build Our Way Into Fire’s Path
The enduring image of the Southern California hillside resident — the one who braces for disaster every fall, just as the Santa Anas begin to blow — is that of a self-reliant, latter-day homesteader who settled up among the trees because he finds solitude and freedom there. And maybe because he remains a bit suspicious of life in the city.
It wasn’t hard to find examples of the breed in news coverage of last week’s devastating fires, guiding horses to safety or crustily refusing to evacuate. Yet the vast majority of the nearly 2,000 houses destroyed so far weren’t outposts marking the last remaining frontiers of the American West. They were neatly lined up in subdivisions, on gently curving streets slotted into terraced hillsides. Many of the biggest fires grew by leaping from one cul-de-sac to the next, tearing through the territory that writer Mike Davis once called “Sloping Suburbia.”
Since the middle of the 20th century, this is how we have developed much of our new housing in the U.S., and particularly in Southern California: by pushing deep into canyons and deserts and onto flood plains. We build reassuringly familiar-looking subdivisions, decorated with vaguely Spanish or Mediterranean accents, in locations that by land-use standards — and by common-sense standards — are truly exotic. We build with the unstinting belief that growth is good and that progress in the form of various kinds of technology — new building materials, military-style firefighting, a vast system of pumps and levees — will continue to make it possible to construct new pockets of nostalgic architecture virtually anywhere.
But maybe our nostalgia should extend beyond red-tile roofs to include earlier lessons about how and where it is safe to build. This country’s culture as a whole is in the midst of a profound shift from the unshakable confidence that marked the so-called American Century to a new recognition of risk, conservation, even fragility. Green architecture, with its rather old-fashioned emphasis on paying attention to site and climate, is part of that shift. But those who build and approve new hillside developments — “the lords of subdivision,” as nature writer Richard Lillard called them, the “replanners of the Earth’s surface” — have barely acknowledged it.
One of the success stories of the last week has been Stevenson Ranch near Santa Clarita, which narrowly averted destruction in part because its houses were built with concrete roof tiles and heat-resistant windows. But to celebrate this neighborhood as a model for escaping fire is itself a kind of escapism. The question is never, why am I building here on this hillside that predictably catches fire every few years in the fall (and maybe now in spring or summer too)? It is, instead, how can technology and new materials — how can progress — protect me from the dangers inherent in living where I have chosen to live?
The aesthetic basis of a typical subdivision is reassurance and stability. Builders enforce those qualities with architecture, choosing from a well-worn catalog of residential styles, and with massive earthmoving operations, to flatten the streets and blur the topographical differences between one hillside and the next.
The media pitch in too. Thursday night on CNN, Anderson Cooper and other anchors focused relentlessly on the news that an arsonist may have set the Santiago fire in eastern Orange County. The Santiago fire destroyed 14 houses — a tiny fraction of the total this week. By contrast, the Witch fire that roared through suburban developments in northern San Diego County, consuming more than 1,000 houses, was caused by downed power lines. The emphasis on possible crime suggested that the disaster could be pinned on a few rogue evildoers. But the vast majority of destroyed houses burned as a direct result of choices made by home builders, homeowners, politicians and planners about where to put new development. The villain is us.
The truth is that while houses near Lake Arrowhead and in certain canyons that burned this year are marked by real isolation, most Southern California residents who move into fire-threatened hillside neighborhoods are not adventurous souls hoping to thumb their noses at convention and urban mores and carve out a life surrounded by nature. They are merely looking for spacious single-family residences that feel attractively adjacent to, rather than in the heart of, the hills and mountain ranges that divide the region’s coastline from its deserts.
Adjacency to nature rather than full immersion in it has always been at the heart of the suburbs’ appeal. The developers who create our version of it, particularly in the fastest-growing parts of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, have been highly successful at giving their projects the air of the familiar mixed with a touch of unspoiled landscape.
Disasters, though, have a way of stripping away those signs of comfort and rather starkly revealing land-use patterns as well as the philosophies that underpin growth. The flooding in New Orleans that followed Hurricane Katrina, for example, wiped out mostly suburban-style ranch houses that had been built slab-on-grade, without the raised foundations and other low-tech flood-protection mechanisms that once distinguished the city’s houses.
There is a reason that the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans virtually never flood. They were built on naturally high ground, produced over the centuries by deposits of Mississippi River silt. And there is a reason that wildfires in Southern California prey mostly on subdivisions built in the last 50 years or so, when suburban expansion and faith in American know-how were at their height.
We can draw a final connection here, even if it is only a metaphorical one. The way that American home builders keep pushing out into new territory, developing parcels of land once considered unsafe for residential construction, is an architectural version of the way that banks and lenders have acted over the last decade, practically tossing money at borrowers once dismissed as too much of a credit risk. The goal in both cases is to maintain a pace of growth and expansion that is ultimately unsustainable.
The crisis in the credit markets, by pulling down the broader economy, has shined some needed light on predatory lending and slowed its spread. Though history suggests that we probably shouldn’t hold our breath, perhaps the fires, by the sheer scale of their destruction, will have a similar effect on the way we build.
© 2007 The Los Angeles Times
Another example of American hubris…
All that devastation and about a million full time American soldiers on U.S. soil, continued with business as usual - playing war games, and laying around watching tv.
If the soldiers in Venezuela can be trained to HELP people instead of killing them, then the soldiers here and elsewhere can be used for benovelent purposes too.
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“The range of debate between the dominant U.S. [political] parties tends to closely resemble the range of debate within the business class.”
Robert McChesney
It is the Randite neurotic individualist philosophy that drives the Great American War on Nature and Great American War on People.
The west moves into a permanent change over to increased aridity. Desertification begins. We see huge fires. Yeah there are a lot of us and houses dot the landscape where fires cannot be allowed to burn away shrub and undergrowth.
It isn’t just housing it’s the reality of global warming. We were ready for it to hit in 2050 but are surprised indeed to see it happening instead to us. These dry condition fires are what we still don’t want to face…they are global warming. Imagine a decade or so ahead.
Another opportunity for the disaster capitalists to rake in the dough, much of it at the expense of US taxpayers.
“We can draw a final connection here, even if it is only a metaphorical one. The way that American home builders keep pushing out into new territory, developing parcels of land once considered unsafe for residential construction, is an architectural version of the way that banks and lenders have acted over the last decade, practically tossing money at borrowers once dismissed as too much of a credit risk. The goal in both cases is to maintain a pace of growth and expansion that is ultimately unsustainable.”
You’re right, andersdl, and so is Naomi Klein.
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
Part of the problem is caused by the fact that taxpayer subsidies will go to people who lose their houses. It is one thing to provide post disaster assistance but we create a moral hazard when we guarantee insurance to people who live on flood plains, barrier islands, earthquake zones and on fire and mudslide prone hills. If states want to self insure for these things that should be up to them.
Pushing new frontiers worked for the winners, except for the absurd masnned space program.
We go aroung pretending we can drive our SUVs forever and that global warming won’t put he whole state of FL underwater, soon!!!
BushUSAInc makes huge profits while resisting any effort to soften the inevitable crunch of the collapse of the world as we know it.
Someone said that the ethics of politics is that they do what they know they can get away with. People like reading fiction about super-heros and justice. Myths and lies are comforting when the truth is not.
Most of our pols deserve trial for crimes against humanity. Don’t hold your breath. Guess maybe it’s always been mostly lies. The USA wasn’t that great in the 50s, but it’s been hell-bent for destruction since Vietnam–except very good profits have been made by some.
Enjoy your cruise on the Titanic, sorry first class is totally reserved.
It’s a little odd that this article ignores the record drought in the Southwest, which certainly has ties to global warming. A drying American Southwest is one of the predictions of climate science. It’s also true that the situation is being affected by the La Nina conditions currently in place in the Pacific Ocean:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071024103856.htm
It is indeed a record drought:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2007-06-07-drought_N.htm
So, this is a little like Katrina - the disaster and deaths were do to poor planning and a failure to prepare in both cases (Katrina was more severe, certainly) but the fact is that massive wildfires and stronger hurricanes should become more frequent events as the planet continues to warm, so plan accordingly (if the levees had been rebuilt before the storm, much of the damage could have been avoided, for example). Similarly, planning for long-term water scarcity is needed for communities in the Southwest.
WHAT DANGERS LIE AHEAD?
by James E. Lovelock (1994)
Even if we reform immediately we shall still see the Earth change and we, its first social intelligent species, are privileged to be both the cause and the spectators. The change in climate imminent is as large as between the last ice age and now.
To comprehend the magnitude of the change ahead glance back to the depth of the last ice age, some tens of thousands of years ago. Then the glaciers reached as far south as latitude 350 in North America and to the Alps in Europe. The sea was more than 100 metres lower than now, and therefore an area of land as large as Africa was above water and where plants grew. The tropics were like the warm temperate regions are now. In all it was a pleasant world to live on and there was more land. What will happen, as a result of our presence so far, will be a change as great as that from the last ice age until about 100 years ago.
To understand what has already begun and will develop in the next century, imagine the start of a heat age. Temperatures and sea level will climb, by fits and starts, until eventually the world will be torrid, ice free, and all but unrecognizable. Eventually is a long time ahead, it might never happen to that extent; what we have to prepare for now are the incidents of a changing climate, just about to begin. These are likely to be surprises, things that even the most detailed of big science models do not predict. Think of the ozone hole, this was a real surprise. The most expensive computer modelling and monitoring of the Earth’s ozone layer failed to see or predict it. It was seen by observers looking at the sky with simple instruments. Surprise may comes as climatic extremes, like ferocious storms, or as unexpected atmospheric events. Nature is nonlinear and unpredictable and never more so than in a period of change.
This is an occasion when we cannot look to Gaia for help. If the present warm period is a planetary fever, we should expect that the Earth left to itself would be relaxing into its normal comfortable ice age. Such comfort may be unattainable because we have been busy removing its skin for farm land, taking away the trees that are the means for recovery. We also are adding vast blanket of greenhouse gases to the already feverish patient. Gaia is more likely to shudder, then move over to a new stable state, fit for a different and more amenable biota. It could be much hotter, but whatever it is, no longer the comfortable world we know. These predictions are not fictional doom scenarios, but uncomfortably close to certainty. We have already changed the atmosphere to an extent unprecedented in recent geological history. We seem to be driving ourselves heedlessly down a slope into a sea that is rising to drown us.
We must, in our own interest, recognize that our planet is at least as important as we are. If we continue to pollute and destroy for narrow self interest, we could bring about the end of the Pleistocene and the dawn of a new hot Earth. The future depends on decisions made now on the supplies of food and energy. We must moderate our passion for human rights and begin to recognize the rest of life on Earth. Individual risk, such as of cancer from exposure to nuclear radiation, or to products of the chemical industry, are to be prevented, but they are no longer the most urgent concern. First in our thoughts should be the need to avoid perturbing Gaia and exacerbating its present natural instability. Above all we do not want to trigger the jump to a new but unwanted stable climate.
Among the things we must not do is cling to the illusion that we could be stewards of the spaceship Earth. Stewardship implies that contemporary science can fully explain the Earth, and that people are willing and able to work together to keep the Earth a fit and comfortable place for life.
These assumptions are naive, like expecting the passengers of a plane, whose pilot had died, to land it safely with no more help than the pilot’s manual. Does anyone believe we, intelligent carnivores prone to tribal genocide, could, by some act of common will, change our natures and become wise and gentle gardeners, stewards, taking care of all of the natural life of our planet?
It takes a lot of hubris even to think of ourselves as stewards of the Earth. Originally a steward was the keeper of the sty where the pigs lived; this was too lowly for most humans and gentility raised the steward so that he became a bureaucrat, in charge of men not only pigs. Do we want to be the bureaucrats of the Earth? Do we want to be made accountable for its health? I would sooner expect a goat to succeed as a gardener as expect humans to become stewards of the Earth. There can be no worse fate for people than to conscript them in such a hopeless task; to make them responsible for the smooth running of the climate. To make them responsible for the chemistry of the oceans, the air, and the soil. Something, that until we began to dismantle it, Gaia gave free.
“an arsonist may have set the Santiago fire in eastern Orange County. The Santiago fire destroyed 14 houses — a tiny fraction of the total this week. By contrast, the Witch fire that roared through suburban developments in northern San Diego County, consuming more than 1,000 houses, was caused by downed power lines.”
A corporation’s service property contributes to 1000 homes being destroyed. It now appears the arsonist is a child playing with matches, that destroyed 14 houses.
I am sure the media will focus attention away from the corporation and direct it towards the child. How much legal restitution can the 1000 homeowners expect to receive from the utility?
Hawthorne I like the way you write.
“new pockets of nostalgic architecture virtually anywhere.”
nice.
And then we have those who rushed to build in the desert and used up the aquifers by building swimming pools and bringing deciduous trees that must be watered and green grass so as to not have to see the desert beauty. Now they are running short - having depleted the Colorado River to the point where it no longer runs to the sea - and they are casting covetous looks on the Great Lakes whose region has many more people to “water” than the desert. Let them leave, especially those who have other homes, and let them live in places where there is water. They are thieves - robbing the desert of its character and robbing the rest of us of water. Building up the desert was a huge mistake.
I’m sure a lot of people in Mexico used the Colorado River until we used every drop of water and left people south of the border with no recourse. How Nice! No Suprise!
In America we build wood framed homes in fire prone areas. Most of the people that choose to live in those areas never really consider that a wildfire is inevitable. Builders do not care because they are building for profit. Most city and county planners are just not sophisticated enough and very short sighted. And yet, after a fire they rebuild the same wood framed home that will burn again sometime in the not so distant future.
Be it flood plane, tornadoes or hurricanes, people build the same style homes that contradict the nature of the environment. Most other mammals that have taken similar paths are now extinct. How we continue to persist in opposition to our natural environment will be interesting study to those that will one day unearth our remains.