Intro

The Los Angeles Fires—most notably the Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire—are the most destructive in California history. They are horrific, and they are teaching us hard lessons.

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If you’re paying attention, you recognize that all of this—the unprecedented “hurricanes” of fire, our inability to prepare for them, the systemic failures of our government, the exploitation for political disinformation—are symptoms of collapse in polycrisis. We’ve been seeing them more and more, all over the world. Remember last year’s floods in Brazil, Niger and Spain? Or Hurricanes Helene and Milton? Many call this our new normal, and that’s true in a general sense, but it belies the deeper truth. This is a cascade of new normals (plural); as the Earth heats, we will continue to witness events that dwarf prior ones in scale and impact. Somewhere, possibly even in Los Angeles again, we are going to see hurricanes of fire more violent than those burning right now. The “fire tornado,” for example, was only identified in 2003 and popularized during later California wildfires in 2018 and 2020. Now that almost seems quaint in comparison to the Los Angeles fires—and not because the fire tornado became any less scary as a concept.

Will the Los Angeles fires be the wake up call to the necessary changes and preserve the Earth's habitability? Inertia is powerful, so I’m not optimistic, but for those who do want to treat it as such, I thought I’d take a moment to synthesize some of what I’ve learned through my Urgent Futures conversations to outline the root causes of the polycrisis and responses to consider.