Podcast #267: The Tragedy of California’s Wildfires
Jonathan Kay speaks with University of Southern California scholar William Deverell about what he calls the ‘new fire regime in the American West.’
Jonathan Kay: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week’s episode. To hear the full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, visit us at Quillette.com and click the Subscribe button.
And this week, I’m in Los Angeles, which is why I sound like this. I’m using my travel microphone. And no, this trip wasn’t supposed to be a fact-finding journalistic project to learn about the wildfires raging around the Los Angeles area. I’d actually planned this trip months ago, so I could attend a science conference at the University of Southern California.
And in coming weeks, you’ll be hearing a lot about that conference. But now that I’m here, I decided to use the opportunity to educate myself and Quillette listeners [00:01:00] about the fires, which you can smell from the USC campus and pretty much everywhere else in this city. To date, the fires have claimed at least ten lives and destroyed tens of billions of dollars worth of property.
To find out what caused the fires and what Californians can do to prevent them from recurring, I paid a visit to an expert here on the USC campus: Professor William Deverell, a historian with a focus on the history of the American West, who once led a multidisciplinary project called The West on Fire.
Here’s a recording of our interview. Professor Deverell, thanks so much for joining the Quillette podcast.
William Deverell: My pleasure, thanks for asking me.
Jonathan Kay: Now, this must be a difficult time. As I mentioned to you before the interview, I’m here for a conference, and the moderator for one of the panels actually had her house burn down, and had to borrow clothes from somebody else just to attend the conference.
I can only imagine that you must have colleagues who have been affected by this.
William Deverell: Oh, we do. I think it’s in the dozens now. The familiarity I have is with the Eton Canyon fire. I live just below that. That level of devastation is not yet known, I think, by the wider world. And of course, the Palisades fire is devastating.
Jonathan Kay: There’s something very surreal about being in Los Angeles right now. As we discussed, we’re here on the USC campus. Los Angeles is a huge city. [USC is] some distance away from all of the fires. And if you didn’t know that the fires were raging, you’d think it was business as usual here. Is it somewhat surreal that there are just some parts of this city that are completely business as usual, and other parts where tens of thousands of lives have been upended?
William Deverell: You put your finger on it. It is odd. I think if people were to get some kind of elevated view, though, over the last 72 hours, the level of smoke and soot and ash would be visible all across the basin. My family, we had to dig out our COVID mask boxes. We had to get those out.
Jonathan Kay: The whole world is suddenly discovering what Santa Ana winds are. Obviously, it’s very important. What are those?
William Deverell: Well, Santa Anas tend to run from mid to late spring through the fall and we’ve got some now that are a little late, but the worrisome feature of them on a drought-ridden landscape is the winds that start well to the east of us in the Great Basin of Utah and the Intermountain West.
And as they move west, those winds drop in elevation and get warmer and drier. And then they find their way west through the various canyons and arroyos and other landscape features of, in our case, Southern California, where their warmth and their dryness is going to increase the likelihood of fire ignition.
Jonathan Kay: I mean, we’re in January now, which is not typical Santa Ana season. Is this now a twelve-month, year-long phenomenon?
William Deverell: Well, certainly fires are. In my lifetime, we’ve referred to “fire season,” and now it doesn’t make sense to refer to fire season here. Largely across the American West. In fact, that’s a twelve-month season, and so we are dealing with climate flux.
Some things are known. Some things are not known, but it’s unfortunate to the tragic level that our empirical understanding is now based in part on the results of the last seventy-two hours.
Jonathan Kay: My own rudimentary understanding of how to preemptively control fires, a big problem in the Canadian West, is you create fire breaks. Breaks in the landscape so that fire can’t just jump from tree to tree uninterrupted.
Is it the case that when winds get to a certain speed, those things are useless? My understanding is that these fires actually jump over divided highways.
William Deverell: Oh, no doubt. And you all have had this tragic experience.
We have watched, as your southern neighbour, the fires in the Canadian West over the last several years that have been so devastating. We’re all in this together, as it were, but once the fires are up in the tree canopies and embers are allowed to be picked up by the winds we just had, which were ferocious, fires can jump [from area to area] through the activity of an ember that’s maybe just an inch long.
If there’s no wind, it could be more easily controlled, but once fire climbs up into the tree canopies through heat and wind, those things can absolutely move and jump to the level of miles.
Eucalyptus trees, introduced to California in the 1870s, evolved to exploit fire as part of their reproductive strategy. They contain flammable oil & fire triggers their seed capsules to be released. They shouldn't be in California. pic.twitter.com/q9AlsyGQNB
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) January 10, 2025
Jonathan Kay: My boss actually tweeted something about eucalyptus trees. My understanding is there are certain trees [for which] there’s an evolutionary mechanism, an advantage to occasional fires, and that they can propagate through fire.
And eucalyptus trees, as I understand, contain [flammable] oil. Is there any kind of invasive-species aspect here, where there’s different kinds of fire-prone trees that have been planted?
William Deverell: Yeah, sure. And the eucalyptus trees were brought here. And for some trees, the germination patterns require intense heat, but that just reminds us that fire is a common experience [in nature].
[00:06:00] It’s normal. It’s just, we now have abnormal fires. Yes. There is a problem of invasive species that can be particularly fire-prone. The mitigation for fire can cover anything from cultural and human behaviour to landscape care, to try to address climate change, to be more aware, to perhaps stop building up into what we call the urban–wildland interface.
So there’s all kinds of mechanisms and tools to try to mitigate what we now have so much evidence of: a new fire regime in the American West… Over the last several decades, each successive large catastrophic fire becomes the new record holder. So the evidence is plain, and it’s right in front of us in tragic consequence.
Jonathan Kay: You use an expression… urban–wildland interface. I guess that could be something as banal as a barbecue, or it could be power cables, but the idea being that when humans come up against dry woodland, it can be a dangerous phenomenon. Is there any technological solution? I’m thinking, for instance, of the power lines.
Can power lines be constructed in such a way that when one gets cut or collapsed, it doesn’t give way to fire?
William Deverell: A perfect solution probably doesn’t exist, but it’s commonly known by the acronym WUI, which is the Wildland–Urban Interface. And so we have these WUI fires. And what I meant mostly by that is encroached [human] development up from suburban basins.
[Humans have moved] into canyons and arroyos where fires like to burn and like to burn with regularity. Well, we can build with different materials. We can build with more fire-resistant or fire-retardant materials. In my [academic] world of the history of the American West in the nineteenth century, the primary building material was of course wood.
The primary heating technology was wood fires. And so towns in the American and Canadian West burned all the time. And we need to make some real regime changes in what we use for building materials. The power-line issue, well, I think the communities that use power, which is just about all of us, need to be prepared to help absorb some of the expense, I suspect, of putting them underground.
That’s a very good solution, but extraordinarily expensive. Part of the reason is we’ve put our power lines away from sight lines because we don’t find them aesthetically pleasing. So we put the power lines up and out of the way into quote-unquote nature, and out of sight means that when they fall or they break, they fall into the forest floor and they can catch things on fire and people don’t recognise it quickly.
So we have to make some of those changes. You can create coatings and other kinds of [technical changes]. I don’t know the technology well enough, but I know they’re out there. And they’re probably being perfected or worked on constantly.
But it’s going to be a very, very expensive maneuver. And it’s also going to take the political will of politicians and the public to push for that.
Jonathan Kay: By coincidence, I happened to be in Chicago a couple of months ago. I did a historical tour there and, of course, they talked about the Great Chicago Fire.
Which is kind of typical of what we think of as the great fires of London and Rome. Millions of people in a highly congested area… versus in some ways what you’re describing as the opposite, where you actually take infrastructure, human infrastructure, and for aesthetic reasons, push it into nature.
So are we talking about two completely different fire-prevention problems here?
William Deverell: It’s a very good question. I would say separate but intimately related—the Pacific Palisades fire [in Los Angeles] burned in open space, of course, and continues to burn in open space, but it then travels to densely packed suburban neighborhoods… You know, one of the things that people are learning through tragedy is to push your firescape out of the way of your structure. Create buffer zones. You know, you talked about firebreaks. We’re finally beginning to realise that our Indigenous forebears, their trails, their game trails and their travel trails, etc., were of course a transit technology, as it were, but they’re also firebreaks.
And Indigenous people know that. So we just have to be more cognisant of what both history and innovation can teach us because there’s not a single tool that will [solve] this. It has to be a toolbox filled with all kinds of mechanisms, cultural and otherwise.
Jonathan Kay: What’s happening now in California has gained the world’s attention.
Claire Lehmann
But my understanding is this has happened, maybe on a smaller scale in Colorado, I think in Tennessee, certainly, and on an epic scale in Australia, where Quillette is based. I’m guessing there’s an international community of scientists who talk about best practices in this sort of thing.
William Deverell: Certainly. Folks in the United States Forest Service—one of their jobs is fire mitigation and fire prevention. As you know, that’s the sponsor of Smokey Bear. They are constantly in dialogue with [international] forest personnel and forest scientists.
Jonathan Kay: America being America, it was pretty quick that people went to political factors. You had people talking about things like, I don’t know, the recruitment policies of California firefighting services, and of course, global warming was mentioned.
Are either of those factors ... Are there politically relevant factors that exacerbated this problem?
William Deverell: Not from my vantage point. I was asked, was the destruction to be laid at the feet of our [state] governor? And my response might have been a little direct, but I didn’t know the governor of California controlled relative humidity and wind speed.
But global warming: I don’t see how that can’t be part of this equation. Now, you know, we have these boomerang cycles now, of largely drier and hotter weather. Let’s say, let’s just pick… because we’re a base-10 society, let’s take a decade. Look out across a decade from now. There’s going to be, let’s say, seven years of hotter and drier [weather], but there will be, let’s say, three years of colder and wetter [weather]; and the colder and wetter extremes will be more extreme and the hotter and drier extremes more extreme.
[On both sides], it’s a pendulum swing that’s swinging wider and further than we’re accustomed to. And so those colder and wetter periods. are going to generate fuel [by promoting tree growth]. They’re going to generate all kinds of fuel. Some invasive species, some not. Some fire retardant, some not. Or fire resistant, some not. And then when the hotter, dryer weather comes… fire is an opportunistic action. It is looking for the proper circumstances to ignite. And it will find them.
Jonathan Kay: When the last major hurricane hit New Orleans, I remember people were saying that because of the land profile of New Orleans, the expression was that what New Orleans really “wants” to be is a lake. It’s below sea level. But for political reasons, you can’t tell hundreds of thousands of people, Sorry, you know, It turns out this isn’t a good place to live. [00:13:00] It’s a very politically difficult thing to do. But certainly, in Florida, people are having conversations about whether certain parts of the state are still worth the insurance risk. Is it the case that in California, it’s going to affect decisions about, like, we just can’t set up human habitation [in certain places].
William Deverell: It’s a good question, and those dialogues and debates are ongoing. So we have had insurance-company withdrawal.
Jonathan Kay: Does that mean if you lose your house, it’s out of pocket?
William Deverell: In theory. It means that your insurer has come to you and said, we’re no longer honouring these policies.
At least one major insurance carrier, as I understand it, said we are no longer honouring our policies on fire in certain districts of Southern California. So then the homeowner has to shop for a new insurer. But, you know, once one big company leaves, there’ll be a competitive market and some other insurer will probably step in there, but at some point they may stop writing policies in particular areas at all.
Or we’re going to get local, state, or regional laws, I think, that will probably prohibit certain kinds of development and growth in that interface that I talked about. I would be in favour of that. I’m not a lawmaker. I’m a voter, but it does look to me as if there are places we really ought not to be living.
Jonathan Kay: I keep hearing this term, “forest management,” that we have to do a better job of forest management. I confess, I’m not sure what that term means.
William Deverell: It is a bit of a catch-all phrase and it’s been used to relate to or suggest everything from the sublime to the ridiculous, in my view. What the term means to me, at least in light of recent events, is making sure that the fuel loads that are sitting there waiting for ignition are culled and mitigated well before a fire event.
Jonathan Kay: Is that underbrush? Is that what’s on the floor [of the forest]?
William Deverell: Underbrush for sure… the undergrowth, the understory, that kind of thing. But also we have to look up and try to figure out how can we reduce the likelihood of fire getting up in the canopies of trees, because then it just jumps and dances around from tree to tree. Then it’s very difficult to fight that because you’re not going to have your firefighters climb trees. If you can keep a fire on the landscape, you have a better chance of putting it out. And also, as we saw in LA, you can fight fire from the air. You have all kinds of technologically sophisticated assets in the air, but if the wind is blowing a hundred miles an hour, it is super dangerous; and you’re going to open the bay doors on that fire-retardant plane and the retardant is just going to blow away, or the water, and so we’re dealing with all kinds of complicated problems.
Technology is going to help. We’re increasingly drawing satellite technology into trying to spot where fires are likely to happen, where fires have happened. You know, fire likes to go where it has [already] been. Fire works oftentimes on familiarity. It likes the canyons that it has burned in before.
Those are fire scars that it likes. And so we can utilise everything from the old-fashioned man or woman in a fire tower with a pair of binoculars. That’s a good technology of observation and surveillance, [right up] to a satellite operation.
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Sam Rapaport
