Editor’s Note for January 2025 Networker
Los Angeles is my hometown. I recognized my own experiences in Patti Davis’s recent reminiscences. I, too, “watched as the storms rolled in during the winter months, the land turning green and lush, then blossoming in wild colors and sweet scents in spring, browning and drying out in summer before the air turned crisp in autumn and orange leaves fell from trees to blanket the ground.”
Of course, the Santa Ana winds howled then, too, and were especially fierce where we lived. I hated them, particularly the screeching noise they made through a gap between a northward-facing door and its frame. My mom tried to stop it with a towel. Every fall we'd watch fires burn in the foothills or in the mountains beyond. But it wasn’t as worrisome. Far, far fewer people lived at the urban-wildland interface then. And then the rains would come, sometimes more, sometimes less, but without fail—usually by sometime in November.
This January, especially strong—at times hurricane-force—Santa Anas followed the third hottest summer and fall since 1895, with no appreciable rainfall to date, and none in the forecast.
View of Palisades fire from the San Fernando Valley, January 10, 2025.
Credit: Aviv Orenstein. Used with permission.
Just a year ago I was in Los Angeles during one of the “atmospheric rivers,” when a foot of rain fell within a few days. “Hydroclimate volatility” is described by UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain and colleagues in a paper published just as the recent Los Angeles fires ignited. They say these “sudden, large and/or frequent transitions between very dry and very wet conditions” will increase in the coming decades, “owing to the fundamental thermodynamics of a warming atmosphere.”
Swain explained the relationship to the fires in an interview:
That wet-to-dry whiplash sequence of hydroclimate actually helped facilitate the preconditions for these fires. Not only did we add more potential fuel, literally, to the fires, based on the wet conditions, but then we followed those up with some of the driest conditions on record in the very same places that had this huge accumulation of grass and brush.
Meanwhile, my Los Angeles family and friends—who are, as I write, safe—are mourning others’ losses of homes, neighborhoods, whole communities. They are still monitoring the wind direction and air quality, watching and abiding by the evacuation orders and warnings, enduring power outages, checking on each other, and offering mutual aid both instinctively and through organized efforts, at once impressive, generous, and beautiful.
Mutual aid hub at Octavia's Bookshelf in Pasadena, California, named for Octavia E. Butler, author of Parable of the Sower, mentioned above. Octavia Butler was born and raised in Pasadena.
Credit: Lydia Horne, lydiahorne.com. Used with permission.
Please see the full piece where this photo collage originally appears.
Even as my Los Angeles rabbi, Sharon Brous, along with the congregation, spared no effort in providing relief to impacted communities, she cut to the chase about the main culprit in this catastrophe:
[T]houghts and prayers not only ring hollow after a calamity, but constitute a moral offense. Because failing to address root causes of human suffering will only allow that suffering to endure….
[W]hen I saw those fires Tuesday night, tearing over the hills I have hiked in with my family for twenty years, savaging the homes of my friends, our community members, I was filled not only with sadness and fear, but also with rage. Rage because I recognized the images on the screen from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and from the Ministry for the Future, from An Inconvenient Truth and power point presentations by climate scientists more than thirty years ago modeling out potential climate outcomes, warning that this is what today would look like, if we didn’t change course, immediately.
And we didn’t change course, of course. Instead, we witnessed the most powerful people in the world engage in a campaign of denial, obfuscation, and outright lies, threatening our future on this planet with no guardrails and near impunity.
And now our city burns. Yes, I felt rage. And I still do.
I feel rage for those same reasons and more, including for the lack of other kinds of good governance, which would include smarter zoning policies, prescribed burning, and mandated safer building and product materials.
In this issue of the Networker we have detailed pieces from Drs. Rebecca Altman, Ted Schettler, and Sandra Steingraber on the plastics pollution crisis. As we’ve prepared this newsletter, we and our colleagues have noticed media attention paid to the fact that burning plastics and other toxic building materials and home furnishings are adding to the exposure burden Southern Californians—and firefighters—are suffering, as well as increasing the fires’ intensity:
[T]he smoke is a toxic soup. It’s not just the brush that’s burning, but homes are burning and homes contain plastics that are built from petrochemical compounds. —Brian Rice, president, California Professional Firefighters Union, on CNN
And what is really alarming—and it’s another thing people don’t talk about—is what excellent fuel the modern house is. So, these wildfires are raging through forest, which is natural. Fire is a normal part of the California landscape. But coming into these built environments, houses nowadays, the modern house, has so many petroleum products in it, in terms of vinyl siding and Formica counters and polyurethane stuffing and the rubber tires and the gas tanks in the garage. There are all kinds of explosive petroleum products built into our lives that we don’t even think about. Look at what your shoes are made out of. When they get hot enough, they are explosively flammable. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. And if you start looking around at your home, you’ll realize that petroleum and its products are everywhere. And these are really, really flammable. —John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, on Democracy Now!
[T]here was “a tremendous amount of particulates and pollutants” in the building materials that burned in the Eaton fire area. Lead and arsenic readings are high. —Jen Croft, air resource adviser with California Wildland Fire Coordinating Group, in the New York Times
I’ve kept a close watch on any fire activity near the heavily polluted Santa Susana Field Lab, on whose grounds the 2018 Woolsey Fire began and was later found to have deposited radioactive particles as far as 15 kilometers away, near my childhood home. The Kenneth Fire—which burned from January 9 to 12 of this year before being extinguished—began a few miles from the Lab. The winds sent that fire in the opposite direction (and no structures burned). The region’s fate hinges on the behavior of the Santa Anas… but not only. I fervently hope that sanity will prevail and that—with all respect to those who have suffered great losses and urgently need to be safe and rehoused—the city, county, and state will move forward with plans and policies informed by climate scientists, several of whom have made a newly personal, similar plea as they, too, have been evacuated or lost homes.
Thank you for reading and working for a resilient and sustainable future.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH, Editor