Mourn the tragedy of the Tahoe fire, but please recognize the wasteful futility of it all

On the map of the United States, just below halfway down the east coast, you can see a series of islets, in the shape of a hooked nose. These are the Outer Banks, barrier islands - sun-kissed in summer, storm-tossed in winter - that stretch for 100 miles and more, protecting the main coastline of the state of North Carolina. They are built, quite literally, on shifting sands.

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This is what local agents call "a very nice market", and last month their area had a week of free worldwide publicity. Hurricane Isabel swept in, washing out much of the islands' only road and picking up motels from their foundations and tossing them, according to one report, "like cigarette butts". One island was turned into several islets, with a whole town, Hatteras Village, being cut off from the rest of the US - for ever, if nature has its way.

Residents, journalists reported, were in shock. Many scientists were not. Speaking well before Isabel, Dr Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of geology at Duke University in North Carolina, described the Outer Banks property boom to me as "a form of societal madness". "I wouldn't buy a house on the front row of the Outer Banks. Or the second," agreed Dr Stephen Leatherman, who is such a connoisseur of American coastlines that he is known as Dr Beach.

For the market is not the only thing that has been rising round here. Like other experts, Pilkey expects the Atlantic to inundate the existing beaches "within two to four generations". Normally, that would be no problem for the sands, which would simply regroup and re-form further back. Unfortunately, that is no longer possible: the $2m houses are in the way. According to Pilkey, the government will either have to build millions of dollars worth of seawall, which will destroy the beach anyway, or demolish the houses. "Coastal scientists from abroad come here and just shake their heads in disbelief," he says.

Sloping Suburbia
In one of his last articles, the well-known Los Angeles writer and environmentalist Richard Lillard challenged Frederick Jackson Turner's famous thesis that the American frontier — and with it, the frontiersman — had ended in 1890. As a matter of fact, Lillard asserted, the frontier was alive and well in the Edenic canyons above Malibu and Hollywood. The unique challenge of the wild mountains in the big city brought out the true grit in their self-selected population. "The whole hillside and canyon ambiance, almost always fresh and wild-smelling, both attracts and holds the kind of individual that Frederick Turner and many a traveler, Tocqueville included, knew in the backwoods districts." The neighborly and self-reliant hill folk, moreover, were tempered to heroic proportions by the constancy of the fire danger, "keeping an outlook for arsonists or children playing with matches, as their forefathers once kept alert for hostile aborigines."

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Hillside home building, moreover, has despoiled the natural heritage of the majority for the sake of an affluent minority. Instead of protecting "significant ecological areas" as required by law, county planning commissions have historically been the malleable tools of hillside developers. Much of the beautiful coastal — sage and canyon — riparian ecosystems of the Santa Monica Mountains have been supplanted by castles and "guard-gate prestige." Elsewhere in Southern California — in the Verdugo, Puente, San Jose, San Joaquin and San Rafael hills, as well as the Santa Susana, Santa Ana and San Gabriel mountains — tens of thousands of acres of oak and walnut woodland have been destroyed by bulldozers to make room for similar posh developments.

At the same time, suburban firestorms are becoming more apocalyptic. Two-thirds of all the homes and dwellings, for example, destroyed by wildfire since statewide record keeping began in 1923 have been burned since 1980. And as Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit complained while visiting the Malibu fire scene, "fire-fighting is getting more expensive, more hazardous." The new density of hillside housing has transformed the battle against wildfire from a war of maneuver into the equivalent of street-fighting. But larger firefighting armies by themselves are no solution. One national forest official observed: "These fires in Malibu prove that you could throw in every fighter in the world and still can't stop it."

To resume Stephen Pyne's argument that the 1956 Malibu fire was the inauguration of a new fire regime, it may be that the 1991 Oakland fire ($1.7 billion insured damage) and the 1993 Southern California fire complex ($1 billion) marked a qualitative escalation in fire danger, if not the actual emergence of a new, post-suburban fire regime.
http://www.radicalurbantheory.com/mdavis/letmalibuburn-3.html