"A market-driven recipe for disaster"

Mike Davis on the wildfires in Southern California
"A market-driven recipe for disaster"

November 7, 2003 | Page 5

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...Two social processes are responsible for this explosive suburbanization of foothill and mountain hinterlands. First, wealthier (but generally not ruling class) households are aggressively seeking luxury country lifestyles (horses, view lots and so on) in low-tax unincorporated areas. Secondly, ordinary professional and working-class people are being driven inland by inflated land prices in the coastal zone.

Both processes, as many studies have shown, are directly subsidized by poorer residents in older, inner-ring suburbs or inner cities (they, in effect, subsidize their own decline). A rational, socially and environmentally responsible system of human settlement would halt growth at the edge and re-urbanize (not gentrify) metropolitan cores. It would set aside hazardous wildlands areas as a permanent commons, not a reserve for private land development.

The sprinkling of thousands of new homes in the chaparral and forests radically undermines fire prevention. Forestry and fire officials, finally accepting the wisdom of native Californians, now agree that the best strategy for preventing catastrophic wildfires is frequent, small-scale prescribed burning of old brush. It is, however, virtually impossible to carry this out on an adequate scale because of opposition from nearby homeowners fearing runaway fires or smoke pollution.

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The impact of climate change

THE SECOND "deep" factor, of course, is the increasing frequency of extreme weather: droughts, record-breaking temperatures (especially off-season) and even torrential precipitation. Although it is possible that the recent protracted droughts in the Southwest and parts of the South are simply normal Holocene fluctuations, it is more likely that they are expressions of human-forced climate change. This decade, after all, is the hottest in at least 1,000 years.

http://www.socialistworker.org/2003-2/475/475_05_MikeDavis.shtml