From the beginning fire has defined Malibu in the American imagination. In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana described sailing northward from San Pedro to Santa Barbara in 1826 and seeing a vast blaze along the coast of José Tapia’s Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Despite—or, as we shall see, more likely because of—the Spanish prohibition of the Chumash and Tong-va Indian practice of annually burning the brush, mountain infernos repeatedly menaced Malibu through the nineteenth century.
But the pressure during the 1920s boom to open the coastal range to speculative subdivision was unrelenting. In the hyperbole of the era, occupation of the mountains became Los Angeles’s manifest destiny. “The day for the white invasion of the Santa Monicas has come,” declared real estate clairvoyant John Russell McCarthy in a booklet published by the Los Angeles Times in 1925. In anticipation of this land rush, the county sheriff had been arresting every vagrant in sight and putting them to work on chain gangs building roads through the rugged canyons just south of Rancho Malibu. (Radical critics at the time denounced this system as “deliberate real-estate graft” meant only to enhance land values in mountain districts “which the population of this city does not even know exists.”)
This essay gave me a lot to chew on, and I wanted to highlight these two excerpts in particular (bolded emphasis mine). Thanks for sharing. I don't think a "fuck settlers" captures the magnitude of what I'm feeling but it'll have to do for now.
When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire.
Very blunt. This article is from 2018. From the way the media is covering the fires, you’d never know that the area has a history (or maybe better put, an ecological rhythm) of wildfires. I certainly didn’t know!
I was only aware because my family has deep ties to the area. That said, even I, someone who was aware of how often it burns, was unaware of just how violent the fires have historically been.
Coming off from the recent Red Menace podcast, the smarter reactionaries are using articles like these to peddle soft climate change denial. Their line of argument is that the fire would've happened anyways due to mismanagement and just unwisely building in places where fires are prone to happen, which means that you can't use the fire as evidence for climate change. You could even see it within the article where only a single paragraph is devoted to climate change under a postscript, presumably because the original article is excerpts from a book published in 1998. If you delete that single paragraph, the entire article is completely compatible with a climate change denier despite being a good article in its own right. It's another one of those cases where something good is being weaponized by reactionaries to serve something bad.
Someone also mentioned this tactic on the recent Rev Left Radio ep on the fires. Great point.
I said the same thing about New Orleans after Katrina. Why are we witnessing catastrophe which is unavoidable and then throwing people back into the unavoidable catastrophe zones? People aren't supposed to live in certain places, and trying to force the issue not only makes a living hell for the people that inevitably get caught in a natural disaster, it also has detrimental effects on the surrounding ecosystems
