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Just like the plastics industry, which spun decades-long myths about plastic waste being recycled (it isn't, for the most part), the real estate industry is banking on us blaming climate change as the sole source of the wildfires, rather than California's land use policies. 1/
Since the late 80s, Big Oil has obscured the inability of recycling technology to process plastics, snuck recycling signs onto everything they could, and reaped massive profits selling new plastic made of oil, as public concern over plastic waste waned.2/ https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
This should sound familiar to anyone who's looked into the primary reasons for the amount of damage caused by fires in California. It's a cautionary tale about disentangling the environmental crisis from the industries that profit from the commodification of the environment. 3/
In CA, officials ignore the fire management practices of Indigenous communities and give into the lax land use policy pushed for by Big Real Estate. People build where they shouldn't. And developers & liberal politicians love it when we blame climate change for these fires. 4/
Mike Davis put it perfectly: "There’s a major, irresistible force working to keep people in ignorance and it’s called the real estate industry. There’s now such enormous profits to be made from building in cheaper, high fire frequency areas...” 5/ https://knock-la.com/the-maps-in-mike-davis-mind-1b759695d4aa
Anyway, climate change is serious and the politicians of this deep blue state aren't doing shit because they can always wave their hands and say that the problem is bigger and further from the hands of whatever level of government is under public pressure. 6/
But land use is something California's politicians absolutely *can* legislate at all levels, and they know we know it. The way we relate to and live on this precarious land needs to be under as much public scrutiny as environmental policy is. 7/
Davis wrote more about the way LA's development patterns relate to the constant threat of fire in "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn," something I'll post on here every single fire season. /8 https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/
