A curious social-media ritual repeats every time a major fire explodes in Southern California, and this month’s catastrophe was no exception. Between dispatches about evacuations and the hot takes and conspiracy posts that followed, the armchair urbanists got busy citing literature. First came the Joan Didion quotes about the fire-stoking Santa Ana winds (“I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew”). Arriving shortly thereafter were the links to “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” by Mike Davis, a 1995 essay that methodically lays out the history of Southern California’s troubled, delusional relationship to fire. For the past few weeks, that relationship has been tested in ways that even Didion and Davis couldn’t have fathomed when they wrote the words that now proliferate on social-media platforms.

Davis, who died in 2022, was best known for his sprawling 1990 best seller, City of Quartz, a withering analysis of Los Angeles’s development. His Malibu essay is a clear-eyed explanation of how areas such as Malibu have evolved to burn amid natural cycles of regeneration, and how, prior to the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous people practiced controlled burns in these areas to keep the landscape in balance. Total fire suppression, he writes, “the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel.” Davis also assails the unsustainable “firebelt suburbs,” whose presence compounded calamity while policy decisions were “camouflaged in a neutral discourse about natural hazards and public safety.” Malibu, he concludes, didn’t simply have a tendency to burn—it needed to burn. After this article, first published in 1995, reached wide audiences when it was included in his 1998 collection, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, many local homeowners were not pleased.

As ash rained down on my home in East Los Angeles from the Eaton Fire, so did the online invocations of Didion and Davis on wind and flame. In a catastrophe, people are tempted to search for a theory that will explain everything. But as I prepped a go bag in the event of an evacuation, I wondered whether these writings were what we should be reaching for in 2025.

I won’t be the first to declare that it’s time to give Didion’s Santa Ana melodramas a rest; some of her stories are more noir mythology than incontrovertible fact. Almost two decades ago, in fact, Davis himself poked fun at “lazy journalists” who use these disasters as an opportunity to trot out lines by Didion and other writers about how “the Santa Anas drive the natives to homicide and apocalyptic fever.” (If you must pontificate about the winds, quote Bad Religion’s 2004 song “Los Angeles Is Burning,” whose dark refrain succinctly references “the murder wind.”) On Davis, my verdict is split: His essay remains crucial to understanding the events that led to this moment, but after 30 years, it can’t account for the constellation of issues we now confront.

“The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” is uncannily prescient. Davis pored over decades of historical and scientific research and then proceeded to smartly (and colorfully) synthesize the history of fires in the Southern California ecology and the policies that made them worse. He dug into the psychology around fire—both the human urge to “fix” it technologically and the tendency to spin conspiracy theories around its untamability. And he aimed his most pointed barbs at the new subdivisions springing up on fire-prone hillsides—what he terms “sloping suburbia” but what news stories commonly call the “wildland-urban interface.”

[Read: How well-intended policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

A lot has changed since 1995. Among the biggest fires described in Davis’s essay is Malibu’s 1970 Wright Fire, which claimed 403 homes, 10 lives, and 31,000 acres of land, primarily brush. Compare that with the Woolsey Fire, which in 2018 roared through roughly the same terrain, incinerating 97,000 acres and destroying 1,600 structures. As I write this, greater Los Angeles faces not just one gargantuan fire but two. Together, the Eaton Fire, on the fringes of the Angeles National Forest, and the Palisades Fire, in the Santa Monica Mountains, have burned through almost 38,000 acres, damaged or destroyed more than 17,000 structures, and killed 27 people (that toll is likely to rise). Davis was once described as L.A.’s “dark prophet” for his bleak view of the forces that shaped the city. But the 2025 fires have demonstrated that perhaps he wasn’t bleak enough.

Although Davis did, over the course of his career, write about climate change—and he added a postscript on the topic when “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” was excerpted online by Longreads in 2018—his original essay does not contend with how the climate would set the stage for ever bigger blazes, fires with different causes, effects, and solutions than the cyclical events of the past. “This is a story about drought and lack of precipitation this winter,” Lenya Quinn-Davidson, the director of a statewide fire program for UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told me. “The extreme dryness combined with an exceptional wind event—to have those things concurrent is a recipe for disaster. Even if you had fuel breaks around those communities, even if you had prescribed burns”—a solution that Davis highlighted—”it might not have had any effect.”

Nor is Davis’s wildland-urban interface what it once was. The Eaton Fire (which likely began as a wildland fire in Eaton Canyon) quickly spread to urban areas of Altadena, razing commercial thoroughfares and ravaging homes that had been around for more than a century. The Palisades Fire likewise reached deep into residential developments, igniting homes and schools that sit just half a mile—and a few wind-whipped embers—from the border of densely populated Santa Monica. “In the ’90s … there were much fewer incidences of fires burning into communities,” Quinn-Davidson said. That has changed over the past 10 years; wildfires are no longer staying wild.   

Class and wealth also provided an important frame for Davis’s essay. He documented a tremendous gap between the hefty resources deployed toward fighting fire in well-to-do exurbs and the meager funds allocated to quash fires in L.A.’s poorer urban core (most of these caused by a lack of regulation in old tenement buildings). Today, the class disparities remain, but the particulars have changed. The real-estate magnate Rick Caruso hired private firefighters to watch over his Brentwood home as other homeowners faced down the flames with garden hoses. And as wildfires penetrate farther into the city, it’s not just wealthy sloping suburbia that’s getting scorched. The Palisades Fire wiped out a mobile-home park; the Eaton Fire destroyed a multigenerational Black middle-class enclave in Altadena. For everyone but billionaires, fire has become a threat at every level of class and wealth.

Some positive change has occurred since Davis first published his essay; more of the controlled burns he advocated for have become a tool of forest management, preventing the accumulation of dried brush that can turn into kindling with the tiniest spark. Indigenous people, including the Tongva and Chumash, practiced managed burning for millennia prior to colonization. Although some controlled burns were allowed on federal land starting in the 1960s, residential areas long resisted the remedy, thinking them risky or visually unappealing. (In his essay, Davis describes a Topanga Canyon homeowner fearful of what such a burn could do to their property values.) In more recent decades, however, the practice has spread. In California’s north, regular burns are led by Yurok and Karuk practitioners. Near San Diego, in the south, the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians has a “burn boss” in the ranks of the reservation’s fire department. In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to promote the practice.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

But the hopeful idea that small fires might save us from big ones is hard to reckon with in the era of climate change. In 2019 and 2020, wildfires in Australia resulted in the loss of nearly 25 million acres of vegetation, 34 human lives, and more than 3 billion terrestrial vertebrates. In 2023, drought and unusually high temperatures led to the immolation of 37 million acres of Canadian land. That same year, another deadly fire destroyed the Maui community of Lahaina. Late last year, New York City’s drought-wracked Prospect Park burst into flames. In attempting to understand fire at this scale, it might be time to set aside Davis and turn to the work of Stephen J. Pyne, a fire historian whom Davis not only cited in “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” but also counted as a friend.

In his 2021 book, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, Pyne provides a compelling (if rather jargon-filled) geologic and cultural history of fire, describing the types of burns that have shaped our planet. There is fire in the wild (such as a wildfire generated by lightning), fire set and monitored by humans (a cooking fire, say, or the controlled burn of a field), and the perpetual flame that consumes fossil fuels: the ignition of a car’s engine, the flare stacks at a power plant, the electricity that powers the smartphone on which we share essays about fire. This third type of fire is what makes it feasible for people to commute to sloping suburbias and fuels the helicopters that fight the fires that encircle them. It is the fire that has remapped the surface of the Earth, even in places that rarely see literal flames. “Not every place has to burn to be influenced by fire’s reach,” Pyne writes. “It’s enough for combustion’s consequences, in this case on climate, to shape biogeography.”

In “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Davis asks Californians to reexamine the way that they live on the land. Pyne does the same at the scale of our planet. The Pyrocene sharply critiques our reliance on fossil fuels and endless sprawl, as well as our inability to live with fire in the way that nature intended. “We don’t need new science or more science,” he writes. “We already know what needs to happen (in truth, we used to know much of it before we got greedy and forgot).” Pyne updates and expands on Davis, but their goals are similar: not to tell us what to do but to remind us why it matters, even when (or where) the world isn’t in flames. In Southern California, we are currently feeling the burn, but the fire is everywhere.

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

One of the worst-kept secrets in Los Angeles is a 130-acre swath of chaparral. On perfect weekend afternoons, I have walked my dog among the crowds at Runyon Canyon Park, a piece of rolling scrub nestled in the Hollywood Hills. I’d go more often if finding parking on Mulholland Drive wasn’t nearly impossible. In a city that loves the outdoors, Runyon is the premier Sunday-afternoon trail: a dusty-chic destination for after-brunch hikers, families, couples on first dates, and everyone else from around the city to get in steps, spot movie stars, or both. What makes the area so popular is that it’s a mountain hike in the middle of the city—across the freeway from Universal Studios and over the hill from the Hollywood Bowl. Rugged paths lead downhill to meet Hollywood Boulevard, close to the Walk of Fame.

As colossal wildfires have raged across L.A.—the most destructive in the city’s history—Runyon Canyon has not been spared. Last week, a blaze erupted in the heart of the park, forcing some nearby Hollywood residents to flee. Mercifully, firefighters halted the march of the flames before they turned into another major fire. But the blaze still left a 43-acre scar across the expanse. Treasured trails are charred.

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

Compared with all that has been lost here in L.A., the devastation of Runyon Canyon and other hiking trails is trivial. Colleagues of mine have lost their homes. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, and winds threaten to keep fanning the flames. At least 25 people have died. Against the grim scale of this disaster, those ruined trails are a quieter kind of loss that the city will have to reckon with. Core to L.A.’s identity is easy access to nature—wild trails and canyons and vistas—along with perfect weather for visiting them almost any day of the year. Even the Hollywood sign is at the end of a hike. Just like that, many of the signature places to get outdoors have been wiped out.

The city burns because the city is wild. Multiple mountain ranges that demarcate the disparate communities of Los Angeles County create picturesque settings for homes—in dangerous proximity to scrub that is prone to catching fire. Those same areas house an ample supply of easily accessible trailheads that make these peaks and canyons our backyard. On the trails, dadcore REI hikers like me intermingle with athleisure-clad Angelenos who look like they started walking uphill from an Erewhon and wandered into mountain-lion territory. We cross paths with flocks of students carrying Bluetooth speakers, 5 a.m. trail runners, and tourists who underestimated the ascent to Griffith Observatory.

Any given morning in the secluded heights of Pacific Palisades, you would have found hikers on the hunt for a precious legal parking spot between the driveways. From there, well-worn paths lead through Temescal and Topanga Canyons, up to lookout points where hikers could watch the city meet the sea. It now appears this beloved area is destroyed. The horrific Palisades Fire may have started at a spot near the popular Temescal Ridge trail. Despite heroic, lifesaving firefighting, the fire continues to burn deeper into Topanga State Park. Gorgeous hiking country above Pacific Palisades may be closed off to the public for years as the area recovers.

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa

The Eaton Fire, the other major blaze, has also claimed some of the most beautiful spots around L.A. The fire’s namesake, Eaton Canyon, is home to a waterfall so photogenic that you once had to make a reservation to hike its trail. The blaze has burned up that walk, along with so many more in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains: trails that take you to Echo Mountain, Millard Falls, or toward the historic Mount Wilson Observatory that overlooks the city.

These bits of the outdoors have defined my life here, as they have for so many others. Those San Gabriel hikes are where my wife and I spent much of our time during the pandemic. The month after we got our dog, Watson, in 2020, the world shut down. There was nothing to do but hike. We drove to the trailheads that dot the Angeles Crest Highway, where hikers’ dirty Subarus dodge the gearheads who test their modified racers on the mountain curves. We parked in now-devastated parts of Altadena to get lost in the stunning foothills. We walked among the yucca all spring until Southern California’s unrelenting summer sun forced us indoors.

Much of L.A.’s nature still remains intact, of course. But even before the current fires, the sprawling Angeles National Forest that houses those peaks and trails of the San Gabriel Mountains has had it tough. In the autumn of 2020, the Bobcat Fire burned all the way across the range from north to south, torching 100,000-plus acres. This past fall, the Bridge Fire burned new patches of the mountains, with flames creeping toward the mountain town of Wrightwood and the ski slopes. Some of the areas my wife and I would traverse during the pandemic were decimated during these previous fires, and they are still recovering.

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

Los Angeles County was ready to burn. The wet winters of the past two years helped keep the big blazes at bay. The current mix of drought and ferocious winds have proved to be prime conditions for a major fire. These conditions will inevitably return, and they will bring more flames that scorch L.A.’s trails. Yet the growing incidence of wildfire, and its threat to our most loved natural spaces, is far more than a California story. Forest fires are getting worse all around the globe; nearly a third of Americans live somewhere threatened by wildfire. National parks, forests, and other irreplaceable places for communing with nature are under threat. Last month, a 500-acre fire sparked by a downed power line burned up a big chunk of a national forest in North Carolina. In November, a brush fire broke out in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Here in L.A., the city has only started to contend with the toll of these wildfires. On top of the lives, homes, and businesses, the legacy of the destruction will include natural areas. Los Angeles is hiking to Skull Rock just as much as it’s rolling down Imperial Highway. It is the studio lot and the Santa Monica Mountains. The open spaces all around us invite Angelenos to ditch the concrete grid for the wandering switchbacks. With so many trails that are damaged and closed, the mountains aren’t calling quite as loudly as they used to.

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa

In Los Angeles, we live with fire. There is even a season—fire season, which does not end until the rains come. This winter, the rains have not come. What has come is fire. And Angelenos have been caught off guard, myself included.

Tuesday mid-morning, a windstorm hit L.A. In the Palisades, a neighborhood in the Santa Monica Mountains that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, a blaze broke out. Over the past two days, it has burned more than 17,234 acres and destroyed at least 1,000 structures. The Palisades Fire will almost certainly end up being the most expensive in California history. It is currently not at all contained.

By Tuesday night, another fire had sparked—this time in the San Gabriel Mountains, near Altadena, where winds had been clocked at 100 miles an hour and sent embers flying miles deep into residential and commercial stretches of the city. By mid-morning yesterday, the Eaton Fire had consumed 1,000 structures and more than 10,600 acres. It, too, is zero percent contained. Together, the fires have taken at least five lives.

Last night, just before 6 p.m., another fire erupted in Runyon Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills. Like the Palisades and Eaton Fires, the Sunset Fire seems to have first broken out in the dry chaparral scrub whipped by the roaring winds. The hillside there is particularly dense with homes, and the neighborhood is jammed up against the even denser, urban L.A., where apartment buildings quickly give way to commercial blocks. One of this city’s many charms is its easy access to nature, but nature is also the cause of its current apocalypse.

Living through these fires, I’ve struggled to understand the scale of the event; to see the threat for what it is and respond appropriately. My family lives in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood 20 miles from the Palisades with a whole mountain range in between. On Tuesday, while driving on the freeway, I saw the colossal thunderhead of gray smoke of the Palisades Fire erupting from the Santa Monica Mountains and decided: This is fine. I finished my errand. I went on with my day.

When I got home, I turned on KTLA, which was broadcasting live from Palisades Drive, where dozens of cars, trapped in evacuation traffic, had been abandoned by their fleeing owners. A man ran up to the reporter, removed his face mask, and spoke into the microphone. Looking directly at the camera, he implored viewers to leave their keys in their car if they were going to flee, so that the fire crews could get to the fire unimpeded. The guy looked familiar. The reporter asked him to identify himself. It was Steve Guttenberg. Mahoney from Police Academy! Only in L.A.

The wind was making a constant low, terrible moan through the trees. Every few minutes, a violent gust would blast through and rattle the house. That afternoon, I went to pick up my kids, who had been kept inside their school all day. At home, I let them run around outside, but everyone’s eyes got itchy. There was so much dust in the air. Still, the only fire I knew of was all the way across town, so I went out again that evening to see a movie.  

At intermission, a friend returned from the restroom and told me that my wife had been trying to reach me. I turned my phone off airplane mode and called her; when she picked up, she told me a neighbor had just knocked on our door to tell her that a brush fire was burning nearby. It was close, she said. How close? I asked.

Across the street, she said. Like, can you see it? From our house? She said no. I’m coming home, I told her.

Driving back, I saw a huge, glowing gash in the San Gabriel Mountains—the Eaton Fire. I thought about what needed to happen when I got home: the go bags we should pack, the box of birth certificates and Social Security cards. A photo album or two. I’d park the car facing out, for a quicker exit. I’d move some potentially long-burning objects (trash cans) as far from the house as possible.

I knew what to do. I knew the procedure. I’d reported on fires before. Hell, the home I’d grown up in was nearly burned down by wildfires twice in 2017, and my aunt and uncle had lost their home in Santa Rosa that same year. I’d interviewed firefighters about days just like this one—when the Santa Anas howl and it hasn’t rained for eight months or longer, the chaparral is a tinderbox, and fires begin popping up everywhere.

And yet, I hadn’t thought that it could happen down the street. I hadn’t considered that it could happen to me and my family.

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

I arrived home just after 9 p.m. First neighbors with hoses, then the fire department, had doused the blaze nearby. I worked through my checklist, packed the kids a bag of clothes, then my wife and I packed small bags of our own. A thought nagged at me: All day, I’d been looking at fire—why hadn’t I seen the immediacy of the threat? I pulled out a book called Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry, which I find extremely calming in intense moments because it presents an extended argument for the benefits of thought and practice during emergency situations. “CPR is knowable; one can learn it if one chooses,” Scarry writes. “But one cannot know who will one day be the recipient of that embodied knowledge … It is available to every person whose path crosses one’s own.”

What we do during emergencies, when the habits of the everyday (getting out of your car, keys in hand) come face-to-face with the extraordinary (a fire by the side of the road), requires extraordinary thinking. And we would be wise to insert these acts of thinking into our everyday habits. We perform a version of this constantly: We call it “deliberation.” Mostly, we spend very little time between deliberation and action. But emergency-style deliberation is difficult, because true emergencies are rare. It is hard for us to conceive of them happening until they are.

The drivers who locked their car doors and left with their keys were not thinking within the framework of the fire as a threat. A fire doesn’t steal one’s car; it burns it down. I had been no different in my thinking that day. Maybe I was worse: I had the knowledge of what to do in a fire, but I hadn’t even considered the realistic possibility that the fire presented a threat to my family.

I spent most of Tuesday night awake. The wind remained terrible. The smell of smoke began to fill the house. I rolled up towels and stuck them at the foot of the doors. Yesterday morning, just after 7 a.m., our phones buzzed with an alert: an evacuation warning for our corner of the neighborhood and much of nearby Pasadena. We hustled our kids through breakfast, packed up, and got out. Our going was optional, but at least 100,000 other Angelenos are under mandatory evacuation, a number that is surely growing higher as all of these fires continue to burn.

We left with the little we’d packed in our go bags, which was clarifying. I felt a weight lift. This was everything that truly mattered. Rereading Scarry had reminded me: I did not learn to perform CPR until I was about to be a father, until the possibility of having to perform it seemed a bit more real. I still, thankfully, have never had to. But will I retrain myself? Should I be practicing? We motored on through traffic. After a while, the smoke began to clear, just enough to see patches of sky. I will schedule that CPR retraining, I thought. That’s something I should do. When we can get home and catch our breath.