Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table. In his laundry room was a Gibson guitar signed by the Everly Brothers; near his fireplace, a white Stratocaster signed to him by Eric Clapton.

Last month, the night the Eaton Fire broke out, Charlie evacuated to his girlfriend’s house. And when he came back, the remnants of his home had been bleached by the fire. The spot in the family room where the record collection had been was dark ash.

I’ve known Charlie for as long as I can remember. He and my father met because of records. In the late 1980s, Charlie was at a crowded party in the Hollywood Hills when he heard someone greet my father by his full name. Charlie whipped around: “You’re Fred Walecki? I’ve been seeing your name on records.” Dad owned a rock-and-roll-instrument shop, and musicians thanked him on their albums for the gear (and emotional support) he provided during recording sessions. Charlie was a national sales manager at Warner Bros. Records and could rattle off the B-side of any record, so of course he’d clocked Walecki appearing over and over again. Growing up, I thought every song I’d ever heard could also be found on Charlie’s shelves; his friend Jim Wagner, who once ran sales, merchandising, and advertising for Warner Bros. Records, called it the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame West.

Charlie’s collection started when he was 6. He had asked his mother to get him the record “about the dog,” and she’d brought back Patti Page’s “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” No, not that one—he wanted a 45 of Elvis’s recently released single, “Hound Dog.” He’d cart it around with him for the next seven decades, across several states, before placing it on his shelf in Altadena. At age 8, he mowed lawns and shoveled snow in his hometown outside Chicago to afford “Sweet Little Sixteen,” by Chuck Berry, and “Tequila,” by the Champs; when he was 9, he got Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” And when he was 10, he walked into his local record shop and found its owner, Lenny, sitting on the floor, frazzled, surrounded by piles of records. Every week, Lenny had to rearrange the records on his wall to reflect the order of the Top 40 chart made by the local radio station WLS. Charlie offered to help.

“What will it cost me?” Lenny asked.

“Two singles a week.” Charlie held on to all of those singles, and the paper surveys from WLS, too.

When he was 12, he bought his first full albums: Surfin’ Safari, by the Beach Boys; Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut; and Green Onions, by Booker T. and the M.G.s. He entered a Wisconsin seminary two years later, hoping to become a priest. There, he and his friends found a list of addresses for members of Milwaukee’s Knights of Columbus chapter, and sent out letters asking for donations—a hi-fi stereo console, a jukebox—to the poor seminarians, who went without so much. Radios were contraband, but Charlie taped one underneath the chair next to his bed, and at night, while 75 other students slept around him, he would use an earbud to listen to WLS. “And I would hear records, and I would go, Oh my God, I gotta get this record. I have to. ” Seminarians could go into town only if it was strictly necessary, so he’d break his glasses, and run between the optometrist and the five-and-dime. That’s how he got a couple of other Beach Boys records, the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You,” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.”

Charlie dropped out of seminary in 1967, at the end of his junior year. All of those five-and-dime records had been in his prefect’s room, but when he left, the prefect was nowhere to be found. So, Charlie got a ladder, wriggled through a transom, and got his collection, stored in two crates which had previously contained oranges. (“Orange crates held albums perfectly,” he told me.) Then he hitchhiked to San Francisco and grew his hair out just in time for the Summer of Love. He moved into a commune of sorts, a 16-unit apartment building with the walls between apartments broken down, and got a job hanging posters for the Fillmore on telephone poles around the Bay Area. He’d staple up psychedelic artwork advertising Jefferson Airplane, Sons of Champlin, the Grateful Dead, or Sly and the Family Stone. (He still had about 75 of those posters.) He worked at Tower Records on the side but would hand his paycheck back to his boss: The money all went to records. Anytime one of his favorites—Morrison, Mitchell, Dylan, the Beach Boys—released a new album, he’d host a listening party for friends. When he moved back to Chicago, his music collection took up most of the car. The record store he managed there, Hear Here, would receive about 20 new albums every day to play over the loudspeakers. When Charlie heard Bruce Springsteen’s first album (two before Born to Run), he thought it was such a hit, he locked the shop door. “Until I sell five of these records,” he announced, “nobody is getting out of this store.”

Next, Charlie worked his way up at a music-distribution company, starting from a gig in the warehouse (picker No. 9). Later, at Warner Bros. Records, he’d work with stores and radio stations to help artists sell enough music to get, and then sustain, their big break. To sell Takin’ It to the Streets, he drove with the Doobie Brothers so they could sign albums at a Kansas City record shop; to help Dire Straits get their start, he lobbied radio stations to play their first single for about a year until it caught on. He was also on the shortlist of people who would listen to test pressings of a new album for any pops or crackles, before the company shipped the final version. Charlie held on to about 1,000 of those rare pressings, including Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Prince’s Purple Rain.

He moved to Los Angeles in the ’80s to be Warner’s national sales manager, and in 1991, he bought his home on Skylane Drive, in Altadena. Nestled in the foothills, the area smelled of the hay for his neighbors’ horses. Along the fence was bougainvillea, and in his yard, a magnificent native oak that our families would sit beneath together. He started placing thousands of his albums on those shelves in the family room, overlooking that tree.

In Charlie’s house, a record was always playing. He had recently papered the walls and ceiling of his bathroom with the WLS surveys he started collecting as a child, in his first record-store job. Every record he pulled off the shelf came with a memory, he told me. And if he kept an album or a memento in his house, “it was a good story.”

A gold record from U2, on the wall next to the staircase: “All bands, when they first start off, they’re new bands, and nobody knows who they are, okay? … I went up with U2, on their first album, from Chicago to Madison, and they played a gig for about 15 people, and then we went to eat at an Italian restaurant. I went back to the restaurant a couple years later, and the same waitress waited on me, and I said, ‘Wow, I remember I was in here with U2.’ And she goes, ‘Those guys were U2?’ I was like, ‘They were U2 then and they’re U2 now.’”

In the kitchen, a poster of Jimi Hendrix striking a power chord at the Monterey Pop Festival: “Seal puts his first record out, and I have just become a vice president at Warner Bros. And I go to my very first VP lunch, and I announce, ‘Hey, this new Seal record is going to go gold.’ The senior VP of finance says, ‘You shouldn’t say that. Why would you make that kind of expectation?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I know with every corpuscle in my body it’s gonna go gold’ … So we make a $1 gentlemen’s bet. About six weeks later, it’s gold.” At the next lunch, he asked the finance executive to sign his dollar bill. Just then, Mo Ostin, the head of the label, walked in and heard about their wager. “Mo said, ‘So Charlie, is there something around the building that you always liked?’ I was like, ‘Well, that Jim Marshall poster of Hendrix.’ And he goes, ‘It’s yours.’”

*Illustration sources: RCA / Michael Ochs Archive / Getty; Stoughton Printing / Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Warner Brothers / Alamy; Sun Records / Alamy

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.

The cruel reality of living through a moment of catastrophic change is that the knowledge of how many other people are also living through it offers no comfort. It is happening to you: Your house is gone. Your father’s paintings are gone. Your hundreds of hours of footage, meant to be your film, gone. Your family’s efforts, across a whole generation, to establish financial stability, literally up in smoke. That this is also happening to other people is awful. As is knowing that it will almost certainly happen again.

Los Angeles is still smoldering. The winds have died down, but the Palisades Fire is just 39 percent contained, and the Eaton Fire is 65 percent. Many residents are under instructions not to drink their tap water, which ash and melted pipes may have contaminated. Tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders are still waiting to return, perhaps to a burned-out lot, or perhaps to a house still standing but coated in the toxic remains of everything around it.

The fires were, at their worst, unfightable. But destruction at this scale was not inevitable. The question now is what measures anyone will take to limit the damage next time.

Because there will be a next fire. The vegetation—fire fuel—will grow back, fire season will keep lengthening into wind season, and the combination of drought and wind will nurse an errant spark. Fire is part of the ecology in California; a century of suppressing it has only set up modern blazes to be more intense.

The way places such as California prepare for these fires has to change, or more neighborhoods will end up in ruins. Insurance is meant to insulate people from bearing the costs of extraordinary events, but those are becoming ordinary enough that private insurers have been leaving California. The state’s FAIR Plan, a pooled insurance plan of last resort, is oversubscribed, and may not be able to cover the claims from these fires alone. If it exercises its power to demand that private insurers help cover the difference, that could send even more fleeing. These are all signs that the state’s magical thinking about fire risk has exhausted itself.

[Read: Are you sure your house is worth that much?]

“California is like a driver that’s had five car accidents,” Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now heads a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford University, told me. The state is at proven risk of catastrophic loss. But because California has spent years trying to keep insurance rates somewhat reasonable, those (still high) rates don’t reflect the real risk homeowners face. This creates a problem further up the insurance food chain: Insurers rely on reinsurers—insurance companies for insurance companies—who, Wara said, “are supposed to lose one in 100 times … They’re not supposed to lose, like, four times out of 10, which is kind of where we’re on track for in California.”

If a few of those companies stop insuring the insurers, there aren’t necessarily others to step in. The state is trying to stave off a reinsurance crisis by allowing insurers to incorporate more risk probability and reinsurance prices into their rates, as of last year. But California could still turn into Florida, where all but the most local insurers are leaving the state, or going belly-up, and insurance in places can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Because coverage is generally required for anyone seeking a mortgage, soaring rates in California could drive home values down, threatening yet another crisis, this one in real estate. And if existing homeowners can’t get insurance, they’ll be left bearing the cost of catastrophes all on their own, like many in the burn area around Los Angeles are now.

If nothing changes, more people will get sucked into this doom spiral, because California cannot avoid some level of catastrophe. Wind-driven fires like the ones in L.A. throw embers far ahead of themselves, leading to conflagrations that firefighters can’t stop, and the fastest fires are growing faster now. Transferring those risks to insurance will become less and less affordable as the climate warms and more people live in the zone where cities meet wildlands, because the catastrophic risk to homes is high and getting higher. As Nancy Watkins, an actuary at Milliman who specializes in catastrophic property risk, told me, “That actually is not an insurance problem. It’s a risk problem.”

To bring down risk, she wants to see neighborhoods embark on ambitious missions to “harden” homes and the landscape around them, and then see insurance companies account for those efforts. If each homeowner has removed vegetation from the first five feet around their house, if the neighborhood has kept its roads clear and made firebreaks where fire would be likeliest to enter, a place has much less of a chance of burning down, even in major fires. Plenty of communities, even the most fire-prone ones, still don’t do this. Watkins imagines a future database in which each parcel of land is inspected for fire-readiness, so that each neighborhood can be profiled for fire safety and insurers can price rates accordingly. Creating this system would take major effort, she knows, but it would motivate collective action: If it meant the difference between your whole neighborhood getting insurance and being uninsured, you would probably clean up your yard and screen your vents.

Watkins herself lives in the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, a highly flammable area outside San Francisco, which Wara’s research has identified as one of the top three places where the worst overnight losses could occur, from an insurance perspective. (Another was Pacific Palisades.) She was one of many in her area who got a nonrenewal notice from her insurer last year. Now she’s making her plot as fire-proof as possible, in hopes of coaxing an insurer back. It’s like staging a property for sale, she said: “We’re staging our home for insurability right now.” She cut down a 10-year-old manzanita tree and pulled out her mint garden, but so far she’s kept the Japanese maple that came with the house and turns a brilliant red in the fall. Once she has fire-proofed the rest of the property, she plans to invite a fire-chief friend over for dinner and ask, How bad is the maple? “And then do what they say,” she told me.

But unless her neighbors make similar efforts, Watkins’s risk will still be elevated. And taking these measures can be politically unpopular. Dave Winnacker, who was the fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District until his retirement last month, told me about trying to pass an ordinance that would require homeowners to keep a five-foot perimeter around their house free of flammable material; the public comments were overwhelmingly in opposition, even though these borders are proved to cut a house’s risk of burning down, he said. Residents called it a draconian overreach that would make their home unsightly and bring down property values. He chose that moment to retire. He didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure to act the next time fire arrived.

When communities do act, it can save them. Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer at UC Merced, studied what happened to Montecito, California—the town of Harry and Meghan, and Oprah—after it decided in the 1990s to take fire prevention seriously. From 1999 to 2017, the town spent $1.6 million total clearing brush, maintaining evacuation paths, building fuelbreaks, and working with homeowners to make sure they’d cleared vegetation around their houses. When the Thomas Fire came through in 2017—a worst-case-scenario fire for the region, with wind speeds around 75 miles an hour—Montecito could have lost 450 to 500 homes, Kolden’s research showed. Instead it lost just seven. Yards in Montecito do look a little different from others in California. But “there’s a lot of really gorgeous landscaping that does not burn,” Kolden told me. Succulents and other fire-resistant plants—think giant agaves—can be close to houses; rock gardens can be beautiful. Palm trees are fine if they’re well-manicured enough that they wouldn’t throw off flaming fronds, as some in L.A. did this week.

For a wealthy community such as Montecito, less than $2 million across almost 20 years is by no means prohibitively expensive. And according to Wara’s research, the state could help fund projects like these at relatively low cost. By spending about $3 billion a year—less than Cal Fire’s total fire-suppression budget in 2020, by his calculation—the state could harden about 100,000 homes a year, starting in the most fire-prone areas, and build fuelbreaks in every highly threatened community. That would also cover preventive burns on every acre that needs them, to prevent larger fires later.

Of course, landscaping and building better-sealed homes won’t change the fact that the biggest California fires are getting more intense. Climate change is creating more suitable conditions for the worst conflagrations to arise, and they will, again and again, with greater frequency now. Slowing that trajectory is a matter of global action. But yet here Angelenos are, living at the scale of their homes, their parcels of the Earth. Fires in California are like hurricanes in Florida. They’re going to happen, and people will live in their path. Stopping them from happening is impossible. But minimizing the damage they wreak is not.

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 an ember storm, every opening in a house is a portal to hell. A vent without a screen, a crack in the siding, a missing roof tile—each is an opportunity for a spark to smolder. A gutter full of dry leaves is a cradle for an inferno. Think of a rosebush against a bedroom window: fire food. The roses burn first, melting the vinyl seal around the window. The glass pane falls. A shoal of embers enter the house like a school of glowing fish. Then the house is lost.

As the Palisades Fire, just 8 percent contained this morning, and the Eaton Fire, still uncontained, devour Los Angeles neighborhoods, one thing is clear: Urban fire in the U.S. is coming back. For generations, American cities would burn in era-defining conflagrations: the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the San Francisco fires of 1906. Then came fire-prevention building codes, which made large city burns a memory of a more naive time. Generations of western firefighters turned, instead, toward wildland burns, the big forest devastations. An urban conflagration was the worst-case scenario, the one they hoped they’d never see. And for a long time, they mostly didn’t.

Now more people live at the flammable edges of wildlands, making places that are primed to burn into de facto suburbs. That, combined with the water whiplash that climate change has visited on parts of California—extraordinarily wet years followed by extraordinarily dry ones—means the region is at risk for urban fire once again. And our ability to fight the most extreme fire conditions has reached its limit. The Palisades Fire alone has already destroyed more than 5,300 structures and the Eaton Fire more than 4,000, making both among the most destructive fires in California’s history. When the worst factors align, the fires are beyond what firefighting can meaningfully battle. With climate change, this type of fire will only grow more frequent.

The start of the Palisades and Eaton Fires was a case of terrible timing: A drought had turned abundant vegetation into crisp fire fuel, and the winter rains were absent. A strong bout of Santa Ana winds made what was already probable fire weather into all but a guarantee. Something—it remains to be seen what—ignited these blazes, and once they started, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. The winds, speeding up to 100 miles an hour at times, sent showers of embers far across the landscape to ignite spot fires. The high winds meant that traditional firefighting was, at least in the beginning, all but impossible, David Acuna, a battalion chief for Cal Fire, told me: He saw videos of firefighters pointing their hoses toward flames, and the wind blowing the water in the other direction. And for a while, fire planes couldn’t fly. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered, Acuna said. The fire retardant or water they would have dropped would have blown away, like the hose water. “It’s just physics,” he said.

California, and Southern California in particular, has some of the most well-equipped firefighting forces in the world, which have had to think more about fire than perhaps any other in the United States. On his YouTube livestream discussing the fires, the climate scientist Daniel Swain compared the combined fleet of vehicles, aircraft, and personnel to the army of a small nation. If these firefighters couldn’t quickly get this fire contained, likely no one could. This week’s series of fires is testing the upper limits of the profession’s capacity to fight wind-driven fires under dry conditions, Swain said, and rather than call these firefighters incompetent, it’s better to wonder how “all of this has unfolded despite that.”  

The reality is that in conditions like these, once a few houses caught fire in the Pacific Palisades, even the best firefighting could likely do little to keep the blaze from spreading, Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now directs a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford, told me. “Firefighting is not going to be effective in the context we saw a few days ago,” when winds were highest, he said. “You could put a fire truck in every driveway and it would not matter.” He recounted that he was once offered a job at UCLA, but when the university took him to look at potential places to live in the Pacific Palisades, he immediately saw hazards. “It had terrible evacuation routes, but also the street layout was aligned with the Santa Ana winds so that the houses would burn down like dominoes,” he said. “The houses themselves were built very, very close together, so that the radiant heat from one house would ignite the house next door.”

In California, the shift toward ungovernable fires in populated places has been under way for several years. For the former Cal Fire chief deputy director Christopher Anthony, who retired in 2023, the turning point was 2017, when wildfires in populated places in Northern California’s wine country killed 44 people and burned nearly a quarter million acres. The firefighting profession, he told me, started to recognize then that fortifying communities before these more ferocious blazes start would be the only meaningful way to change their outcome. The Camp Fire, which decimated the town of Paradise in 2018, “was the moment that we realized that this wasn’t, you know, an anomaly,” he said. The new fire regime was here. This new kind of fire, once begun, would “very quickly overwhelm the operational capabilities of all of the fire agencies to be able to effectively respond,” he said.

As Wara put it, in fires like these, houses survive, or don’t, on their own. Sealed against ember incursion with screened vents, built using fire-resistant materials, separated from anything flammable—fencing, firewood, but especially vegetation—by at least five feet, a house has a chance. In 2020, California passed a law (yet to be enforced) requiring such borders around houses where fire hazard is highest. It’s a hard sell, having five feet of stone and concrete lining the perimeter of one’s house, instead of California’s many floral delights. Making that the norm would require a serious social shift. But it could meaningfully cut losses, Kate Dargan, a former California state fire marshal, told me.

Still, eliminating the risk of this type of wind-driven fire is now impossible. Dargan started out in wildland firefighting in the 1970s, but now she and other firefighters see the work they did, of putting out all possible blazes, as “somewhat misguided.” Fire is a natural and necessary part of California’s ecosystem, and suppressing it entirely only stokes bigger blazes later. She wants to see the state further embrace preventative fires, to restore it to its natural cycles. But the fires in Southern California this week are a different story, unlikely to have been prevented by prescribed burns alone. When the humidity drops low and the land is in the middle of a drought and the winds are blowing at 100 miles an hour, “we’re not going to prevent losses completely,” Dargan said. “And with climate change, those conditions are likely to occur more frequently.” Avoiding all loss would mean leaving L.A. altogether.

Rebuilding means choosing a different kind of future. Dargan hopes that the Pacific Palisades rebuilds with fire safety in mind; if it does, it will have a better chance of not going through this kind of experience again. Some may still want to grow a rosebush outside their window. After this is over, the bargaining with nature will begin. “Every community gets to pick how safe they want to be,” Dargan said.

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.