Mike Davis (RIP): The Case for Letting Malibu Burn [View all]

https://www.csun.edu/~rdavids/350fall08/350readings/Davis%20Case%20for%20Letting%20Malibu%20Burn.pdf

and

https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/

This is a chapter of his book, "The Ecology of Fear" - https://www.powells.com/book/ecology-of-fear-9781786636249

The hot, dry Santa Ana winds are a persistent feature of Malibu, known to the earliest European settlers and native people for centuries prior. The native vegetation is designed to undergo periodic brush fires to maintain itself. For example, some seeds will not germinated unless stressed by fire. Native Americans knew this and would perform regular burns until the Spanish forced them to cease.

By the end of the 1920s. Malibu had been opened up to development, largely luxury housing for the affluent. Protecting private housing for the affluent became the priority. There were many missed opportunities to set aside Malibu as a public preserve:

In hindsight, the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Only a few months before the disaster, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.—the nation’s foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system—had come out in favor of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain areas between Topanga and Point Dume. Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded the wisdom of Olmsted’s proposal for a great public domain in the Santa Monicas. The county of Los Angeles, for example, squandered an extraordinary opportunity in 1938 to acquire 17,000 acres of the bankrupt Rindge estate in exchange for $1.1 million in delinquent taxes. At a mere $64 per acre, it would have been the deal of the century.

Then as now private greed and exploitation of natural resources was the priority. Short term wealth triumphed over ecologically sustainable planning. Given the climate of the Southwestern US, which created the Santa Ana winds, and the geography of the mountains, which channeled these winds into fierce storms, the periodic destruction of Malibu became inevitable.

Public policy encouraged expansion into these dangerous fire-prone areas. Each new fire provided funding for more homes:

A perverse law of the new fire regime was that fire now stimulated both development and upward social succession. By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale as land use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire “victims.” As a result, renters and modest homeowners were displaced from areas like Broad Beach, Paradise Cove, and Point Dume by wealthy pyrophiles encouraged by artificially cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief, and an expansive public commitment to “defend Malibu.”