Peace Department Reflections: L.A. Wildfires
On the morning of January 7th, I received a deluge of messages concerning a small but angry fire that had started just above my children’s school in the Pacific Palisades. Even while desperately trying to get to my kids as ash began to rain down and ferocious winds whipped at my car, I couldn’t have fathomed the devastation that was coming. It’s a small fire, they will handle it in no time, I told myself. Wildfires don’t happen in California now, in the middle of winter. But climate change had come knocking at my family’s door in a way I never could have imagined.
I’ve lost count of how many families close to ours have lost their homes, their memories, their naive sense of untouchability and safety. On my middle son’s birthday, the flames came within feet of our front door, only to be kept at bay by the superhuman efforts of true heroes, even unlikely ones. Though our house miraculously stands, my children’s community has been wiped off the map. It’s a stark reminder that none of us are impervious to the forces of nature, which continue to become all the more virulent because of the choices we humans continue to make.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to my kids’ school, what the future holds. I’m overwhelmed with anxiety over my children’s emotional wellbeing and how to support those close to me reeling from catastrophic loss. I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy, but part of me is grateful for this experience because it’s brought me closer to the rest of the world and imbued me with a new sense of understanding. I write now from a place of safety, which communities impacted by climate or conflict, or the convergence of the two, never feel again once they’re forced to flee. By no means am I trying to equate our experiences. But I do now understand what it means to be forever changed by a climate event I cannot control, and what it feels like to lose a physical community, a sense of “home,” as a result of it.
Anthropogenic climate change may not have started these LA wildfires, but it’s absolutely what turbocharged them into fast and furious infernos of destruction that decimated entire towns – multiple on a single day – transforming once beautiful landscapes into a dystopian nightmare. The “hydroclimate whiplash” created by dramatic oscillations between intensely wet and dangerously dry conditions across the region in recent years meant that excessive growth of flammable brush and grass was followed by extreme dryness and warmth, turning Los Angeles into a veritable tinder box. When combined with cyclonic 100 mph winds that gobbled up five football fields per minute, our fair city didn’t stand a chance in the face of climate change’s disastrous effects.
It’s cruelly poetic that the Copernicus Institute released its annual climate summary while LA’s ring of fire continued to rage, confirming that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850. It was also the first year global mean temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.6°C, surpassing the 1.5 °C benchmark established by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. But wildfires are hardly the only bellwether of our warming world. This year also saw record levels of water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; record lows of sea ice around Antarctica; and record oceanic temperatures in the North Atlantic, Indian, and western Pacific Oceans. July 22, 2024, was the hottest single day ever recorded worldwide. The timing of this sobering report felt kismet – demonstrating to us through the world’s most primal and eternal symbol of destruction that our planet is in a state of dangerous disequilibrium.
Unfortunately, not everyone got the message. On January 20, 2025, freshly inaugurated President Donald Trump once again withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and signed multiple executive orders to supercharge fossil fuel production, curtail rights, and undo exiting President Joe Biden’s significant push towards alternative energy and just transition. “Drill, baby, drill” will certainly be a hindrance for sustainable development, but the good news is that not even the current governing trifecta can totally derail the global megatrend towards decarbonization.
Reversing momentum, both within the United States and globally, will not be seamless for a multitude of reasons, including the fact that more than half of the Biden-era clean energy investments and incentives are concentrated in Republican congressional districts and that further falling behind China’s dominance in the net zero transition is not in the US’s best interest. Though progress on sustainability is not where it needs to be by a long shot, the world is definitely changing. Even if President Trump does not take climate change and the energy transition seriously, the fact that the rest of the world increasingly does is a reality the United States simply cannot ignore.
Furthermore, even in the absence of federal leadership, subnational actors – states, cities, and especially local communities – are stepping up to fill the void. This unstoppable force of clean energy transition is fostering connection, resilience, and innovation towards a more sustainable and just future. So, it’s almost fitting that Trump’s inauguration day – when his resolve to dismantle green transition efforts was first flexed – fell on a national holiday celebrating Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., America’s greatest social justice leader.
Dr. King understood and advocated for environmental justice before the term even existed. His vision of racial equality was expansive and multifaceted, and he acknowledged the profound power of local, place-based interventions to move the needle in awe-inspiring ways. The convergence of his birthday with the beginning of an openly climate-hostile administration is an important reminder of our collective power to rise from the ashes and do great things when we act in service of one another and our shared home. It’s a reminder that I very much needed as my family and our community embark on our own journey to recovery. And, it’s a reminder that reaffirms the necessity of the work of organizations like The Peace Department, our partners, and the communities we work alongside and strive to uplift.
