In 1995, urban theorist Mike Davis was pilloried for publishing an article entitled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” But more than twenty years later, as wildfires rage in California, illuminating the dangers of unregulated development, he’s being proven more right than wrong.

Davis, a former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, recently joined Suzi Weissman on Jacobin Radio, which you can listen and subscribe to here. They talked about the role of climate change in the fires, the prison inmates enlisted to fight them, and what the conflagrations say about the two Californias — “one rich on the coast, the other working-class in the Sierra Foothills.”