I keep rewatching a video of a McDonald’s in flames in Los Angeles. Blazing palm trees are buffeted by extreme winds. Sparks fly from the golden arches. It feels like an image out of Mike Davis’s 1998 book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.

Writing there about a fire five years earlier, Davis argued that if Southern Californians seemed “unprepared for this trial by fire,” the region had little excuse. “The conflagrations of 1993 came down grimly familiar pathways” and there had been “no shortage of omens.”

In the case of today’s still-raging fires in Los Angeles, it’s far too early to know precisely what caused them. But omens have been plentiful.

For decades, environmental activists have been shouting from the rooftops that Southern California will be increasingly vulnerable to more and worse wildfires as global temperatures continue to climb. But despite their urging, little movement has been made. In 2019, the phrase “Green New Deal” was everywhere, a punchy way of summarizing a range of proposals for the federal government to take dramatic action to arrest climate change, rapidly converting the nation’s energy infrastructure, and creating millions of union jobs in the process. Today the slogan can feel like a curious relic of a bygone era, like those Whip Inflation Now (WIN) buttons from the Gerald Ford administration.

The institutional breakdown starts at the federal level, with years of climate policy paralysis, and cascades down through California’s state government to Los Angeles County and City Hall. We don’t have the full picture yet of how these fires happened, but we know, for example, that the state government’s failure to force for-profit energy monopoly PG&E to properly secure its transmission lines has made the state far more vulnerable to similar blazes.

We also know that in a city, county, and state historically resistant to redistributing their considerable wealth through progressive taxation, public services have suffered. There’s been fierce debate about which numbers most accurately represent the changes to the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) budget in the 2024–2025 fiscal year. Defenders of Mayor Karen Bass insist that a much smaller budget this year than last year shouldn’t be counted as a “cut” because the LAFD got a budgetary boost to deal with particular expenses the year before. Los Angeles city controller Kenneth Mejia disagrees. Meanwhile, if more money has been requested but not yet delivered, should that count as an increase? What about the cuts to the LAFD’s overtime pay and the department’s inability to fill new positions?

However you slice all of this, what’s clear is that the LAFD was understaffed to begin with and had several million dollars less this fiscal year than it was expecting. On December 4, city fire chief Kristin Crowley warned in a letter that these cuts had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.” A little over a month later, 130,000 residents have fled from the spreading flames.

An article at the right-wing New York Post linked the cuts to extra spending on homeless services. (The timing is pretty amazing for the Post’s insinuation that the city should be less generous to the unhoused, given that so many Angelenos have become homeless themselves overnight.) Meanwhile, the left-wing Intercept has linked the budget cuts to extra funding for the police. Countless other stories could surely be told by connecting budgetary dots this way, but the boring truth is that money is fungible. Particular funds that don’t go to firefighting aren’t thereby “going to” any particular alternate line on the budget. And in a saner and less unequal city, state, and country, an entire suite of public services could be generously funded.

Crowley’s equivalent at Los Angeles County, fire chief Anthony Marrone, confirmed at a press conference that neither the county nor “the 29 fire departments in our county” were “prepared for this type of widespread disaster.” They could have handled “[o]ne or two major brush fires,” but they don’t have anything like the personnel required to rapidly contain five such fires. The county’s firefighting capacity has been stretched thin by years of austerity and tight budgets, even as climate change has increased fire risks.

Meanwhile, hundreds of prison inmates have been brought in to help fight the fires for far less than minimum wage. California’s state minimum wage is $16.00 an hour. Los Angeles’s municipal minimum wage is $17.28. Salaries of the city’s firefighters work out to average about $30. The incarcerated firefighters are paid within a range that goes from $5.80 and $10.24 a day, although you’ll be relieved to hear that “they can make an additional $1 per hour when responding to an active emergency.” It’s hard to imagine a grimmer symbol of our literally burning late-capitalist hellscape than a locale that’s home to so much lavish and conspicuous wealth bringing in incarcerated firefighters to risk their lives for less per day than their free equivalents would make in an hour — if only the city had been willing spring for a few more of them.

None of this has to be this way. We could have had a Green New Deal in 2019, or better yet decades earlier when the facts about anthropogenic climate change were already well-established. We could eliminate private monopolies like PG&E that cut corners for profit. We could make far more planned and deliberate decisions about housing density to minimize the dangers posed by the “lethal combination of homeowners and brush” that Mike Davis wrote about in Ecology of Fear (in a chapter provocatively entitled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”).

We certainly don’t need to leave fire insurance in the hands of for-profit companies that have demanded that the government let them keep ratcheting up premiums as the threat of wildfires increased and, when they didn’t get what they wanted, simply dropped 1,600 policyholders in Pacific Palisades in 2024. And any polity as prone to wildfires as Los Angeles is in the 2020s could make adequately funding fire protection a serious priority.

Wildfires predate both climate change and the politics of austerity. Nevertheless, both greatly exacerbate their risks. It would be a mistake to either blame this entirely on “nature” or to broadly condemn human civilization itself as a blight on nature. One of the core functions of an organized society is to minimize the dangers posed to its members by the ravages of nature. Sociologically and ecologically, ours has failed spectacularly.