Fires in San Diego County have taken seventeen lives, burned a thousand homes and evacuated one hundred times as many. But for many commentators, the fires represent a kind of justice, retribution for San Diego's suburban hubris. From the Eastern seaboard, the New York Times editorialised 'unless humans set limits on development, nature certainly will' (30 October 2003). Chiding the San Diegans for leaving Los Angeles the Times warned 'You can withdraw into nature as protection from humanity if you like, but there is no changing the underlying character of nature itself'. San Bernardino County Supervisor told the LA Times that the burnt out homes in the Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear resort communities 'should never have been built' in the first place (31 October).
The brilliant and acerbic commentator Mike Davis found it difficult to contain his schadenfreude at the 'politically ironic' firestorms: 'as I watch San Diego's wealthiest new suburb, Scripps Ranch, in flames, I recall the Schwarzenegger fund-raising parties hosted there a few weeks ago' (28 October, http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17066). Like the Times, Davis saw the basic problem as development - 'tens of thousands of new homes have pushed their way into the furthest recesses of Southern California's coastal and inland fire-belts'. Radical Davis has cause to gloat: his bestseller Ecology of Fear warned of the 'lethal mixture of homeowners and brush' back in 1998 (Vintage ed., 1999, p. 107).
Novelist Susan Straight used the tragedy to script her innocent daughters' question 'horror quivering in their voices,"Why?"' They were too young to understand the perverted drives of 'some males (because I have only known men or boys to do this)', 'neighbor boys, teenagers', 'friends of my brother's' or 'homeless men' ('Young men and Fire', New York Times, 29 October 2003). "Terrorists couldn't plan anything easier," she says, and just in case anyone was feeling any sympathy for the men risking their lives to stop the blaze 'Once a serial arsonist in this region turned out to be a seasonal firefighter'.
The record indicates that the residential push into the already fire-prone regions, baked dry by the Santa Ana winds, limits ordinary deforestation through controlled burns, in an area that has not seen logging for decades. And Davis is right to show that the individualistic ethos has led to woefully inadequate investment in fire precautions. 'The San Diego Fire Department has roughly 35% fewer firefighters per 1,000 residents than average for large cities nationally,' the LA Times reported, 31 October.
But that does not make firestorms poetic justice, 'politically ironic', or nature's revenge against man's hubris. As populations expand into new areas sustaining the myth of a pristine wilderness is not worth risking one human life, let alone a score of them. Decades of fire suppression have left forests that could support 40 trees an acre packed with 568 per acre. In the 820 000 acre San Bernardino National Forest there has been no logging for more than a century. First beetles, then the Santa Ana wind and finally flames have consumed the surplus wood, that men no longer want. If they want to keep their homes, they will have to cut more of it down.
THE LAST POST?
After narrowly losing a strike vote for national industrial action, the Royal Mail is effectively strike-bound by unofficial action started by London sorting offices. Angry workers reacted to aggressive tactics by Royal Mail managers when they returned to work after a local stoppage in support of London weighting. The postmen and women cannot afford to live on the meagre wages Royal Mail pays, and they see no reason to work harder to cover for job losses.
London's pretensions to be an international city are sadly undercut by its unwillingness to pay for a service that seems destined never to be profitable. A capital city without a working postal service is an absurdity. -- James Heartfield