It's Just Nature, There's Nothing Anyone Could Have Done About It

Leighton Woodhouse, writing at the Free Press:

Excerpt:

Pointing to urban development as the culprit at a time like this feels a lot like blaming the victim. But it’s more honest than the many other culprits being trotted out on social media, like DEI, Gavin Newsom, or Donald Trump. Certainly, there is blame to go around—Mayor Karen Bass shouldn’t have been in Ghana; we need to know why the fire hydrants went dry; climate change exacerbates the natural conditions that produce the wildfires in the first place. But the fundamental engine for these disasters is the simple, physical reality of California, which prevailed before any of us were born: We built a massive civilization in a place where fire is as much a part of the natural habitat as summer rains are in the east.

“We built a massive civilization in a place where fire is as much a part of the natural habitat as summer rains are in the east.” We built a massive civilization where there are tornados, ruin is just to be expected. We built a massive civilization on the Gulf Coast, where hurricanes happen, ruin is simply to be expected. Nothing can be done! We built a civilization in an earthquake zone, we built a civilization where devastating blizzards happen, we built a civilization in the face of dangerous cold. We shouldn’t have done that. The Texas Panhandle burned last year — the Smokehouse Creek Fire was “the largest wildfire on record in Texas.” Look, Texas just burns. That’s what they get for building human civilizations there. They shouldn’t have done that. We really shouldn’t build anywhere on the Great Plains at all, because it’s naturally a place of grasslands, which burn.

We should only build human civilization in places where there’s no risk and it isn’t necessary to challenge nature. When you challenge nature, you get what you get.

Woodhouse compares Los Angeles, built recklessly into the hills during a period of rapid growth, to St Louis, which grew gradually out of a zone of agriculture, separating the city from the dangers of wilderness. I’ve been to St. Louis, because there’s a big National Archives facility there. I waded through downtown, because St. Louis is built on…the banks of the Mississippi River. It floods every few years, sometimes catastrophically. St. Louis shouldn’t have been built — it floods there. What were they even thinking?

Meanwhile, there’s an ugly controversy building in Los Angeles, because the wealthy real estate developer Rick Caruso saved his shopping mall in Pacific Palisades, which is very greedy.

While nearly everything around the mall was destroyed, Caruso hired private firefighters and brought water to the property in trucks. The firefighters sprayed the water on the buildings, so the buildings didn’t burn. People should be very angry about this!

It’s vile behavior, of course, and incredibly controversial and extreme, but there may be obscure lessons to be learned from his remarkable “spraying water on buildings” behavior.

But anyway, no one is to be blamed, because nothing could have been done.