It was like stepping into a surreal world under a dark cloud of gloom.
Exiting the terminal at Los Angeles International Airport, I couldn’t help but notice the ethereal haze hanging over everything like a moldy yellow blanket.
“Wow, I haven’t seen this much smog in years’,” I told my wife, recalling the overcast days of my childhood when we were forced to stay inside.
Then I remembered what I’d been reading before leaving the Philippines, that this was the worst wildfire season in California history. Ah, not smog but smoke, I realized with an involuntary shudder. And suddenly I found myself in a world that was strangely familiar, yet unnervingly different.
Those are the opening lines of my new book, scheduled for release in May. It’s called Dark Skies, though given the latest apocalyptic wildfires in Los Angeles, I’m tempted to change Dark to Blazing. The most recent catastrophe, of course, dwarfs the wildfires I was writing about in 2020. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone who grew up in Southern California.
As a Los Angeles Times staff writer in 2003, I contributed to the wildfire coverage that sparked a Pulitzer Prize the following year. My single overriding memory of that experience is standing in a staging area staring across a narrow highway at a hillside blazing like the Gates of Hell. My God, I thought, this can’t be real.
Alas, it was. As are the thousands of homes, acres, and lives destroyed by the latest conflagration with which my hometown greeted the fiery New Year. So, what are we to make of all this, what’s the main takeaway?
Local and national politicians were quick to cast their own flames of blame. And though I don’t believe that anyone—except maybe a few suspected arsonists—intended for this calamity to happen, there are important lessons to be learned.
Here’s what I say about it in my forthcoming book:
Ecologists view the annual burnings as part of a natural cycle. Once they were kept in check with controlled burns performed regularly by firefighters. Growing up, I frequently saw the smoke of those burns rising from the fields alongside the freeways. These days, though, pressure from environmentalists has made that smoke rare.
“We dug ourselves into a dangerous fuel imbalance,” award-winning environmental reporter Elizabeth Weil has written. “We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn” yet don’t allow that burn to occur.
A recent Yen Makabenta column in this newspaper sounded the same theme in quotes from the late commentator, Charles Krauthammer. “A sane environmentalism,” Krauthammer wrote in Time Magazine, “begins by unashamedly declaring that nature is here to serve man. A sane environmentalism is entirely anthropocentric; it enjoins man to preserve nature, but on the grounds of self-preservation.
“Nature is our ward,” the commentator continues, “it is not our master. It is to be respected and cultivated, but it is a man’s world. And when man has to choose between his well-being and that of nature, nature will have to accommodate.”
Carla Hall, an editorial writer at my alma mater Los Angeles Times, has a slightly different take. “We have plumbed and electrified the wilderness of Los Angeles,” she writes. “But we haven’t tamed it. How could we? To live here, we don’t make a pact with nature as much as an uneasy standoff with it… What happened this past week has upended all our assumptions about our truce with the wilderness of Los Angeles.”
And Samantha Dunn, writing in the Los Angeles Daily News, adds a twist of her own. “… living with what is now the perpetual fire season seems to have rewritten something in our collective DNA,” she proclaims in a story headlined “Wildfires redefine ‘OK’ and ‘safe’ for all in Southern California.” Its subtitle: “Even beyond those who had to flee, an entire region has been under siege, and it feels like that’s our new reality.”
My only quibble is with the word “new.”
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David Haldane is an American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is due out in May. Click HERE to preorder using promo code PREORDER2025 for a 15% discount. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.