California’s Wildfires Burn Through America’s Climate Illusions
The destruction keeps getting costlier, and somebody’s got to pay for it.
Cars destroyed by the Camp Fire sit in the lot at a used car dealership on November 9, 2018, in Paradise, California.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North AmericaJoan Didion’s “Holy Water,” written in 1977, is a paean to the elaborate engineering that supplied her taps in Malibu and filled drinking glasses in Hollywood restaurants. At its heart is a warning:
The Golden State is actually a pretty inhospitable place: arid or semi-arid in large parts, prone to occasional floods (maybe even mega-floods) and, lest we forget, a giant quake-zone. There’s even a clutch of volcanoes. As a prosperous home for almost 40 million people, it is a place made, not begotten. Roughly a decade after Didion’s essay, Marc Reisner characterized California as “a beautiful fraud” in his much longer polemic “Cadillac Desert,” chronicling in exquisite detail the epic water projects, bottomless budgets and Chinatown politics that went into making a place like Los Angeles not merely viable but desirable.