LA的同学们看看这篇 case for letting Malibu burn

https://qz.com/1468286/mike-daviss-case-for-letting-malibu-burn-is-sadly-relevant-again/

And yet it’s a future that was more or less predicted 20 years ago, when University of California, Riverside professor emeritus Mike Davis wrote the provocatively titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” a chapter of his book Ecology of Fear. In his essay, Davis argued that destructive wildfires are not a bug, but a feature of this native chaparral habitat—one that, aided by Santa Ana winds, has long used fires to carry out ecological processes.

Davis wrote that the Santa Monica mountains’ native vegetation interacts with perfect fire weather—”drought conditions, 100-degree heat, 3 percent humidity and an 85-mile-per-hour Santa Ana wind”—to create fires, on average, every two and half years. And he argued that the longer Malibu sought to suppress fires in order to save ever-increasing amounts of property, the worse its inevitable fires would be. “Science has established that it is accumulated growth that determines fire destructiveness,” he wrote. “Botanists and fire geographers have calculated that half-century-old chaparral, heavily laden with dead mass, burns with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral.”

In other words, Davis predicted that Malibu would see fires of the kind of intensity and ferocity that residents witnessed, to their collective horror, this month. When reached by Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times for comment last week, he was steadfast: “I’m infamous for suggesting that the broader public should not have to pay a cent to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years. My opinion hasn’t changed.”

Davis was, and remains, a pariah in Malibu. And indeed, alongside his ecological, anti-development thesis is also a rather clear disdain for many of Malibu’s residents, who he calls “wealthy pyrophiles encouraged by cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief and an expansive public commitment to ‘defend Malibu.'”