Hell Is Other People

Farhad Manjoo’s latest New York Times column is to my eye a great example of how two people can look at the same phenomena and draw completely different conclusions. Consider:

Hollywood is in Hollywood rather than in West Orange, N.J., for many of the same reasons that California’s Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food, and why the Beach Boys wished for all of America to be like “Californi-a.” It’s why John Muir, looking from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, described a landscape that appeared “wholly composed” of light, “the most beautiful I have ever beheld.”

And it is the same reason that a lot of Californians first came here, and the reason so many of us, despite everything, still can’t help but stay: sunshine and natural splendor. We are hooked not just on California’s weather, pleasantly temperate and accommodating to seemingly any pursuit, but also the way life here feels defined just as much by what’s outdoors as what’s in.

A state that lives by nature, though, risks dying by it, too. In the last few years, as California battled heat waves and drought and fire, intensifying as the planet warms, I have found myself wondering about my home state’s future and, in a deeper sense, its purpose.

Is California still California when our weather becomes an adversary rather than an ally? What is California for when summertime, the season in which the Golden State once found its fullest luster, turns from heaven into hell?

He attributes the change to global climate change; I attribute it to too many people trying to live in a fragile environment suited for only a few. As evidence Mr. Manjoo produces the bleak present weather patterns:

Seven of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last three years. This fire season has already put an entry in the books. The Dixie Fire, which has been raging for nearly a month near Lassen National Forest, is already the second largest fire in the state’s history; it has consumed nearly half a million acres and destroyed hundreds of structures, and it’s only 25 percent contained.

Smoke from the Dixie Fire and other blazes this summer has blown more than a thousand miles away, choking the air in Denver and Salt Lake City. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, the air has so far remained short of noxious, but nobody I know is expecting it to remain that way. As they did last year, face masks will soon likely serve a dual purpose for Californians — wear one indoors to evade the virus, and wear one outdoors to filter out smoke and raining ash.

which certainly appears to have become a regular, recurrent pattern. I take a more longitudinal view. There are records of weather in the Los Angeles Basin going back for millennia, everything from tree rings to actual written records starting in about 1770 when the Spanish began to develop the region. When the Spanish came they planted orange, lemon, and olive trees and the weather became cooler and wetter; during the great post-war influx of people into the region they cut the orange, lemon, and olive groves down and replaced them with cement and houses—the temperature rose and it became drier.

Furthermore I think that California’s fires are pretty obviously a consequence of expanding residential areas into where more scrub and trees are conjoined with bad land management.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t dispute that global climate change could play a role. I do wonder how you’d go about disaggregating local conditions from global ones. It reminds me a bit of blaming problems on “systemic racism”. It tends to remove any possibility of the problem’s being because of your own behavior.