LA Fires: Standing with the Wretched of the Earth
For weeks now, fires have been ravaging southern California and spreading north from Los Angeles. Due to climate change, heightening winds during the driest wet season on record made for perfect wildfire conditions on January 7th. As a result, wildfires broke out across Los Angeles and 4 other California counties.
Just today, new fires have broken out across San Diego, a few hours south of LA.
Over 10,000 homes have been destroyed, whether in the Black working class parts of Altadena or in the enclaves of Hollywood multimillionaires in Pacific Palisades. For those who are not multimillionaires, the loss of their one home is total. As for everyone else, despite the air quality of the city reaching dangerous levels of toxicity, workers clock in, children go to school, and parents come home with ash on their clothes.
The city of LA has failed to contain the fires. Even so, workers and prisoners are still on the front line of fighting the fires, at risk of their lives. 30% of firefighters are incarcerated, many of whom earn pennies on the dollar and were in prison as juvenile offenders. Working class immigrants themselves fight fires in their communities. The Navajo nation has also deployed firefighters.
Such massive wildfires have become more frequent in California over the last few decades. Despite this, the state of California and the city of Los Angeles display no hurry to safeguard peoples' lives and livelihoods and have only increased the firefighting budget marginally instead of drastically. More than that, they neglect to regulate the oil and extraction industries, happy to leave the cause of climate change unaddressed and for fires to burn hotter every year.
Instead of putting out California fires, Congress has made a priority of sending money and weapons to the Israeli apartheid regime occupying Palestine. Israel has dropped 100,000 tons of incendiary bombs since October 2023, and carbon emissions from the following two months alone surpasses 450,000 tons. In this way, thanks to the same entity, the US government, the fires that raged in Palestine mirrored the raging fires above LA.
As Trump took office, in his inauguration speech, he declared war on what few environmental regulations exist. We know that climate action will only continue to take a backseat in favor of the interests of oil barons, extraction industry CEOs, their investors, and the politicians who legislate on their behalf. Right-wing politicians like Greg Abbot will be emboldened to continue weaponizing the environment against immigrants, sticking killer buoy barriers into the Rio Grande and erecting walls at the border. Extractive industries will continue to push into indigenous lands as Enbridge has with Line 5 and 6 against the Bad River Band in the Northwoods. And similarly, forests and nature preserves will be demolished in favor of police militarization as cop cities are built throughout the country.
SDS condemns the lack of action taken by the state of California, not only in failing to safeguard against the frequency of wildfires but to address the cause itself: the lack of regulation of fossil fuel industries. SDS demands that real climate action be taken and that people's lives and homes be made the priority instead of the fortunes of rich stakeholders, investors, and CEOs. We must protest the agenda of climate change deniers and the business interests that they serve, whether it is on the docket at a university Board of Trustees meeting, in LA City Hall, or in the White House.