The Ring of Fire — Reflections and Response

My heart goes out to everyone in Los Angeles this week who are living through perhaps the worst "natural" disaster in US history "in terms of just the costs associated with it,” as California governor Gavin Newsom said on “Meet the Press” yesterday.

The financial costs of such a monumental disaster is one perspective on what looks and feels apocalyptic! Partly, because it feels so personal… not only in the numbers of friends and colleagues who have lost everything, but also because of the political blame game that is fueling another kind of fire and fury!

For me, personally searching for some perspective that would ease the feelings of helplessness and despair, I turned to science and literature, going first to one of my favorite writers, Joan Didion, who in her 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, wrote about her experiences living in Southern California in the 1960s.

Joan Didion in Los Angeles on August 2, 1970. She lived in Los Angeles for three decades. (Image Source: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections.)

In one essay, "The Santa Anas,” she writes vividly about these strong, strange winds that descend every winter on Los Angeles blasting dry, desert air from the canyons they are named after, west of the city.

“Easterners commonly complain that there is no “weather” at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.”

— Joan Didion

The strong, dry and mercurial Santa Anas have always been “fire weather.”

In her essay, Didion recalls fires that most of us don't remember or likely have never heard of: “The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.”

I experienced one such Santa Ana-related fire when I, too, lived in Southern California and remember it as if it was yesterday, standing on my roof with a garden hose watching the fire in the canyon come closer. My home was spared, but for thousands now in Southern California, homes, cars, pets, and perhaps, what we think of immediately when we contemplate such a loss, memories captured in the unreplicable and unrecoverable photos, papers, and ephemera of life.

Amid the dangerous political blame games on social media is a meme that I’ve seen going around that is important to consider: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” Blogger Michelle Albanes-Davis, who typically writes about food and shares recipes, writes, “I’m filming it today. You’ll film it tomorrow. We’ll all film it until we change. This is no way to live.”

This is no way to live, but we are living it — despite leaders who are desperately trying to shift the blame away from themselves and the oil and gas industry, who all lied to us for decades about the fact that burning fossil fuels warms our planet, which supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.

“We’re in a new era now,” former Vice President Al Gore told The New York Times. “These climate related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”

Indeed, the conditions that have created the kinds of extreme fire weather that has taken on a whole new meaning with this Ring of Fire around Los Angeles are not unexpected, given the lack of actions needed to respond before the disasters.

This blended image shows the hundreds of fires that ravaged the Altadena neighborhood. (Washington Post / Satellite image from January 8 ©2025 Maxar Technologies)

Given that, one big thing that all of us can do is advocate for action, loudly and often. We can prevent climate change from getting worse. The solutions are here and we know what needs to be done. What we are lacking is political will to act.

Didion ended her essay with a line that reads today as prescient, although she could never have known what was coming at the time.

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability.

The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.”

— Joan Didion

In this new era, and especially in this moment and in the coming weeks, months and years of recovery for Angelenos, we must care for each other, as best we can, in whatever way we can. Here's a list of ways you can help from the LA Times.

Collectively, we can make a difference for those who need our support, and a difference for the future we want to see.

“I’m filming it today. You’ll film it tomorrow. We’ll all film it until we change. This is no way to live.”

We can change it, but we have to do it together. We can’t stop the winds but we can stop the changes that make them more dangerous and deadly.

We can’t save or restore what is being lost every minute in California, but we can and must demand an end to the reliance on fossil fuels; we can and we must shift our investments and our policies to support the clean energy future that is possible, and we can and we must vote for leaders who have the courage to take the actions necessary to protect the earth and all that live on it.

Onward!

- Pat