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Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What the Reconstruction Era Can Teach Us About the Politics of Shame
Man representing the Freedman's Bureau stands between armed groups of Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans, 1868. Credit - A.R. Waud—Library of Congress There is a curious passage in W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, that tries to capture the zeitgeist of those closing decades of the 19th century that ended Reconstruction and gave birth to Jim Crow. Reflecting on the epochal defeat of our country's post-Civil War experiment in Black emancipation and multiracial democracy, Du Bois characterizes the era as 'the psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars.' I have taught Souls every year of my career as a professor of African American Studies. Still, I confess I never truly grasped the enduring significance of Du Bois' insistence on this peculiar description. Reading it amidst our era's rampant recriminations against 'identity politics,' 'diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),' and 'wokeness,' as well as the backlash against 'Black Lives Matter' and police reform, it is difficult to avoid the force of Du Bois' insight: Like with the demise of Reconstruction, the struggle over shame is key to understanding the reactionary politics that we see today in the post-BLM era. The rhetoric of racial reaction, to paraphrase economist Albert O. Hirschman, has successfully spread this debilitating emotion. In the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in 2020, for instance, support for Black Lives Matter soared to historic heights in polling and protest participation. Shortly thereafter, according to leading Pew Research Center surveys, public support—especially among white Americans and Republicans—fell precipitously as narratives and media coverage from the right reframed the movement. Early portrayals often treated antiracist activism as a disruptive but long overdue 'reckoning' with how racial stigma promotes police impunity or makes the citizenry tolerate enduring, intergenerational injustices like inner-city poverty. Now that the rhetoric of reaction is ascendent, leading narratives dramatize the movement as divisive, dangerous, and corrupt. Looming over this data is the ubiquitous gender gap in American politics. While women have historically been, especially during the Reconstruction era, advocates and underappreciated drivers of change and support, growing gender divisions structure public opinion. A March 2025 NBC News poll reports that among women ages 18 to 49, 67% say DEI programs should continue, while only 40% of men in the age bracket say the same. We are living through another of these 'psychological moments'—a time when much of the nation is recoiling in unwarranted shame or even resentment at the moral obligation to repair, remember, and reimagine. What once felt like a shared reckoning has, for many, become a source of fatigue or suspicion—a sobering reminder of how quickly a moral awakening can be reframed as a shameful mistake. Yet, this shame is not simply a private emotion. It is the result of a political strategy, one cultivated to sap the confidence and conviction of those who dared to be outraged about racial injustice, or thought that disruption and solidarity could overcome paralysis and fear. It is akin to the shame that followed Reconstruction, when the project of multiracial democracy was denounced as naïve, corrupt, and unnatural—not simply because it had failed on its own terms, but because of who was involved and what it threatened to upend. To understand our own moment's rhetoric of race politics, we must trace an ignoble inheritance passed down from the enemies of Reconstruction to the present. These so-called 'Redeemers,' as white conservative Democrats anointed their movement in the postbellum era, cast themselves as gallant saviors of a fallen South, determined to rescue their region from the sinful empowerment of formerly enslaved people, federal intervention, and the democratic possibilities unleashed by Reconstruction. With a deep investment in racial hierarchy and a romanticized vision of the antebellum order, they cloaked their counter-revolution in the language of salvation, insisting they were 'redeeming' their states from what they framed as the chaos, corruption, and illegitimate imposition of 'Negro rule.' In truth, the Redeemers waged a campaign of violent reassertion indifferent to injustice—past or present. Theirs was a restorationist project carried by terroristic violence, voter suppression and government usurpation, and the deliberate dismantling of government institutions like the Freedmen's Bureau and public schools. 'Redemption' became a euphemism for the suffocation of multiracial democracy in its infancy. Their rhetoric provided a rough draft for what Du Bois would later call 'the propaganda of history': the collective distortion of the past in textbooks, scholarship, popular culture, and memorials into a 'convenient fairy tale.' There are three key elements of the Redemptionist reaction that especially resonate in the present. First and foremost, the rhetoric of their movement insisted that racial equality is an inherently foolish and futile pursuit due to the intractable incompetence and inferiority of people of African descent wherever they are found on the globe. In an 1867 address to Congress, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed that 'Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people…wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.' Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, in the majority opinion for Williams v. Mississippi, an 1898 ruling that narrowed the scope of anti-discrimination claims to the explicit text of law, declared that the Negro race 'by reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependencies,' has 'acquired or accentuated' certain habits, temperaments, and characteristics that mark them separate from whites in their carelessness, dishonesty, docility, and lack of 'forethought.' Popularly, the banner of Black incompetence was carried by demeaning depictions in material and theatrical culture, as well as in D.W. Griffith's racist epic film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which portrayed Reconstruction-era Black legislators as 'comically' idiotic, necessitating the violent restoration of white rule. This rhetoric is, unfortunately, resonant with today's attacks on 'DEI,' with critics insisting that efforts to recruit, incorporate, and promote Black talent in higher education, the military, and in many workplaces amount to the dangerous promotion of incompetence. President Donald Trump, for example, immediately and falsely blamed a horrific Washington, D.C. plane crash on DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration, despite no supporting evidence and overwhelming testimony to the contrary from aviation officials. Meanwhile, figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made attacking and dismantling DEI a large part of their public persona, while ignoring legitimate concerns about their unprecedented lack of qualifications for their own roles. High-profile Black leaders like former Harvard president Claudine Gay or former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., have been targeted for defamation and harassment to drive them out of their positions, similarly to Black elected officials and business leaders in the Reconstruction era. The consequence of these campaigns is a revival, from the highest offices of the land, of the Redemptionist lie that common sense should treat Black people as presumptively unfit for positions of authority or public trust. Those who believe otherwise, then, are caricatured as foolish and sentimental. These arguments frequently draw their legitimacy from pseudoscientific racism and the related idea of the backwardness of African diasporic peoples—and expand much further than politics. From Silicon Valley to the media landscape, people in positions of power are reintroducing theories of racial hierarchy under the guise of defending 'free inquiry' or 'realism.' As the Scientific American and The Guardian have documented, a network of actors is actively working to launder eugenics-era thought into legitimacy, cloaked in appeals to genetic science, meritocracy, and market rationality. From Tucker Carlson's monologues, to Elon Musk's offhand remarks about intelligence and heredity, to the administration's executive order against teaching the social construction of 'race,' a new generation of elites is reanimating the old canard that racial inequality is not the legacy of injustice but the reflection of the fundamental inequality of natural 'racial' kinds. Second, we are encouraged to feel shame because of the perversity of consequences. Whatever the good intentions of the last decade or so of racial progressivism, we are told, we have only exacerbated crime, deepened distrust, and stood in the way of economic rationality. Take, for example, the so-called 'Ferguson Effect,' the notion that protests against police brutality demoralize police and exacerbate crime. Just as the reactionary historiography of Reconstruction, led by William Dunning, cast Reconstruction as a misguided, radical experiment in Black suffrage and governance, the Ferguson effect casts protest movements like Black Lives Matter as accelerants of violence and civic decay. Both assert a kind of intuitive 'common sense' that masks deep ideological anxieties. The Dunning historians appealed to the logic of natural racial hierarchy, while proponents of the Ferguson effect draw on a racialized sense of law and order where public safety is presumed to hang precariously on police exercising sweeping authority and compelling broad deference and admiration. In both cases, dissenting scholars have had to work uphill to replace myth with measurement. As social scientists like David Pyrooz and Richard Rosenfeld have shown, the Ferguson effect—when tested across dozens of major cities—fails to reveal a coherent national trend. Rigorous studies consistently find that changes in policing behavior, while real in some places, did not drive national crime patterns, and where proactive policing declined, crime often did not rise at all. Importantly, the best accounts have not only rejected the broad claims of de-policing as a driver of crime but have also emphasized the dangers of clinging to these narratives. The fact that cities like Boston and Baltimore are currently experiencing record homicide declines undercut the notion of a generalized crime wave and affirm something protestors proclaimed: that differences in police approaches matter immensely. Another pillar of Redemptionist rhetoric is the feminization of progressive politics. From Reconstruction to the present, reactionary voices have sometimes attempted to discredit movements for racial justice by portraying their advocates—especially white women—as naïve, sentimental, meddling, and destabilizing. During the postbellum years, white female abolitionists and teachers working with freedpeople were mocked as 'nigger schoolmarms,' accused of spreading delusion and disorder, and often singled out in violent retributions. These women played a vital role in founding schools, advocating suffrage, and supporting Black citizenship, but were often cast by their critics as insubordinate, hysterical, or morally corrupting. This gendered stigma echoed through how Reconstruction itself was characterized—less a serious project of transitional justice and constitutional refounding than a crusade driven by feminine sentimentality run amok. As recent historians have shown, many white women brought genuine moral and pedagogical commitments to the work of abolition and Reconstruction, but navigated a public discourse that portrayed their efforts as irrational and disruptive. Their work, particularly in the South, became one of the earliest battlegrounds where political femininity was equated with moral overreach, excess, and social breakdown. This trope has only persisted today as figures like Christopher Rufo and other conservative intellectuals have revived a strikingly similar line of attack. Writing in City Journal, National Post, and across the digital right, they framed 'wokeness' and progressive racial discourse as symptoms of what they call the 'feminization of American culture.' The rise of DEI and new norms around pedagogy, student activism, and campus protest culture is attributed to a dangerous excess of 'feminine' traits—emotionality, overprotection, inclusivity, and moralistic judgment. This narrative not only ridicules the intellectual and political work of women but also seeks to cast entire movements for justice as self-indulgent and unserious. It is an old trick: to attribute the presence of injustice not to the powerful who perpetuate it, but to the women and marginalized people who criticize it. What makes this rhetoric particularly potent is that it insists on old gender hierarchies as the norm. To understand this history is not merely to lament its repetition, but to arm ourselves with clarity. The reemergence of scientific racism, the delegitimization of Black leadership and achievement, the panic over DEI and protest, the feminization of justice—are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a coherent tradition of backlash, one that knows how to speak the language of realism and reform while advancing the cause of domination. The task, then, is not simply to refute the lies with better data, though that matters. It is to refuse the shame that seeks to make us forget what we glimpsed, however briefly, in the streets in 2020 and beyond: the possibility that this country might confront how far it is from the scale and scope of its promises, and seize upon that reckoning to remake itself. We will either find a way to remember that aspiration without apology. Or, we will watch another moment where the tentative promise of reconstruction curdles and congeals into something genuinely worthy of our collective shame. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His forthcoming book is Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement This project was supported by funding from the Center for Policing Equity. Contact us at letters@
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Story About Salmon That Almost Had a Happy Ending
Completion of the world's largest dam removal project — which demolished four Klamath River hydroelectric dams on both sides of the California-Oregon border — has been celebrated as a monumental achievement, signaling the emerging political power of Native American tribes and the river-protection movement. True enough. It is fortunate that the project was approved in 2022 and completed last October, before the environmentally hostile Trump administration could interfere, and it is a reminder that committed, persistent campaigning for worthy environmental goals can sometimes overcome even the most formidable obstacles. How tribal leaders, commercial fisherman and a few modestly sized environmental groups won an uphill campaign to dismantle the dams is a serpentine, setback-studded saga worthy of inclusion in a collection of inspirational tales. The number of dams, their collective height (400 feet) and the extent of potential river habitat that has been reopened to salmon (420 miles) are all unprecedented. The event is a crucial turning point, marking an end to efforts to harness the Klamath's overexploited waterways to generate still more economic productivity, and at last addressing the basin's many environmental problems by subtracting technology instead of adding it, by respecting nature instead of trying to overcome it. It's an acknowledgment that dams have lifetimes, like everything else, and that their value in hydropower and irrigated water often ends up being dwarfed by their enormous environmental and social costs. But removing the Klamath dams is no panacea. It is a necessary but far from sufficient step toward restoring the serially ravaged Klamath River basin, once home to the nation's third-largest salmon fishery, so thick with salmon before the arrival of Euro-Americans that local tribal members still speak of the time, possibly mythical, when their ancestors could walk across the river on migrating salmons' backs. By the turn of this century, all of the river's seven salmon species were extinct or headed that way, and the basin's tribes suffered from diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cultural breakdown in their absence. The first Euro-American known to set foot in the Klamath basin, Peter Skene Ogden, in 1826, brought with him Western ideas about capitalism, resource extraction and the disposability of natural landscapes — and began the basin's environmental dismemberment. He led a beaver-trapping expedition for the Hudson's Bay Company, whose 40 or so members trudged up and down the Maryland-size basin in pursuit of furs to meet European demand for beaver hats. So many trapping expeditions followed Ogden's that within a few decades, the basin's beavers were gone. Without the calm produced by beaver dams (which, unlike man-made dams, are water-permeable), rivers and streams flowed more rapidly, producing erosion and sediment that smothered fish-spawning grounds and upset water bodies' chemical balances. Over the second half of the 19th century, miners, loggers and salmon and sucker canners took turns despoiling the basin. In their search for gold, the miners deployed huge dredging machines that destroyed riverbeds. They blasted away whole hillsides by diverting entire creek systems into water cannons that pushed out powerful jets through giant nozzles at a rate of 30,000 gallons a minute — so-called hydraulic mining. The process spread astonishing quantities of sediment throughout downstream rivers and passages, clogging fish habitat, and the mercury used to separate gold from sediment contaminated waterways and food chains. Loggers found that the trees lining basin riverbanks, including majestic Ponderosa pines, were easiest to reach, so they generated still more erosion when the trees were cut down. They turned the rivers into product conveyances, floating the logs downstream. The logs scoured riverbeds and shorelines and sometimes became entangled in mile-long snarls that were dislodged with dynamite, killing fish and further damaging fish habitat. Environmental health wasn't a consideration. But none of these depredations produced as much environmental damage as the undermining of the upper basin's hydrology carried out by farmers, ranchers and their allies in the federal government. Early in the 20th century, they drained two of the Klamath's three largest lakes and most of its wetlands to create agricultural fields. The loss of those two lakes and about 80 percent of the basin's wetlands is the blow from which the upper basin can't recover. It's perhaps unjust to label the lake-drainers as villains, as they were merely mimicking what had already happened throughout much of the United States in the 19th century, and they were oblivious to drainage's long-term consequences. But over time it eliminated the upper basin water systems' resilience. Before Euro-Americans' arrival, the upper basin was a unique watery landscape miraculously perched on top of sagebrush-dry terrain, in the 4,000-foot-altitude high desert of south-central Oregon and far-northeastern California. Upper Klamath Lake, the lake that survives, was smaller than Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake, the two drained lakes. The three lakes, nestled close to one another at slightly different altitudes and interspersed with large tracts of wetlands, each had their own rhythm and composition: Tule Lake's water level, for example, rose and fell over a 20-year cycle, while Lower Klamath Lake fluctuated on a seasonal and yearly basis. The variations from lake to lake and from lake to wetlands fostered biodiversity. Two species of suckers are sacred to the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, the predominant upper basin tribe that is an agglomeration of three separate tribes required by the federal government in 1864; a juvenile sucker could grow up in relatively protected wetland waters, then circulate as an adult in more treacherous Upper Klamath Lake. But without the wetlands and two of the three lakes, the sucker population was vulnerable. By the 1990s, populations of the two sucker species had plummeted, and they are now on the verge of extinction. To the farmers and ranchers of the early 20th century, the wetlands were useless quagmires, riddled with insects and inhospitable to humans — the word 'wetlands' didn't even come into common usage until the 1950s, when their invaluable ecosystem benefits began to be understood. Wetlands acted as the Klamath ecosystems' kidneys and lungs: They filtered pollutants, captured nutrients that juvenile fish ate, and, as a result of their spongy composition, mitigated natural upheavals by retaining water during floods and releasing it during droughts. By eliminating the wetlands and drastically reducing lake water, the basin's settlers rendered Upper Klamath Lake incapable of performing the ecological services that the three lakes had carried out together for thousands of years. The basin's hydroelectric dams, built between 1918 and 1962, were merely the crowning blows, the walls across the river that definitively blocked salmon from upper basin spawning grounds. By the end of the 20th century, the Klamath basin contained only about 5 percent of the salmon numbers that existed before Ogden began setting his traps nearly two centuries earlier. Back when the lakes were drained, the upper basin was an unlikely national trendsetter. Irrigation throughout the arid American West was jump-started by what Donald Worster, author of the 1985 classic 'Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West,' calls 'the most important single piece of legislation in the history of the West' — the National Reclamation Act of 1902. The Klamath Reclamation Project, which made farming possible there, was the largest of the 12 projects in the first tranche authorized by the act. Since then, so-called Project farmers, some now in their fourth and fifth generation, have relied on irrigated water diverted from Upper Klamath Lake. But with the arrival of extended drought intensified by climate change at the turn of this century, the basin's vulnerability was exposed. By then, the two revered fish species, the Lost River and shortnose suckers (c'waam and koptu to upper basin tribes), had been listed as endangered, and coho salmon that still populated the lower basin were designated as threatened. When, adhering to provisions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation suspended water deliveries to Project farmers in April 2001 so that more water would remain in Upper Klamath Lake and the Klamath River to benefit fish, it set off a social conflagration. Outraged farmers carried out acts of civil disobedience in protests that went on for four months. The cutoff led some Project farmers to sell their properties to bigger operators or go into bankruptcy; at least one died by suicide. Though the drought continued, the next year the George W. Bush administration made sure that the farmers got their allocations, but that left so little water in the Klamath River that disease spread among spawning salmon, resulting in the deaths of some 70,000 salmon whose carcasses washed onto the shores of the lower river in September 2002, in the biggest fish die-off in the history of the American West. Lower basin tribes mourned. The basin, in other words, was in the grip of revolving crises. And as the upper basin continued to dry out throughout this century, Project farmers received scant water allocations in most years, and more and more of them went out of business. The same story of agricultural decline is now unfolding throughout the West, as the century-long irrigation era edges toward collapse. Depletion of groundwater for agriculture is so widespread that 'it could threaten America's status as a food superpower,' a New York Times investigation found in 2023. 'The ongoing megadrought has severely contracted water supply and rendered Western agriculture inviable at its present scale,' wrote the legal scholars Stephanie Stern and A. Dan Tarlock in a paper published in December in the Ecology Law Quarterly. 'An increasing number of farms, particularly small farms, are shuttering agricultural operations, filing bankruptcy, fallowing fields, slaughtering livestock and selling water rights. And the pain is only beginning.' Dam removal has already restored the Klamath's reputation as a trendsetter, a $500 million signifier of dams' environmental harm and the feasibility of dismantling them. Now it has a chance to do something even more important: show a way toward environmentally sustainable agriculture. In the first large salmon run since dam removal was completed, at least 6,000 salmon swam upstream past the demolished dam sites, exceeding biologists' expectations by orders of magnitude. As a result, many upper basin residents were feeling something they were unaccustomed to: hope. River-rafting outfitters began mapping out portions of the river exposed by dam removal, including steep, fast-moving rapids and newly formed streams that reflect the river's revival. In the restored portion of the river, great blue herons have already established rookeries, and bald eagles are, as a surveying rafter put it, 'all over the place.' Thinking in watershed terms has long been an environmental tenet; now salmon are making the idea come alive. Their presence in the upper Klamath is spreading awareness of the interconnectedness of the whole basin, prompting cooperation between entities at both ends, from upper basin farming districts to the coastal Yurok tribe. At the base of the Klamath's potential recovery is the redressing of Euro-Americans' most egregious environmental sin, their draining of upper basin wetlands. Some Project farmers resist wetland restoration, understandably viewing it as a way of shrinking agricultural fields. But expansive wetlands could be the remaining farms' best hope, preventing the lowering of water tables and the ongoing drying-out of the upper basin. In December, in what was conceived as the first phase of the largest freshwater wetland restoration project ever carried out in the Western United States, a contractor hired by the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, Ducks Unlimited and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began breaching a 60-year-old dike that had separated 22 square miles of wetlands from Upper Klamath Lake and had turned the drained wetlands into cattle pasture. This and other restoration projects made it possible to imagine that the long-running Klamath River recovery epic, full of reversals that were overcome, was finally approaching a just, environmentally responsible resolution. In the past month, however, the Trump administration suspended funding authorized in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other Biden-era legislation for the wetlands restoration and other Klamath projects, and laid off U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees who facilitated those projects. 'These are small rural communities, and these investments are a big deal to local economies,' said Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the Humboldt Area Foundation, which funds Klamath River restoration projects. 'These are projects that improve people's lives, and now they're frozen. The uncertainty is just frustrating people. No one knows what to do.' Coming so close to a happy ending to the long-running Klamath saga, these rash, heedless cuts may be the cruelest setback of all.
Daily Tribune
11-02-2025
- Science
- Daily Tribune
A Quick Historical Glance at the California Fires
Conventional wisdom has it that fires are destructive to the ecosystem when gone out of control or used more often. Repeated burning could devastate forests and trees and is likely to increase erosion and destroy the mineral content of the soil, undermining the natural habitat for both humans and animals. While this might hold water, it has also been ecologically proven that, when employed on a small scale, wildfire can be a sustainable environmental force. Within the context of the whole expanse of what is today the United States, historical records reveal that man-caused fires had been frequently set for various purposes by both the indigenous inhabitants, now known as the Native Americans, and the Euro-Americans up until the dawn of the twentieth century. Fires, for instance, were burned to clear forests for more settlements in the untamed wilderness and prepare the ground for planting. They were also used as a subsistence strategy, whereby people set fires to the woods to reduce brush, encourage the growth of pasturage, and provide meadowlands for wildlife. Burning the land also contributed to the decomposition of forest litter and the recycling of nutrients through an ecosystem. The ecology of California, in particular, has largely been determined by fire. Indeed, much of the Golden State's plant life evolved in response to fire, incorporating the periodic burnings into their life cycles. Fire was set to freshwater marshes, thereby fostering the growth of forage for livestock, providing more space for waterfowl nesting, and increasing overall species diversity. In this sense, many coastal California environments were human artifacts, the product of burning, and would have reverted to woody vegetation had this technique been abandoned. This long-standing practice, however, came to a halt in 1910 when the US Forest Service embarked on a nationwide policy of forest fire suppression and redefined fire setting as a federal crime, following the conflagrations that raged across the West Coast region, sending smoke as far east as the East Coast states. Nature, however, knows not these restrictions. January 7th marked a black day for the state of California when a series of conflagrations erupted across the Los Angeles area starting in Pacific Palisades in the Santa Monica Mountains then moving on by strong winds to the Eaton Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains and other adjacent neighborhoods. Things did not stop there. Two weeks later, the Hughes Fire broke out in the northern part of the LA County. Firefighters had to wrestle with the fires for three weeks before they could bring them under control on January 31. The fires left behind serious damage. According to the initial estimates of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the blazes scorched a total of 50,293 acres and wiped out more than 17,000 structures, ending the life of at least 29 people and displacing vast numbers of others to the streets. Financially, the LA Fires are the costliest in the nation's history, expected to reach an amount in excess of $50 billion. Were Californians taken aback by the LA Fires per se? The answer is categorically negative. The Golden State has had a long history with blazes as it is geographically characterized by a volatile physical environment prone to drought and blistering winds, thus exposing it to increased risks for fire eruption. In the 1980s alone, 10,000 wildfires struck the Golden State, and since 2000, the state has been subject to a series of annual conflagrations of varying degrees, establishing themselves as part of a trend toward larger and more damaging fires. The calamities are partly natural, but the magnitude of their development has been, in fact, the result of a reckless policy of suburban sprawl dating back to the post-WWII period. Eager for more fresh land, house developers entertained the idea of building on hillsides. The foothills of the San Gabriels, it came to be known, are covered with chaparral, a type of scrubland extremely prone to fire. When developers descended on the foothills of Los Angeles, they were building in the midst of one of North America's most flammable environments. More important, the proliferation of fire-prone wooden roofs in the postwar period boosted that hazard even further. In a sense, while Californian suburbanites are aware of the inevitability of fire-breaking in most parts of the state, they have nonetheless chosen to put much faith in the capabilities of their state and federal governments to bail them out when self-inflicted calamity hit. What those Californians have failed to consider, however, is that nature can strike back at any moment in ways beyond humans' imagination and calculations. Indeed, what horrified Californians—and the whole world—more than anything else was the scale of the damage wrought by such wildfires, especially the latest ones.
