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VIEWPOINT - We live on the North slope of the Santa Monica Mountains in Encino. The Pacific Palisades is our neighbor on the South slope. On January 7, 2025, a hellfire driven by ferocious winds destroyed the Palisades. In hours an idyllic suburb of Los Angeles was combusted into a Nagasaki-Hiroshima tableau. We lived in the Palisades. The house in which our children were born was destroyed.
Listening to Governor Gavin Newsom’s overwrought attempts to lay blame on global warming for California brush fires, including the Palisades and Altadena fires, reminded me of a passage in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
Could the devastating damage to the Palisades have been mitigated? Yes—but for the ineffective response from the City and County of Los Angeles, and the State of California’s restrictive regulations.
The Los Angeles Fire Department did not immediately deploy the level of resources that had been called up for past windstorms. Leadership decisions, shaped more by political priorities than fire preparedness, delayed a full-scale response. On the first day of the conflagration, Governor Gavin Newsom flanked by firefighters boasted about the state’s response. But by the time reinforcements arrived, the Pacific Palisades was gone. Symbolic politics had taken priority over operational expertise.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power failed to ensure maintenance of a 117-million-gallon reservoir on the mountainside above the Palisades. That reservoir was designed to feed the community’s fire hydrants. With the cover unrepaired and the reservoir offline, hydrants throughout the Palisades ran dry moments after the firefight began.
Then there are the state’s environmental laws. The California Environmental Quality Act limits mountainside brush clearance to “minor alterations to existing conditions by removing dead plants…trimming overgrown vegetation…that will be scattered and left in place with no ground disturbance activities.” Dead vegetation left in place has acted as accelerant for fires and multiplied the destruction of communities throughout California.
Governor Newsom continues to claim that global warming is responsible for the rise in wildfires. But policy restrictions and failures in leadership made this disaster far worse.
“California leads the nation in environmental stewardship. I’m not going to give that up.” — Governor Gavin Newsom
Gavin Newsom’s progressive political agenda has become a greater threat to California cities than global warming itself.
A Lesson from Steinbeck
In preparing a lesson plan for my writing class, I revisited a passage in Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
The narrator describes the Salinas Valley as a place of cycles—wet years of abundance followed by dry years of terror. Steinbeck wrote of thirty-year cycles, when people forgot hardship during the rich years and ignored the lessons of scarcity until it returned:
“I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too and that put a terror on the Valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain. And then the dry years would come and sometimes there’d be only seven of rain. The land dried up and the grasses were only a few inches high…Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
The point is clear: California has always faced cycles of feast and famine.
Shifting Narratives
The press has reflected those shifts in tone:
- “International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere” — New York Times, January 5, 1978.
- “The World Is Warming Up. And It’s Happening Faster.” — New York Times, June 26, 2025.
Yes, our planet is slowly warming. But the sky is not falling. Earth has heated up and cooled down for eons. If we want to reduce the damage caused by wildfires, we need to restore common sense in the management of our water supply and wildlands.
Restoring the values of our once-great state and city will require the election of leaders who place the safety and well-being of their constituents above political agendas.
(Noel Anenberg is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The LA Times. He writes frequently on politics, culture, and public affairs, bringing a sharp eye for history and current events.)
