Building Homes Amid a Landscape of Fire Ecology

Pete Wilson is right. There is an army of arsonists lurking in our foothills. But they are called wealthy homeowners.

Southern California is a fire ecology in the same way it is a land of sunshine. Our natural landscapes--coastal sage, oak savanna and chaparral--have co-evolved with wildfire. Periodic burning is necessary to recycle nutrients and germinate seeds.

The native Californians were skilled fire farmers. They used fire to cultivate edible grass, increase browse for deer and produce better basket stalks. Their annual burning prevented fire catastrophe by limiting the accumulation of fuel.

The deadly foothill firestorms are the ironic consequence of massive expenditure on fire suppression.

In a famous study, a botanist once compared the fire histories of San Diego County and northern Baja California. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on fire suppression in San Diego’s urbanized backcountry, while a natural fire cycle has been tolerated in Baja’s wild hill areas. As a result, only San Diego County has had catastrophic fires.

Preventive burning has been successfully practiced in local national forests for decades. It is precluded in most of our foothills by the sheer density of housing, and the threat of lawsuits from powerful homeowners’ associations. They are the principal political constituency for the continuation of costly and quixotic efforts at “total fire suppression.”

Since 1945, 75,000 high-income homes have been constructed in the foothills and mountains. Even more than communing with nature, these homes represent--as design critic Reyner Banham recognized--a search for absolute “thickets of privacy,” outside the fabric of common citizenship and urban life.

Hillside home-building has despoiled the natural heritage of the majority for the sake of a selfish few. The beautiful coastal sage and canyon-riparian ecosystems of the Santa Monicas have been supplanted by castles and “guard-gate prestige.” Elsewhere--in the Repetto, Verdugo, San Jose, Puente and San Joaquin hills--tens of thousands of acres of oak and walnut woodland have been destroyed by developers’ bulldozers.

Despite a season of firestorms, dozens of new hillside tracts remain under construction. In the foothills above Monrovia, 240 mature oak trees have been cut down for the sake of a ridiculously overscaled plantation of combustible “chateau-style” mansions. In Altadena, a glen is being transformed into a “total-security” suburb complete with its own private school.

Typically, development rights in the foothills have been secured through questionable campaign contributions. Instead of protecting our “significant ecological areas,” as required by law, the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission has historically been the malleable tool of developers.

Moreover, society as a whole must pay the huge costs of defending hillside developments from inevitable natural hazards. Since 1945, several billion dollars of general revenue have been invested in flood-control and fire-fighting efforts focused on elite foothill society.

There has been no comparable investment in the fire and earthquake safety of the inner city. Indeed, we tolerate two systems of hazard prevention, separate and unequal. The Times has recently exposed the scandal of unenforced fire laws in McArthur Park neighborhoods, where dozens have died in tenement fires.

Media discussion of the fire hazard has been dominated by a criminalized discourse that scapegoats the homeless as potential arsonists. Pundits reinforce the illusion that wildfire can be contained by yet more costly investments in high-tech fire-fighting technology. The pyrogenic nature of hillside development is largely ignored. Indeed, if the post-fire experience of the Oakland Hills is any guide, immolated properties will be rebuilt at twice their original size.

It is time that the flatland majority considered an alternative approach, based on intertwined principles of restoration ecology and social cost-benefit analysis:

* An immediate moratorium on further hillside development.

* “Fire zoning” to establish the fiscal responsibility of foothill homeowners to pay a larger share of the cost of protecting their own homes.

* Comprehensive enforcement of the fire code in every part of the city, with harsher sanctions against criminally negligent landlords.

* Prioritize environmental restoration through an expansion of the California Conservation Corps.