Drawing a Line in the Ashes : The recent wildfire disaster drives home the point: It’s time for government to rein in building in the coastal mountains.

This fall’s devastating brush fires force us to admit what we have denied for so long: Far too many people live in the chaparral-covered hillsides and canyons of the Southern California coastal mountains. Local governments have erred seriously by allowing so many homes to be built there.

This mistake cannot be rectified, because our existing canyon communities will not go away. But we can avoid the mistakes of the past by seriously restricting new building in fire-prone areas.

I know that these words will brand me as a “Nimby.” I live in a mountain village north of Malibu. When my neighbors and I espouse slow growth and no growth in the mountains, opponents are quick to charge that we want to keep the good life for ourselves but deny it to others.

Implicit in their argument is the belief that the chaparral-covered coastal mountains, like the flatlands of Los Angeles, can absorb far more people, houses and urban infrastructure. Expansion plans for Ahmanson Ranch and Soka University reflect this attitude.

Until the recent firestorm, reasonable people could disagree on how many people the coastal ranges can accommodate. The latest wildfires--larger, hotter, deadlier and more destructive than those of the recent past--compel us to the only reasonable conclusion. The mountains have reached their limits.

Responsible public planning everywhere prohibits the building of homes in obviously dangerous places. We cannot build on an active earthquake fault, or on a mapped landslide. We cannot build in a riverbed. We cannot put up homes next to toxic dumps, oil refineries or nuclear plants. We cannot build on uncompacted fill, below old dams or where the ground is subsiding.

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Yet public officials encourage building in coastal canyons thick with chaparral so flammable that it burns, in the words of John McPhee, “as if it were soaked with gasoline.” These mountains, so lovely in spring and summer, are extremely dangerous in the fall and winter. Chaparral is so dense that when the wildfires rage, 25,000 tons of it burns on every square mile of hillside. These conflagrations create firestorms hotter than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, incinerating virtually everything in their path. And the conditions for these fires occur right on schedule, every year, as hot, dry Santa Ana winds blow over the tinder-dry vegetation.

Trying to create a “buffer” of cleared land between a new development and the chaparral is like using a chicken-wire fence to stop a charging lion. A firebreak wide enough to keep a wildfire from a large development would have to be correspondingly huge. Plowing the land destroys vegetation and greatly increases the risk of winter mudflows and flooding. In many mountain communities, brush is physically impossible to remove--homes are so close to steep canyon walls and ridges that the chaparral is out of reach. And much of the chaparral is in parklands where clearing is prohibited to protect habitat.

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Clearing brush and wetting down roofs often do little when sheets of flame cascade over structures. Our own heroic efforts may save our homes, but whether many homes are saved depends on the caprice of the winds, the presence of fire crews and sheer luck.

Our fire-ravaged neighborhoods will be rebuilt for many reasons. Most of us love the mountains so much that we are willing to risk it all again. All of us who stay do so with complex and often contradictory motives. We are bound by powerful emotional ties to one another, to our communities and to the land. Monte Nido, Fernwood, Old Topanga and dozens of other neighborhoods will continue as vibrant, energetic parts of the Los Angeles mosaic.

But preserving existing communities in the brush fire zone does not justify creating new ones. How can public officials condone development in areas where many citizens are exposed, repeatedly, to a high risk of injury or death? How can officials justify such decisions, knowing that the annual cost of defending homes from fires runs into the many millions of taxpayers’ dollars? And that when a catastrophe occurs, like the one we just went through, the cost will probably approach $1 billion?

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If we could reset the clock, public officials would zone the coastal mountains to keep the residential population low. The relative few who live there would be in widely spaced, in sparsely populated hamlets and ranches. Firefighters would have far fewer homes to protect and could do so without mobilizing armies of fire crews at staggering cost.

In such a landscape (as Los Angeles was only 40 years ago), the hills and canyons would not be packed with subdivisions and dense neighborhoods of schools, churches, stores and homes. The false sense of security that “planned communities” in the coastal ranges inflict on their residents would not exist. How many homeowners in Laguna Beach realized their brush fire peril? There would be no narrow, twisting roads to create instant gridlock as panicked, escaping residents blocked fire crews trying to reach their homes.

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We cannot turn back the clock. But we can stop the ever-increasing scale of destruction. We can say we’ve reached the limit. Here we draw a line in the ashes. No more houses. No more schools. No more colleges or universities. No more shopping centers. We will rebuild what was destroyed, but we will not permit more families to be put at risk.