“The Los Angeles megafire is a warning to all populations around the world”

Lhe images leave you speechless: the fire that has hit Los Angeles (California) since January 7 seems unstoppable. Continuous television and social networks constantly broadcast the same scenes of devastation. And the comments emphasize the exceptionality of the phenomenon: “Who could have imagined this? » Pacific Palisades and Hollywood on fire? Amazing !

In truth, the question that should be asked is quite different: how did we not want (here as elsewhere) to hear the alerts, to anticipate, to prepare? Because all the conditions had been in place for a long time for such a sequence to occur. Even more, how can we not understand that this event is now expected to be less exceptional than normal and ordinary and that it testifies to the extreme weakening of our human habitats, which we can observe everywhere, on a terrestrial scale?

In this California experiencing urban and suburban expansion in all directions, based on the sacred right to build one's house in whatever condition, disregarding all precautions, on the valorization of real estate speculation, on the unbridled development of activities, on the absolute primacy of road mobility, over energy profligacy, over consumption of water resources (while the dry and hot climate is in the process of aridification, even more marked due to global warming), such conflagrations were assured.

And all the more so since in Los Angeles, for more than a century and a half, the consistency of devastating fires has been obvious. In 1993, a particularly severe episode concerned Malibu. Mike Davis [historien et géographe californien] y consacra en 1995 un article : « The case for Letting Malibu Burn » [« pourquoi il faut laisser Malibu brûler »]in which he examines the history of recurring fires in and around Malibu, and highlights their steady increase in damage potential due to urban growth. It also shows how these disasters express and accentuate social inequalities. The richest populations generally see their neighborhoods taken into better consideration in the fight against the flames than the poorest. They also devote significant resources to recruiting “private firefighters”. At the start of 2025, we saw the same thing, however, upmarket sectors did not escape the combustion and, suddenly, it was as if the catastrophe had become real, tangible!

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