I am deeply shaken by the fires in Los Angeles, I am shaking with anger and grief. I lived for fourteen years in the town of Altadena, near Pasadena, where the Eaton Fire damaged or destroyed at least 5,000 buildings.
I moved there with my family two years ago because, as California’s weather continued to get drier, hotter and hotter, I feared our neighborhood would catch fire. But even I didn’t imagine that a disaster of this scale and severity would level it so soon, as well as other large portions of the city. Now, these days, the images of Altadena show us a hellish country, which one would think came out of The Parable of the Sower [éd. J’ai lu, 1995]Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient novel about climate change.
Climate change teaches the same lesson again and again: bad things can happen faster than expected. Predictive models of climate impacts are generally too optimistic. But today, unfortunately, warming is accelerating, and it is ahead of scientists’ calculations.
We have to admit that no one is going to come and save us, especially in disaster-prone areas like Los Angeles, where the risk of catastrophic fires has been evident for years. As a result, many of us are faced with a very real choice: stay, or leave. I chose to leave.
-“In 2007, it was like we had landed in paradise”
Often nicknamed L.A.’s “best kept secret,” Altadena is a picturesque town nestled at the foot of the hills, far from traffic jams, and where everyone seems to know everyone. I arrived there with my family in 2008, when I was starting out as a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics. It’s as if we had landed in paradise; flocks of green parrots cackling above us; the perfect lawns of Caltech in Pasadena, where I could lounge with my children, even in January.
I started to worry
