A Public Health Analysis of California Wildfires

It’s November 2019, and California is on fire. There are wildfires across the 800-mile reach of the state, ranging from 103 to 75,415 acres in size. For reference, an acre is about the size of a 4×4 cube of tennis courts, or an entire football field. The Kincaid fire of 75,415 acres north of the Bay Area would be 3/4ths the size of 100,000 football fields, or 120,664 tennis courts. 

Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes and communities just over the past few days alone, with thousands of homes and other built structures lost.

These fires are mostly started by human technology or action, such as sparks from electric wires and illegal hunting fires sparked out of control. Sure, fires in the wilderness happen everywhere, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest. However, the devastation being experienced in California is a statistical anomaly. The frequency of fires has been rising since the late 20th Century. As a resident of the Los Angeles area, SLU senior Ryan Lawless commented on living in these conditions, stating:

“There’s a weather phenomenon in Southern California called the Santa Ana winds and where I’m from (Antelope Valley) is caught right in the middle of them. The winds are super strong and blow towards the coast. Sometimes you have entire days of constant 40mph winds and gusts that can get up to 80mph. This means if there are any fires that crop up to the northeast you, at the very least, bare the brunt of the smoke that’s produced from it. At best, this means the sky looks overcast and it’s hard to breath. At worst, the smoke makes visibility so extremely low that they have to close down streets and highways… It’s super stressful to deal with even when you’re not in immediate danger from the fires.”

Even if folks are not directly touched by the fires themselves, second-hand and resulting effects of these conditions mitigate community well-being and stifle public health. With drying landscapes and heavier winds, conditions in the American West are increasingly susceptible to catatonic fires. Fires of greater gravitas and frequency are a public health issue. Over the years, politicians have responded to the dangers of wildfires by attempting to make sure they never happen. Policies have been implemented to restrict man-made fires for hunting and camping in hopes of ending the dangers of fires. Though actions against danger are inherently utilitarian, restricting landscapes from their natural patterns of recalibration primes ecosystems for collapse.

Ecologists stress the importance of wildfires. From a preservation point of view, nature is supposed to change. Just as how mushrooms and fungi are integral to natural processes by consuming decaying matter, so do wildfires take away dead plant material and refresh life cycles. 

Despite evidence-based outcry from the scientific community, President Trump announced that “forest clearing” would be integral to stopping forest fires. If one tries to make sure a natural thing never happens, when it does, it will be worse. Clearing forests makes fires more destructive in the future because of the resulting accelerated growth of natural landscapes. The President also threatened to terminate federal payments to combat fires, putting millions of lives in imminent danger, saying “remedy now, or no more Fed payments.” Though federal dollars are going towards halting the fires, they aren’t doing it in the most ethical way.

For example, people that are incarcerated are being paid $2 a day to manually extinguish flames. Alongside 2,000 non-incarcerated folks who have willingly chosen to fight fires, hundreds of incarcerated men are extinguishing flames to hopefully get time off their sentences. Many of these people are youth offenders under the age of 18. All incarcerated folks working on fires are kept on-site in “camps.” If combating an active fire manually, imprisoned folks get $1 an hour. Pressuring incarcerated people has been happening for over a century, as reported in 2018 by Abigail Hess:

“[The] CDCR first established labor camps that forced inmates to build highways and roads [in 1915]. The program was expanded during World War II and by 1945, the first inmate firefighting program was established. Today, the CDCR, CAL FIRE and the Los Angeles County Fire Department jointly operate 43 adult conservation camps in 27 counties, with about 3,400 inmates participating in total.”

Using less jail time to barter life-endangering physical labor is exploitative. With the structures of the prison industrial complex and criminal justice system, most of the folks putting out fires are Black and Brown men. The exploitation of these men is forced labor based on race.  

It is inherently racist to use slave labor to put out wildfires. Not only are these conditions life-threatening and dangerous, but this kind of labor is specifically being done by voices who have been silenced by the prison-industrial complex. California is also implementing systems of evacuation in dozens of counties. Evacuating is harder if you are low-income and don’t have elsewhere that you can afford to go. Furthermore, electric companies have cut power to counties in an attempt to prevent starting fires.

“Before people even evacuate, power companies are shutting off power to massive amounts of people under the guise of safety. It’s really just the power companies avoiding responsibility for the safety of their equipment and punishing citizens as a consequence,” said Lawless. Corporations are answering to disasters by unnecessarily cutting thousands of folks from necessary resources.

From restricting services from communities to forcing labor from incarcerated folks with their autonomy stripped away, responding to climate disasters has structurally reinforced systems of abuse. Corporations cutting power in preparation is not a good response. Clear-cutting landscapes to temporarily prevent fires is not an evidence-based response. Abusing the incarcerated for labor is not an inclusive response. From a public health perspective, we must prevent, react and respond to climate phenomena in more inclusive ways that care for the folks who are being hurt the most by them. 

Hundreds of thousands of acres have burned over the past few months in California. These numbers will continue throughout and beyond the dry season. Though we may not live in the region, the impact of the events is significant. Phenomena experienced are getting worse. How we culturally respond to climate crises within the climate crisis has an immense impact, especially folks of oppressed identities and backgrounds. 

Our government must work with our climate and with people in more evidence-based practices. It is integral to implement more inclusive practices in responding to and preparing for potential disasters. To minimize the burden we face by natural forces, we need to pressure our cultural and political systems to act with and for our ecosystems and for those who live there. 

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