California-style:

Back in 1998, in his book Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis wrote everything about the Southern California “fire coast” that you’d ever need to know, if you didn’t want to be surprised by the raging Santa Ana-driven wildfires of 2003 or 2007. Even then, the periodic firestorms were becoming ever more “apocalyptic” and, even then, “the essential land-use issue, the rampant, uncontrolled proliferation of fire-belt suburbs” was being ignored in a post-fire search for “arsonists.”

In his first significant writing on the subject since the firestorms of this month practically ate San Diego County, he begins with a recent ceremony in which “500 wealthy business people and Republican Party donors raised their champagne glasses to salute ‘Mr. San Diego,’ Pete Wilson, as he unveiled a bronze statue of himself in downtown’s Horton Plaza.” Looking back on the history of San Diego’s mayor and later California’s governor, Davis wryly comments: “I think we should simply chisel the word ‘arsonist’ in large letters at the base of the Bronze Pete.”

He then explains just why the kind of “developer power” Wilson institutionalized ensured that future Santa Anas would have all the tinder they needed to roar through the county. Wilson’s legacy, Davis writes, is being carried on even now — as “the business community openly gloats over the coming reconstruction boom and the revival of a building industry badly shaken by the mortgage crisis.”

Davis describes the latest in planning this way: “More recently, on the very eve of the new firestorms, county supervisors endorsed a so-called ’shelter in place’ strategy that will permit developers to build in the rugged, high fire-risk backcountry without having to provide the secondary roads needed to ensure safe evacuation. Instead residents would be encouraged to stay in their “fire resistant” homes while fire-fighters defended the perimeter of their cul-de-sac. As scores of fire experts and survivors have pointed out in angry op-ed columns and blogs, this is a lunatic, if not homicidal scheme, that elevates developers’ bottom-lines over human life. Those who have actually confronted 100-foot-high firestorms, driven by hurricane-velocity winds, know that the developer slogan — ‘It’s not where you build, but how you build’ — is a deadly deception.”