He rounded a bend to hear the roar of the conflagration and see a fire a half mile ahead like a black-and-red curtain dropped from a night sky. Even from that distance the heat stopped him. He collapsed to his knees, sat in the warm ashes through which he’d been wading, and wept. – Denis Johnson, Train Dreams.
Fire has always been an inherent part of life in the American West. The mountains, plains, and forests that sprawl from the Mississippi to the Pacific see conflagrations that can reduce thousands of acres of landscape into smoldering ash in just a few days. Then, over time, the plants and wildlife return, and the ecology and lifestyles of the place return to normal over time. But nothing is normal anymore. And I fear we are long past the point where any legal efforts can save humanity from the bed it has made for itself.
Hurricane seasons are longer than ever and produce severe storms that are uncategorizable on our current scales of measure. This past year was the most intense tornado season ever recorded. Climate change also leads to other disasters, such as an increased chance of pandemics from zoonotic diseases, the impacts of which we all know far too well. And now, the most catastrophic fire event in Los Angeles history has raised the question of whether a city as powerful and wealthy as L.A. will ever be the same.
These devastating events make me question my environmentalist goals in the legal profession. Are we destined to drive ourselves to extinction? Watching a place I love fall victim to another man made disaster made me reconsider those questions anew. I asked myself whether any reasonable dreams of a future where we live in harmony with our Earth and replenish its bounties will ever come to fruition.
California is my second home. I attended graduate school at USC and met my partner in Santa Barbara. Before moving to Boston, I lived ten minutes from the Pacific Palisades for several years. In that time, I often traversed the Santa Monica Mountain range and navigated its numerous picturesque neighborhoods in search of trailheads. After one of my last runs in those mountains, I told my girlfriend that a terrible fire season lay on the horizon, a Delphic statement that, devastatingly, came to pass.
In recent years, southern California has experienced several extreme weather shifts, noticeable even to those not keeping a rain gauge and a barometer handy. In the summer of 2021, there were scorching temperatures across the typically Mediterranean climes of the coast, with the thermometer consistently climbing toward the upper 90s. Then it rained so much over the following 12 months that waterfalls long dormant came back to life and snowpacks in the Sierras were restored. That deluge of water brought colorful super blooms of chaparral, purple sage, sagebrush, and soaring grasses that towered above my head. Then the area went through another long drought, drying out all that former life and turning it into, essentially, kindling. I didn’t have to be a climate scientist to figure out what would likely come next. Even still, what did come was far more terrible than what I foresaw.
On January 7th, extreme Santa Ana winds, along with the typically dry conditions and all that overgrown brush, led to several fires, most notably in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, which then turned into towering infernos, scorching entire neighborhoods and forcing people to escape by whatever means possible. January is not the typical fire season in California, but it’s clear that everything we thought we knew about these disasters is obsolete. The dangers presented by fires under these conditions, as evidenced by the potentially inadequate response from LAFD and county officials, are breaking all previous rules of engagement. The strategies and tactics of mitigation and prevention that once worked to suppress fire danger do not stack up to the weather extremes caused by climate change. It’s a new reality, and the question is whether humanity still has the time, or the appetite, to do anything about it. A globalist solution is required to address climate change, but as long as America drags its feet, or actively works against this pursuit, the chances of any meaningful change coming about to save us decrease by the day.
While so many things about the response to the fires showed the strength of the human spirit, the overwhelming message I see, from disaster after disaster, is that the strength of the communities is not matched by that of humanity writ large, and–most importantly in our case–American society and politicians. We send our support and donations, all of which are important, but in the immediacy of those fixes the root cause of the pain and suffering gets lost in the shuffle. The large-scale remedies needed to prevent these increasingly devastating disasters will take decades, or maybe centuries to produce results, and for many, that scale of time makes it intangible or less essential to address right now.
I came to law school with a passion for the environment informed by experiences in nature and work in journalism. But what I saw on the news, on social media, and from my former neighbors about these fires brings a lot of mixed emotions about pursuing a career in environmental law. I wonder what, if any, difference I can make in the face of such desolation; if this country has any real appetite to become a global leader in this existential crisis, or if it will remain an enabler of the fossil fuel and big agriculture giants that are destroying the planet for monetary gain.
The expressly anti-environmentalist policy agenda of the new administration makes my concerns turn into something more like existential dread. The U.S. is already the largest fossil fuel producer in the world thanks to record production of oil and natural gas. After the demise of the Chevron doctrine, and several other anti-environment Supreme Court decisions, the already somewhat feckless EPA now has even less power, and the judiciary seems geared toward further weakening any policy or agency geared toward protecting the environment at the cost of industrial gain. Considering those developments, I often wonder what any law student could do to combat such an onslaught of opposing forces. It is a question I have asked myself before, but after the needless destruction of a place so close to my heart, that line of inquiry feels more oppressive and discouraging.
The overwhelming nature of the problem makes it easy to become disconsolate. To give up the fight, the hope, the ambition, and resign oneself to wishful thinking that maybe it will just fix itself, or worse yet, that humanity is predisposed toward self-destruction. I do believe that individual action will never prove sufficient to fix these problems. The greatest trick industrial leaders ever played on society is that individual actions can counterbalance the damage they caused. Unfortunately, we cannot recycle or compost our way out of this mess. While those things help in some smaller sense, we need massive, collective action to force the fossil fuel industry, big agriculture, and governments to reform their actions and reduce global emissions to a level where the hope of a sustainable future exists.
Will that come about because of the actions of one future attorney? I doubt it. However, I believe there are enough people who want to make a change for a better world so that we can make a difference as a collective. The many activists already on the front lines of this fight bolster that belief, but it is clear that much more must be done to support their efforts. My goal in law is to provide some of that support and add some of my skills to aid in this existential struggle. Losing all hope would make that impossible. As foolish as it may be, I would rather go down with that hope than turn away from a preventable apocalypse.
My core belief in the power of collective action to be a part of a remedy prevents me from falling into the abyss of nihilistic despair. Perhaps enough people will wake up to this problem to make it something politicians can campaign on rather than relegate to the backburner of their policy agenda. Perhaps these disasters will wake people up and drive them to find a way to live in unity with the natural world rather than exploiting it for personal gain. Perhaps we can work together to make a brighter future rather than one populated by ash and destruction.
Ian Hurley is a first-year student at BC Law. Contact him at hurleyia@bc.edu.
BC Law: Impact 