2018 essay: "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn"

Smoke from Palisades Fire, as seen from Sherman Oaks, CA. January 10, 2024 (Carla Sinclair)

Malibu mansions face the same statistical certainty of burning as inner-city tenements, yet receive vastly different levels of protection and support. As the late Mike Davis argued in his 2018 analysis of LA's fire ecology, this disparity reveals uncomfortable truths about how we manage fire risk in California.