Mike Davidson, writing about the fires that destroyed Pacific Palisades last January.

What I will say though is that if we want to avoid more catastrophes like this, collective action is the only solution.

I haven’t even mentioned the idea of human-induced climate change at all in this post, because it frankly doesn’t even matter at this point. Extreme weather is here, whether we caused it or not. Even if you believe, as some people do, that the earth just does this stuff on its own, it’s beginning to kill us at an accelerating clip, and that should be something we can all band together against. Right? (…)

Earth is raining calamities down upon us that should unite us as a species. Will we do what we did during the pandemic and turn against each other again? Or can we use this even bigger, spiraling threat to put our disagreements aside and perform the collective action necessary to maintain human life on earth?

The planet will be just fine without us. It is we who are endangered.

In Mike’s words, the fires were an “ever-present, existential threat”, yet they were not in people’s face enough to take proactive measures. The example of how Los Angeles fought smog between 1980 and 2000 is both encouraging and perplexing. We could mitigate and adapt to climate change much more quickly than we currently do.

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