Who lets the world burn?

A mass movement must meet the climate crisis

Los Angeles is burning. A fire that began in LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood is spreading with astonishing speed, thanks to winds of up to 100 mph that are pushing it through the city and thanks to the exceptional lack of rainfall that’s left much of the area in a drought. Southern California hasn't seen more than 0.1 inches of rain since early May. One-tenth of an inch in the last 8 months. Now it’s unclear just how bad this fire will get. It’s already consumed over 3,000 acres, and other fires in the area have torn through over 1,500. Mandatory evacuations have been ordered for nearly 50,000 people, so far.

And evacuating is immensely difficult. Leaving your home and most of your possessions behind, knowing they might be consumed by fire must be a gut-wrenching choice. Then there’s the logistics of actually getting out. The scenes of patients being escorted from the hospital in the middle of the night are terrifying. And footage of the abandoned cars of evacuees who, unable to move in the traffic of mass exodus, left their vehicles and continued on foot is haunting. Bulldozers had to come to at least one LA roadway to clear the cars and allow emergency vehicles to use the street.

We didn’t build this world. This is the society that fossil fuel companies, the auto industry, and the capitalist class as a whole have built for us. A planet on fire where we clog the roads driving to escape and must flee for our lives on foot. Car and gas companies killed public transit, and continue to block its implementation whenever possible. The major airlines sometimes pitch in too, like Southwest spending millions to kill rail in Texas, so people would continue flying between Houston and Dallas and San Antonio. We of course know that politicians, beholden to corporate interests, have failed to adequately address the climate crisis, and the attendant infrastructure problem ailing this country.

There have been efforts to increase renewable energy infrastructure, but we know we’re still emitting far too many greenhouse gasses, failing to shift sufficiently to renewable sources, and most importantly placing profits above the lives and ecosystems being lost in this worldwide climate crisis. Moreover, the consensus of many politicians appears to be that repression of climate protesters, and of the general disorder that will likely result from the climate crisis, should be prioritized above remedying the infrastructure collapse and above a sustainable transition away from oil and gas. In LA, for example, the city council has invested in cops and defunded the fire department. The most recent budget had an increase of more than $138 million for the LAPD; and a decrease of about $23 million for the LAFD. Nationwide, cop cities are being developed, and regressive, repressive laws passed.

And no one is coming to save us from this malevolent politics that insists we accept a torrent of fires and floods. No benevolent billionaire or powerful body will fundamentally change society to avoid this apocalyptic new normal. Certainly Donald Trump and his cadre of climate deniers, billionaires, and various oligarchical elements have no interest in saving us. They exist to make the rich richer, both in and out of the administration. Trump asking the Big Oil barons for $1 billion while he ran for office highlights just how brazen this whole arrangement is, particularly when it comes to the climate crisis. Oil production hit record highs under Biden, and when his term begins it’s no secret that Trump wants to drill baby drill.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

It will take a movement to change the trajectory of our planet, to save our communities from devastation, and to prevent a future where millions and millions of us are climate refugees. By some strange twist of fate, Octavia Butler wrote about the creation of one such movement in her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. The strangeness is that her book begins in 2024, and Butler was born in Pasadena, California. She was trying to write about our probable future, and she was far more prescient than even she knew. The movement she describes in her work, the movement that does change our collective trajectory, is spiritual as well as political. It’s centered around a semi-religious ideology called Earthseed, which embraces human adaptivity and change. But, at the same time, it builds power and the capacity for political transformation.

And we’re going to need it all. We’re going to need internal changes in the way we relate to the world and to one another, as well as a movement that forges power sufficient to uproot the current system and builds something not based around endless profits and oppression. And our movement must be comprehensive. Siloed issues, like climate or housing or policing, can each be dismantled and dismissed or co-opted and watered down by the ruling class. A comprehensive movement aiming at the foundations of society, aiming to fully shift the power dynamics that govern us and fully abolish the class divide of society, cannot be so easily defeated.

We need the power to throw off the yoke of capitalism and create a society that actually values people and the planet more than profit margins. We need the power to build a bottom-up society rather than one governed from the top-down. We need the power to stop the fossil fuel giants, the oligarchs who have consciously decided to let your home burn rather than see the value of their shares drop. We need the power to construct a world where the rising sea level is seen as a more important problem than our anger at the rising sea level. Those who are letting your neighborhood flood will not be the ones to save you. We must organize to save ourselves, and we must do it now.

P.S. I included resources for how to get started on organizing at the end of this previous piece: https://www.jphilll.com/p/its-time-for-class-war-in-2025