John Buell

California Fires and the Search for Home

California’s wild fires, having petered out, are no longer in the news, but they left behind more than just charred rubble. They left a whole set of moral, economic, and political questions needing attention before the next inevitable round of major fires.

On the one-year anniversary of California’s Camp Fire disaster, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) issued a proclamation celebrating the state’s resilience. On its surface the document seems to be little more than Chamber of Commerce hokum aimed at a little more publicity for the state’s new governor. The story, however, is a bit more complex. Some of the proclamation’s references reflect but also hide important aspects of the state’s history. Hiding and forgetting that history exacts a price, one that disproportionately burdens minorities and working class citizens.

Following his announcement of the proclamation Gov. Newsom was asked by AP reporters if he would support legislation to prevent building future housing near potential fire zones. He replied: “There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit,” He then added “I’m not advocating for no (building).”

There’s a frontier aspect, a historic component,” Newsom said, referencing the phrase “Go West, young man” that is often attributed to author Horace Greeley, an advocate of westward expansion.

Newsom’s reply speaks more than just a plea for deregulated housing markets and more opportunities for developers, although these ambitions are surely involved. The answer reflects and helps intensify the role that the quest for a home in the world plays in our politics and culture. In a provocative and eloquent work, Thomas Dumm, William H Hastie ’25 Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, traces the role that the quest for home has played in the lives of both leading and lesser known figures in cultural and political life. (“Home in America: On Loss and Retrieval,” Belknap/Harvard, 2019)

The quest for a home in the world is more than just for physical shelter. Home is the place where we become human. We learn that we are finite and we “seek comfort in the face of our eventual death.” But human beings also resist finitude” through several pathways, including often from means as different as efforts to construct absolute knowledge or endless consumption.

The effort to hide our finitude often leaves painful remainders behind. One story that Dumm tells seems especially pertinent to the California fires. Dumm tells us that Jefferson built a “house that is our national symbol of home, not because of its grandeur but because of its representativeness. But to note the representativeness of Monticello would be to understate the destructive power of that vision of home. Monticello was built on blood, on misery, on what Jefferson knew to be a hateful system of human bondage.”

Newsom resists state regulation not only by celebrating a pioneering spirit, but also by endorsing a Jeffersonian faith in local control

The concept of local control is also deeply embedded in California’s ethos, and Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, said he doesn’t want to take away land-use planning power from local governments. But as in the case of Jefferson and Monticello, the deeply embedded local control has often been a rationale for and means of achieving and institutionalizing racial and economic exclusion. And “states’ rights” has become the Confederate explication and justification of the Civil War.

The invocation of pioneer spirit also merits closer scrutiny. Just like many 19th century settlers, residents of Paradise were fleeing economic hardship, but also both groups were escaping conditions in part of human making. Here again, one of the most popular tales of a quest for home prefigures these recent events. “There are prairie fires that scorch the earth. In the {Wilder} books these are presented as though they are acts of God … If one reframes the narrative of the pioneer experience on the plains to account for the environmental disaster that the Ingalls and Wilder families participated in, a different vision of home becomes visible: home as a quest for destruction, for the insatiable appetites of supposedly shrewd and knowledgeable settlers familiar with the flora and fauna of a hostile environment they have come to tame … This [story] then becomes a cautionary tale about an American nightmare we are still living. Quote 188-189.

If the journey across the prairie tells a climate and environment story so also does it tell a social story. Defining land not divided into individual parcels and owned as therefore vacant and free for the taking, conflicts with and exploitation of native Americans became inevitable In an equally oblivious manner Newsom discusses the response to the fire in an “we are all in this together” framework during a time in which the ranks of the homeless, often feared and further victimized by their more fortunate neighbors, were dramatically growing. During the very month the governor issued this proclamation the state was authorizing 500 million in emergency aid to local communities for assistance of the homeless.

Some wrongs are beyond full redress. That is, however, no reason not to strive for a full acknowledgment of and generous compensation for past wrongs .As for the future careful listening for the new ghosts, we inevitably foster is in order, not only to enhance the possibility for social justice but also to become more open and considerate persons.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine and writes on labor and environmental issues. His books include “Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). Email Jbuell@acadia.net.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2020

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