People, Places, and Things

I will remind readers here of Williamson’s First Law: “Everything in life is really, really simple, provided you don’t know a [expletive deleted] thing about it.” 

Consider the California wildfires. 

About California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the wildfires currently plaguing the state, Donald Trump wrote with his trademark combination of pre-Oedipal rage and illiteracy: “This is all his fault!!!” Sen. Ted Cruz, who has been trying (and failing) to out-Trump Trump since 2016, has also heaped scorn on California’s elected officials: “The people of southern California have every right to be angry. Their elected officials failed them greatly.”

Sen. Cruz took a rather more nuanced view of the wildfires that scorched Texas in recent years, for example by sponsoring legislation that would have taken into account whether cattle lost in the fires were pregnant when calculating compensation for ranchers. Cruz spurred other federal agencies, such as the Small Business Administration, into action, too. A single wildfire in my part of Texas, the 2024 Smokehouse Creek Fire, burned more land—about 1 million acres—than all wildfires combined burn in California in a typical year. Was that a terrible failure of leadership in Texas? 

Well, you know, it’s complicated—it always is when it’s your business. 

The Smokehouse Creek Fire in 2024 burned 1,654 square miles of largely rural land, an area larger than the land area of Rhode Island and nearly that of Delaware—more than three times the area of the City of Los Angeles and about 40 percent of the area of Los Angeles County. It was huge, the largest wildfire in Texas’ recorded history and the largest anywhere in the United States in 2024. And with all due respect to the two people who died in the fire and the many more who suffered property damage, it was a relatively minor affair. 

It is not as though California does not have political problems—boy, does it. But the fundamental challenge wrapped up in these Southern California wildfires is one of geography. Los Angeles’ well-deserved reputation for sprawl masks the fact that it is, after New York City, the most densely populated metropolitan area in these United States. And while Los Angeles has nothing to compare to the population density of New York City’s most jam-packed census tracts, which run as high as 200,000 people per square mile—it does have tracts that contain 90,000 people per square mile. The Smokehouse Creek Fire mainly affected Hutchinson, Roberts, and Hemphill counties in Texas, which have population densities per square mile of: 23, 3.7, and 2.6. Southwest of these in Loving County, conditions can get pretty dry and brushy, too, and wildfires are no doubt of real concern to the 60-odd people who live there and give it its 0.1 person per square mile population density. 

Of course they’re counting the cattle. There isn’t much else to count besides rattlesnakes. There is a reason that this part of the world is known as the Big Empty. 

Southern California’s climate and vegetation make it fire-prone. Whatever effect climate change is having on the fires right now, fires were in the main much larger in the 19^th century, when something on the order of 4.5 million acres burned in a typical year, as opposed to the median damage from 2000-23, about 650,000 acres a year. (The mean damage is nearly 1 million acres; there have been a few big outlier years.) The wildfire story is a lot like the hurricane story: The loss of life and property damage is considerably worse today than a century ago not because of climate change but because of population change, with people moving into fire-prone or hurricane-prone areas in large numbers, with many of them building unusually expensive houses in these scenic locales. Even if one accepts the largest estimates of the effects of climate change, the most important factor in lives lost and dollars forfeited is that in the middle of the 19^th century there were only 2,240 people living in El Cuidad de los Angeles, while what is today Dade County was home to all of 83 people in 1860. 

You can still see the aftermath of the Smokehouse Creek Fire, if you are willing to do some driving. And if you drive in from nearby Amarillo, you can tour through the million acres that burned in the East Amarillo Complex fire in 2006. That got into more densely populated areas than the Smokehouse Creek Fire did, but nothing like Los Angeles. The Bastrop County Complex Fire in 2011 burned up 50 square miles not far from Austin—only two people died in that very costly and destructive fire (nearly 1,700 buildings were lost), but you can imagine how much worse it would have been had it reached Austin. And Texas is a lot more urban than people may assume: Of the dozen largest cities in the United States, five of them—Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth—are in Texas. In the main, these cities are, like their California counterparts, heavily Democratic, with a very familiar kind of urban politics. (Dallas’ Republican mayor, Eric “Not the ‘Cliffs of Dover’ Guy” Johnson, was elected as a Democrat and switched parties; previously, Fort Worth had been the largest Texas—or U.S.—city with a Republican mayor, the city’s “nonpartisan” municipal elections being a polite fiction.) Politics in Ted Cruz’s home of Houston look a lot like politics in Philadelphia or Chicago or in the city Houston most resembles—which is, of course, Los Angeles. But Houston doesn’t burn as much as it floods. 

It’s easy for Cruz et al. to piss on California, and it is not as though California doesn’t have it coming. But when Texas burned, Sen. Cruz didn’t offer those flatland farmers and ranchers a stern lecture on self-reliance and the necessity of digging fire lanes—he put his hand into the federal cookie jar on their behalf, which is what senators do. And when Californians want to do the same?

Don’t be surprised if Republicans insist that is … different.