A December Wildfire Explodes While Spring Flowers Bloom Early

And why the wealthy must be held accountable for our warming planet

Things are weird.

That feels like an understatement. Things are weird in the U.S. right now, but it’s not only political weirdness or cultural weirdness. It’s also weather and nature. Fire and flowers both blooming out of season.

It’s not unusual for the Santa Anas to stoke fires in Southern California— the winds whoosh west from the Great Basin, gaining speed as they funnel through narrow canyons. This funneling also compresses the winds, raising temperatures and stripping them of any remaining moisture. Fine and medium fuels, like grass and brush, parch in the heat— the winds function like a giant blow-dryer and can result in single-digit humidity levels. Perfect for fires.

But in December? What was once a rare occurence is becoming more commonplace: December fires volatile enough to require evacuation orders, virulent enough to consume structures.

Students at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California spent last night sheltering in place as the fire roared outside. Luckily no structures or lives were taken, but the Franklin Fire is currently active, with only 7% containment. Since late Monday night it’s grown from 10 acres to over 4,000, with no sign of slowing.

As a former wildland firefighter who once worked on a hotshot crew based in San Bernardino, California, I know how difficult it can be to safely fight a fire propelled by the Santa Anas. It’s almost impossible. The winds can be squirrely, shifting quickly from one direction to the next and back again.

One of the first lines of defense against a growing wildfire is a burning operation, when personnel map out and/or create containment lines (often a hodgepodge of roads, dozer, and hand lines) and then burn outwards from, so the main fire will eventually extinguish itself when it meets with the burn. With the Santa Anas this is rarely an option; the winds are too fast, too erratic. The fuels are primed to burn.

There are currently evacuation orders for all of central Malibu, with evacuation warnings extending north towards Oxnard and south towards Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica, as well as east into Topanga Canyon, the Santa Monica Mountains, and towards Calabasas.

These mountains are the spaces and places where I spent a lot of my time as a hotshot, cutting fireline, getting mauled by poison oak, and grabbing bushels of brush taller than I was, throwing it over more brush or stuffing it into holes sawed into the dense weblike innards of interlocking plants.

With my crew(s) I burned from roads and dozer lines and fireline we’d expanded from serpentine trails into swaths wide enough to (hopefully) keep fire from expanding into what we hoped to keep green and unburned.

But there are no hotshot crews on standby. It’s December, and all hotshot crews have already disbanded for the season. Firefighters are working with a bare-bones workforce composed mostly of city, county, and state workers rather than the federal resources available from April to October.

The federal landscape hasn’t yet adjusted to what’s becoming more and more common: a year-round fire season.

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Here in Florida thingsd feel pretty normal— though I am not a Floridian, so my idea of “normal” isn’t attuned to any time span beyond two and a half years.

The weather feels normal. The leaves are finally turning bright red and yellow, signalling autumn, which always comes later that I think it will.

That’s normal, but I don’t think it’s normal to see cherry blossoms blooming on trees, or bright pink camellias browned by recent frost, or an iris extending its petals in their familiar star shape.

The cherry blossoms, camellias, and irises are supposed to bloom in spring. Late winter, at the earliest. Not in December.

I remember this happening on the west coast once, when I was in San Francisco and noticed cherry blossoms blooming during an unseasonably warm winter. That happened maybe ten years ago.

The flowers. The fire.

I keep asking myself: what is normal?

With climate change, there’s no normal anymore. It’s all shifting so quickly.

But here’s what I do know:

It’s essential that we continue advocating for prescribed burning throughout the United States, because the land needs fire.

It’s essential that we pressure companies to move towards more sustainable ways of doing things.

It’s vital that we stop consuming so much, buying so much, and producing so much— because really it’s not material goods that we’re consuming. It’s ourselves. Our planet.

But if you’re reading this, you likely aren’t the problem.

In 2023, a study identified the wealthiest among us, equivalent to 1% of the worldwide population, as those with the deepest climate footprint. The Guardian reported that “the richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%.”

“The most comprehensive study of global climate inequality ever undertaken shows that this elite group, made up of 77 million people including billionaires, millionaires and those paid more than US$140,000 (£112,500) a year, accounted for 16% of all CO2 emissions in 2019 – enough to cause more than a million excess deaths due to heat, according to the report.” —reported by The Guardian.

This wealthiest 1%, as noted above, includes people paid above $140k a year. I think this is an important point, because this includes many non-millionaires. This isn’t just someone like Jeff Bezos— it’s also tech workers, consultants, dentists, and even college professors. Their levels of consumption are typically the highest, and their actions unequivocally cause suffering throughout the world, though we can all understand that the worst offenders are likely on the higher end of this wealth spectrum (like…insurance CEOs, oil barons, and celebrities who fly private).

But those who suffer the most are also the most marginalized and least wealthy. The poorest people who have few defenses or resources.

I feel like we aren’t talking about this enough?? Please tell me what you think in the comments.

That’s all I have for today. You’ll be hearing from me more often, though, and I encourage you to share this post, or the newsletter as a whole, with anyone who might be interested in reading it. Feel free to forward the email to someone or share it on social media.

And don’t forget that you can pre-order my book, HOTSHOT, which is coming out in August 2025.

HOTSHOT details my years as a hotshot as well as the history of fire suppression and the importance of Indigenous fire in the United States. Pre-orders really help authors. Like, a lot. Feel free to drop any questions about the book (or anything!) in the comments.