Wildfire

When the Eaton and Palisades fires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, they did so on a scale the city had never before endured. Fire, of course, is not anomalous in Los Angeles. It is a recurring and constitutive feature of the region’s ecology. What distinguished these fires was their magnitude. The Eaton and Palisades fires displaced more people than any California fire in over a century, including the 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s history—and other conflagrations over the past decade. Over the course of twenty-four days, roughly 150,000 residents were forced from their homes.