"The surburbanization of Southern California's remaining wild landscapes has only accelerated... As middle and upper-class families flee, they seek sanctuaries ever deeper in the rugged contours of the chaparral firebelt. The population, for example, of the Thousand Oaks-Agoura Hills corridor-the crucible of almost all Malibu firestorms-has tripled since 1970, with hundreds of new homes scattered like so much kindling across isolated hilltops and bridges."
"The Case for Letting Malibu Burn"
by Mike Davis from The Ecology of Fear (Metropolitan Books, 1998)
Rampant development leads to rampant fires. I lived in San Diego county for eleven years. I watched developers raze hill after hill, building track home where once was nature--the chaparral firebelt. Now, the desert flames fueled by the Santa Ana winds raze ill-planned middle-class hideaways and we wonder how this could happen.
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