Fire, the price we pay

Eight thousand years ago, the Tongva and Tataviam peoples, who made their homes in what we now call the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, did exactly what many of us have been doing for the last few days: They inhaled the bone-dry air of a wind-scoured fall afternoon and watched the hillsides above them burn.

The smoky conflagrations they witnessed -- more than 5 millenniums before the first European sailed up the California coast -- were, even then, an annual ritual of nature so ancient and reliable that it had set its evolutionary stamp on the chaparral itself, giving rise to species of plants whose seeds require the heat of wildfires to germinate.

Then, as now, the sequence of events was the same. Santa Ana winds blowing off the high desert to the sea suck the moisture from the late season grasses, brush and light forest up-slope and turn them into tinder. A spark occurs. The first such fires were no doubt caused by lightning, though there's evidence to show that the early Amerindians here, as in other parts of North America, often set fires themselves -- just as we now do, sometimes by accident, too often by design.

High winds spread the embers and, depending on the ground cover and gusts, burn until they reach a limit set by nature -- or, nowadays, by man through the mechanism of modern fire suppression.

What the Uto-Aztecan-speaking Tongva and Tataviam never had to put up with is the torrent of self-righteous abuse that now follows each fall's wildfire season as inevitably as rain and mudslides.

The bigger the fire and the greater the losses, the higher the wave of rhetorical censure. Our annual struggle with wildfires inevitably looses a flood of essays on the essential hubris of unnatural Los Angeles, a city that insists on sprawling beyond its naturally appointed limits and on building where it ought never to build -- on hillsides, in canyons, on flood plains and at the seashore.

Arrogant defiance of nature, the argument goes, inevitably brings disaster -- and well-deserved disaster at that. (It's interesting to recall that our worst single fire preceded urbanization. During the last week of September, the Great Fire of 1889 burned more than 300,000 acres in northern San Diego County and southern Orange County, killing thousands of sheep and destroying the unharvested barley crop.)