For the Los Angeles fires:

Blame it on the wind: blame it on the ‘devil’s wind’ that gusts over Los Angeles at 60+ mph, ‘fanning the flame’ of five ongoing, devastating wildfires, as yet ‘uncontained’.

Blame it on the wind, an unpredictable, invisible, seemingly chaotic, uncontrollable force: the easiest scapegoat.

Whose wind is this? Who remembers its names or its cultures? Who is willing to counter the ‘blame’ with the knowledge that a wind like the ‘Santa Ana’ has a cultural history more than 5,000 years old in the lifeways of the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples, on whose land Los Angeles was settled and built?

The Santa Ana winds may be arid and dry, originating from the desert of the Great Basin. These winds may increase static electricity, topple trees, and produce ‘strange luminosities’ in the sky. Yet being affected by a dry, desert wind is not the same thing as codifying it with sensationalist and ‘demonic’ fears. In demonising the wind, whose demonic actions go unnoticed? Which demons are free to roam?

As we blame the wind, how can we have a conversation about the extractive legacies of water stealing, draining and rerouting? Or fire suppression tactics that make the world more flammable? Or centuries of encroachment on more and more arid land?

How do we talk about the fact that the logic that pumps money into LAPD and enlists hundreds of incarcerated peoples to fight an uncontainable fire for $4 per day is the very same logic that sends arms to Israel as it burns entire cities and perpetuates another prison?

How do we resist sensationalist narratives of neighbourhoods where “millionaires are getting a taste of the apocalyptic movies they have produced and acted in” to be able to see the marginalised, differently abled, and elderly existing side by side, whose narratives of ‘escape’, or simply survival, are far less appealing to a media elite?

I pray for the sake of my family home (if it still exists) that the wind relents. But this disaster is not about the wind.

(images are screenshots from videos by Steve Engelmann, maps by CalFire, words by me)