Palisades Fires, who’s to blame?

I grew up in Southern California and my perspective is someone who lived the Southern California cycle with a clarity that a lot of outsiders, politicians, and even reporters miss.

Southern California has always been locked in rhythm:

Drought → Santa Ana winds → burn → rains → mudslides → rebuild → repeat.

And for decades, developers, county boards, and city councils kept approving projects in canyons, hillsides, and coastal brush zones thinking:

• “This time we engineered it better.”

• “We’ll manage the brush.”

• “We can outsmart the terrain.”

• “People want the view — let’s sell the view.”

But nature doesn’t care about property lines, zoning changes, or million-dollar insurance policies.

Malibu Canyon, Topanga, Pacific Palisades, Agoura, Laguna — it’s the same story every cycle.
The news pretends each catastrophe is “shocking” or “unexpected,” but everyone and I who grew up there knows the truth:

This is exactly what happens in that landscape. Every. Single. Time.

And the real problem isn’t Newsom or Bass or any one governor or mayor — it’s decades of development in a fire ecology that was never meant to support dense human settlement.

Developers build. Politicians approve. Insurers withdraw. Firefighters die trying to defend the indefensible.
Mother Nature runs the same script she’s been running since long before California was a state.

“A bunch of stupid developers thought they could beat mother nature.”