In the Face of Disaster, A New Age of Solidarity

Many people have written to me expressing sadness at the destruction of my hometown, Pacific Palisades, California. The fire spread with such ferocity, due in part to high winds, that the whole village burned very quickly. While the label of “celebrity enclave” we are seeing in news reports about the Palisades is partly accurate, plenty of non-celebrities lived there, and the landmarks of the twenty-plus years I spent there had remained.

Now, the church where I went to preschool, my public elementary and high schools, the public library where I worked, the public tennis courts where I spent so many hours, the homes I grew up in, and everything else is gone, together with the natural landscape of wild hillsides and trails that made the Palisades special. Proximity to the beaches of the Pacific Ocean did nothing to still the flames. The burnt-out or still-sizzling ruins of the village recall a site of a bombing or a war, and several childhood friends have lost their homes.

Pacific Palisades on fire, Jan. 8, 2025. Apu Gomes/Getty Images

This is only one of several fires blazing right now around Los Angeles, and over 100,000 people have been evacuated so far. Many have lost everything, including children who no longer have homes and schools. Some of these people will become climate refugees, their families migrating to safer areas to somehow start over. They will join millions of others on the move to escape fires, extreme heat, and flooding: sociologist Jeremy Porter and colleagues have documented relocations by 3.2 million people in the US to escape flooding alone. These Americans join tens of millions of people globally who are internally displaced due to climate change.

Climate will be the biggest factor in generating outward migrations as well. By 2050, 200 million people could be displaced from low-income countries, and the total number of people who must leave their homes due to climate-caused disasters worldwide could rise to 1.2 billion.

Given this situation, it is beyond tragic that America is about to return to “governance” by an individual dedicated to plunder and extractive capitalism in all its forms and whose first administration stood out for its hostility to climate change mitigation. From America's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, to purges of the Environmental Protection Agency, to over 100 rollbacks of rules regarding clean air and water, toxic chemicals, and wildlife, seemingly no area of environmental concern escaped Donald Trump’s deregulatory mania.

His administration removed protections from more than half the nation's wetlands, and the Department of the Interior abolished restrictions that prevented more lands from being available for oil and gas leasing. This left Trump’s backers in the auto, agribusiness, chemical, and fossil fuel industries freer to pollute the earth and plunder natural resources with impunity.

Oil and gas companies no longer had to report methane emissions. Mines no longer had to prove they can pay to clean up future pollution. And after almost 40 years of bans on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, Trump ordered several lease sales to accommodate his cronies in the oil and gas sector.

Turning a greedy eye on the Arctic, an area of strategic geopolitical importance and rich in minerals, is nothing new for these profiteers. Trump’s current threat to use force to claim Greenland for America (it is an autonomous territory of Denmark) represents an escalation from his “offer” to buy it in 2019 (although it was never for sale). As then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated, far from being a tragedy, the melting of Arctic glaciers creates a situation of “opportunity and abundance” since global warming would liberate 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30% of its undiscovered natural gas, and buried gold, diamonds and uranium. So why not help the process along?

Naomi Klein, Antony Loewenstein and other commentators have long called our attention to “disaster capitalism” and those who profit from catastophe: the privately-run detention centers for displaced people who had little to begin with before they lost their homes; the private security services protecting the plunderers; the strongmen who gain from widespread feelings of precariousness and insecurity.

Then there is the denialism promoted by bad-faith political and other actors: Governor Ron DeSantis ordering mentions of climate change to be banned from state laws, while Miami becomes one of the most vulnerable areas in the world due to environmental changes, comes to mind. Add in the culture of competition for money and assets promoted by neoliberal thinking, and it is no wonder that ecoanxiety is pervasive as we witness one conflagration after another.

As insecurity becomes normalized, survivalists pursue their dreams of off-the-grid self-sufficiency, which often entails amassing arsenals of weapons and viewing everyone as a potential enemy.

But there is another path. Instead of radical individualism, there can be radical solidarity in the face of loss, as Rebecca Solnit, Astra Taylor, and others have shown in their studies of the communities that sustain people at times when it would be easy to give up faith in everyone and everything.

As Jonathan Mingle writes, disasters "strip away the illusions —both comforting and discomfiting— that tomorrow will be like today, that the ground beneath us is stable, that we are alone in our struggle. They remind us that instability, rupture, and upheaval are the world's default settings, and that we are united in our shared precarity."

Once the Trump administration starts, magical thinking and denialism about the climate crisis will not only be pervasive in the media, but could become state dogma, as they already are in Florida and other Red states. While we cannot control what the propagandists say, we can control our reaction to it, and we are also in charge of the actions we take in our daily lives to address climate change and to assist those who have been most affected by it.

“Insecurity can cut both ways, serving as a conduit to empathy, humility, and belonging,” Taylor writes, “or it can spur defensive and destructive compulsions that protect the self instead of caring for other people.” As things fall apart, we can choose to come together, creating something genuine and constructive out of tragedy.