The Elemental State

I became a Californian, I want to believe, at 4:31 a.m. on January 17, 1994, when the 6.7 Northridge earthquake jolted my wife and myself out of bed and under a door jamb, where we huddled until the shaking was done. And yet, I say want to believe because, in reality, it was not all so sudden as that.

By 1994, I had been in Los Angeles for two and a half years and had begun, in slow stages, to understand the elemental nature of its landscape. First, there were the floods during the winter of 1992; then, the 1993 wildfires in Malibu, which burned so bright the glow was visible from my Mid-City neighborhood. Factor in a trio of substantial temblors (Sierra Madre, Joshua Tree, and the 7.3 Landers quake of 1992), and you begin to see the process of my acclimatization. I had been raised in Manhattan, where it felt as if the natural world had been subjugated, if not rendered utterly nonexistent. California was a different sort of place.

It has long been my contention that we bond with places where we experience upheavals, and vice versa. Although I’d moved to Los Angeles years before, I shed my final vestiges of being a New Yorker on the September morning the towers fell because I was not there to experience it. California motivated an opposite trajectory: immersion by disaster. Paradoxically, perhaps, every flood or fire or earthquake made me feel increasingly that this was my home.

Gary Griggs’s California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State operates from something of a similar perspective; it opens with an epigraph from Edward Abbey: “There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.” What Griggs (by way of Abbey) is suggesting is that the extremities of the place make it what it is.

Unlike me, Griggs—a distinguished professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz—is a native Californian, and as a scientist, he is less in thrall to the mystical power of disruption than I have become. “I am not really enamored with natural disasters,” he acknowledges, “but I do feel a sense of wonder at the beauty and power of physical processes.” If this reticence makes California Catastrophes occasionally dry and academic, it also creates space for a sober inquiry. In these pages, Griggs moves methodically from earthquakes and tsunamis through flooding, drought, and fire, incorporating detailed discussions of the effects of climate change. The result is a useful primer, tracing not only the history of disaster but the various ways this history has been unveiled.

“History has been written and recorded,” Griggs explains, “in many places other than in books, and the job of a paleoclimatologist is to find where historic climate records have been preserved. Tree rings, lake and seafloor sediments, corals, and ice are a few places where we have been successful in extracting long-term climate records.” I think of the Cascadia subduction zone—which stretches from Cape Mendocino to Vancouver Island—where “large old trees that formerly lived a few feet above sea level were submerged and died when their roots came into contact with salt water when the shoreline sank centuries ago, creating what have become known as ghost forests.” In the 1990s, these ghost forests, correlated with newly found accounts from across the ocean, enabled researchers to identify a previously unrecorded 9.0 tremor that struck the Pacific Northwest on January 26, 1700, and generated a tsunami, decimating low-lying coastal areas in Japan.

Griggs is solid, if not particularly inspired, on earthquakes and volcanology; he covers the ground, so to speak, although he relies too much on a strategy of cataloging incidents, a kind of annotated listing that allows him to be thorough but can wear thin after a while. He also favors Northern over Southern California, exploring the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta “World Series” quake with much more depth and nuance than he brings to, say, Northridge. But perhaps that’s just geographic griping on my part. Either way, where California Catastrophes finds its shape is in the later chapters, which are more far-ranging, both in terms of the events themselves and their ramifications on the state in human terms.

Discussing California’s complex relationship with water, Griggs writes, “Migration led to an explosion of the state’s population, doubling in the 20 years between 1945 and 1965, from 9.3 million to 18.5 million. By 1985, 20 years later, the population had grown another 43 percent to 26.4 million. And everyone needed water, a lot of it—for lawns, swimming pools, golf courses, and most of all for agriculture.” The rates of growth are staggering, but so is the environmental impact. We are living with the fallout of that now. As a result of development and erosion, coastal or otherwise, “roughly 20 percent of California communities are vulnerable due to topography, overflowing rivers and streams, rapid snowmelt, levee failure and dam collapse, or some combination of these.”

And that’s to say nothing of the threats from fire. “There have been, on average,” Griggs observes, “an astounding 8,292 fires annually in California in the 22-year period from 2000 to 2022. The acreage burned, however, has increased in the last decade, nearly doubling from an average of 1,063 square miles annually in 2000 to 2010, to 2,071 square miles per year in 2011 to 2021.” In the annus horribilis of 2020, nearly 7,000 square miles were affected. Those numbers, too, are staggering, even in a state where, as Griggs notes, “fire [has] played an important role in the ecology of forests.”

One of the culprits, of course, is “over a century of poor forest management,” but most of all, it’s climate change. What we are seeing now is the result of a variety of factors, including, since the 1970s, an increase in “average spring and summer temperatures…by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.” Every one of California’s 20 most destructive fires has occurred in the years since 1991, and all but two during this century. These include the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise and at its peak, Griggs notes, “was burning through 2,000 acres per hour.”

Statistics like these make outsiders wonder why anyone would voluntarily live in California, but Griggs is not hopeless. Instead, he argues for a way of thinking he calls “sober optimism,” involving assessment not only of the dangers we are facing but also of the steps we have taken to mitigate them. This means a policy of “aggressive incrementalism,” which requires taking “three approaches for responding to a major natural disaster: (1) build back better, (2) legislate or adopt new land use and building standards for hazardous areas, and (3) prevent reconstruction after a disaster in the most hazardous areas.” It should go without saying that we have long been engaged in all three.

Yes, the 1906 earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco—or, more accurately, the fires did. Yes, nearly 200 schools were damaged or destroyed in the 1933 Long Beach quake. In both cases, however, these events led to vast amounts of useful data and the strengthening of building codes. The essential question, in that sense, is not why but how we live here, how we come to terms with the landscape of this place. For me, the answer is acceptance. Or not just acceptance but also exhilaration, at the fearsome awe and wonder provoked by occupying such an elemental state.•