As wildfires rage across Los Angeles, Erika takes a moment to reflect on the personal and the political dimensions of this catastrophe.

We urge listeners to think critically about the individuals and communities most impacted by this situation, and by the climate crisis more broadly.

These fires expose and remind us all that the vulnerability of physical structures people call home hinges upon the vulnerability of social structures that render home-making a precarious luxury.

With every crisis, cracks are exposed. In one of the richest economies in the world, and despite the fact that California has experienced wildfire after wildfire over the past years, we still saw an underfunded LA Fire Department with incarcerated folks on the frontlines of the fires and a crumbling water infrastructure. Is this climate adaptation? Transferring wealth from the bottom-up, shrinking the public purse, and converting taxpayer money to capital fueling the military-industrial complex?

We need a new system.

Here are some articles we urge you to engage with:

‘Running to danger and saving lives’: 1,100 incarcerated firefighters are on the LA frontlines

Shattered in the Fire: A Historic Black Haven

Who Will Pay for LA’s Wildfires?

How Big Oil Made It Harder to Fight the Los Angeles Fires

There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster

And here's a displaced Black families GoFund Me directory:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pK5omSsD4KGhjEHCVgcVw-rd4FZP9haoijEx1mSAm5c/edit?gid=0#gid=0