Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / JUST JOSH: L.A. On Fire

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JUST JOSH: L.A. On Fire · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get 8 humans.
• 0:04
  Let us interrupt the normal programming of this podcast to say a thing or two about
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  the Los Angeles fires, or maybe not directly about the Los Angeles fires, but about fire
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  and life and trauma and what matters.
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  There's very little that can be said, looking at the images out of LA and if you're listening
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  to this in LA, I really am thinking of you and I really am sort of feeling your situation.
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  It's become a trifle cliche whenever there's a catastrophe for people to say, I feel your
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  pain, but in the specific case of wildfires, Australians really do feel the pain of wildfires
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  because there are very few Australians who have not found themselves confronted by the
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  exhausting trauma of that particular natural disaster.
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  I look at those images out of Los Angeles and look, it's sheer, I suppose, prejudice
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  on my part that the proximity emotionally of that place to my heart, to my life, rips
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  me up.
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  I sometimes jokingly tease Los Angeles for being a gigantic car park or a bunch of freeways
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  connecting some charmer or strip malls, but I lived in Venice Beach for a year, I lived
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  in Hollywood for a year, I go there a lot, I know the place, I have very close friends
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  there and it just hits you differently than a place you don't know, instead of trying
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  to fumble my way through, try to grow minds about this.
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  I thought what I would do here is talk not about the LA fires, but about a fire that I
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  knew very well, in hopes of giving us some context for the experience of living through
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  natural disasters like this.
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  What I'm talking about is shortly after I moved back to Sydney from New York with a year
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  in Hollywood on the way home, I was working at the public broadcaster, the ABC, and cast
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  your mind back to the earliest days of the pandemic, like when everything fell off a cliff,
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  I guess, March of 2020, the prior nine months to that, and this is something you won't
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  know if you're not Australian, and it's something you may not have actually registered in your
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  memory, even if you are Australian.
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  The nine months prior to the world falling off a cliff for COVID, Australia was on fire.
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  The East Coast of Australia was enduring probably the worst natural disaster, certainly that
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  this country had ever seen, and arguably that any rich democracy had seen in decades.
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  I was invited by the publishing house, the book publisher that was working with the
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  National Public Broadcaster to compile a commemorative book about the fires written by journalists
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  who were at the call phase, I was invited to write the epilogue to that book, and I dug
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  it up yesterday when I was emailing and texting with friends in LA, and on a whim, I sent
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  it to a few of them, and a few of them really liked it, and found that it came from perspective.
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  So I thought rather than just talking in clichés about how my heart is going out to LA, which
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  I've already done enough of here, I might just read you that essay, that chapter from the
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  book, it captures my thoughts about living through that surreal experience, and I don't
• 4:00
  know, it might be of some use. In the book, it was titled The New Normal. Here goes, it's 16
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  pages by the way. Goats, my friend's dad, a 60-something town planner announced, jabbing the
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  air with a fork full of watermelon fatter. We were perched next to each other on his sofa,
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  sweaty thighs to close a Christmas lunch. Put goats in the national parks, he explained
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  to me, they eat everything, no more fuel on the ground, nature's fire-thighed as they
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  call them. This was supposed to have been a barbecue, but it had been downgraded to
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  an indoor huddle. That was happening a lot, in late 2019, outdoor events were being cancelled
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  to escape the ashy chowder that hung where the sky used to be. I glanced at sweaty thigh
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  to town planners' wife, a cheerful suicide therapist, I wondered as she reached for a big
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  glass of Sauvignon Blanc, if maybe this wasn't the first time she'd heard him discuss the
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  miraculous goat solution. Who calls them, nature's firefighters darling? She asked, sipping
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  hungrily. He shot me a look that said he was being interrogated by a rooster. The people
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  who don't want to get burnt down by bloody bushfires, honey. Well, I don't know about that,
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  she said. What I do know is that we're going to remember this summer. She paused and put
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  her glass down. Suddenly, violently, she shook her head as if to reset her face from despondency
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  to cheer. She smiled hard. Her eyes were tired. We're going to remember this summer. She repeated,
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  forever. It was when a waterbombing helicopter fell out of the sky that I first took notice.
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  That was November 13th, west of Brisbane, huge swathes of Queensland who had already been
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  evacuated from Bunderburg to the Gold Coast. There'd even been a quaint done-corkian rescue or
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  sunshine coast residents in small fairies. The media treated this as a feel-good yarn,
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  like one of those stories at the end of the news about penguins having sex. Those cookie
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  queens landers and their maritime escapades. What, them? What, vigor? What pluck?
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  Just eight weeks later, another maritime rescue would book end the most horrendous natural disaster
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  in living memory. The Navy's biggest ship, a machine gun clad, quarter-column at a long
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  assault vessel, would be deployed to the orange-aired Hellscape of the New South Wales South Coast.
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  You wouldn't have believed it in November. Things were different then. We were different then.
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  There'd been some warnings. In October, Michael Mann, one of the world's most prominent
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  climate scientists and one of the fathers of the hockey stick graph showing the acceleration
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  in global warming, told me on ABC Radio Sydney that Australia is uniquely vulnerable to climate chaos.
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  Our dryness and heat put us at greater risk than arguably any other rich country.
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  Six months before that, Greg Mullins, a former New South Wales fire chief, had convened more than
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  20 ex-emergency chiefs from around Australia to warn the government about worsening bushfire
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  conditions due to climate change. They requested a meeting with the Prime Minister,
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  Scott Morrison, in April, the PM decline. They asked again after he won re-election in May.
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  He declined again. By the time the chopper crashed into a bushfire on the dialing
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  downs in November, there were 80 odd fires raging in Queensland. There were about 60 more in New
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  South Wales. Winds were strong. Temperatures were high. Sydney's fire danger rating was raised
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  to an all-new level. Catastrophic. For most city slickers though, it was still theoretical.
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  It was headlines in the papers and footage on TV, until the smoke.
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  Summers in Sydney are brilliant, literally brilliant, brilliantly bright, brilliantly blue,
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  ablaze with sparkling waters and distant skies. The black summer was not. It was beige.
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  The sky deflated over a dead pastel world. Sydney was as soupy as a sauna and as fragrant as an
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  ash tray. The harbour bridge looked like it had been photoshopped onto the English moors.
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  On December 10th, Sydney spiders awoke to a total whiteout. All ferry services were cancelled.
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  You couldn't see the end of the street, let alone across the water. Office workers were evacuated
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  as fire alarms went berserk. At Bondi Beach, 70 kilometres from the firefront. Cars had their
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  headlights on. Ash settled on windscreens. People bought masks.
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  I was working seven days a week. On ABC TV, I co-anchored Weekend Breakfast.
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  On radio, I presented the weekday breakfast show. Every morning at 3.30 when my alarm went off,
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  I could tell how bad the fires were just from the smell. I'd tiptoe over squeaky floorboards in
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  the pre-dorm dark. I'd stop at the door of my two-year-old twin's bedroom. Often one would be coughing.
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  I'd drive to work, cursing the wipe of fluid for running out yet again. I need to refill it again
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  peering through the charred streaks, recalling some statistic about how many cigarettes worth of
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  smoke we were all inhaling every day. It was at 15 cigarettes, 40 cigarettes. Tiny two-year-old lungs
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  did it matter. A radio studio is a spaceship, perfectly insulated. But as the atmosphere thickened,
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  the studios started wreaking. Toxins got in and couldn't get out. The thick air caught in my throat.
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  I was interviewing from a compromised spaceship, a cocoon worse than what it was cocooned from.
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  Let's pause for a sec. I know how frivolous it is to whine about smoke. While in the outback,
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  houses were exploding and people were dying. But it's impossible to understand the crisis without
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  understanding its most widespread physical effect. What millions upon millions of people felt,
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  day after day, week after week, was not the heat of the flames, but the raspy throats, the itchy eyes,
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  the whitered out skies, the lazy flakes of ash settling on clotheslines, the children languishing
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  impatiently inside. That fiery smell everywhere, that smokers cough, the wheezing, it just went on
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  and on and on. Who wants to live in a city like that? If that's what happened every year,
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  what would you do? How many summers would you put up with it? How long until you left the city
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  for good? To where? It's portentous in hindsight. This was how we entered 2020. A year that will forever
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  be a byword for covering your face, for staying inside. Months before the air carried viral pathogens,
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  it carried micro particles of burnt leaves, burnt animals, burnt homes, burnt bones,
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  how quaint that we lived for decades, not needing masks. And then, when we did, we suddenly needed
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  them twice. The macro and the micro, the flames and the germs. Mark Twain supposedly said that
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  history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. What a dark rhyme 2020 turned out to be.
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  By early January, the fires were the biggest news story in the world.
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  Britain's the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Financial Times,
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  Toronto's Globe and Mail, and the New York Times all ran the same photo on their front page
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  of a kangaroo bounding past an inferno. The fires were so large, they were creating their own
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  weather systems. Hundreds of millions of tons of smoke created pyro cumulus clouds that formed
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  supercell thunderstorms, generating dry lightning that started yet more fires. Tornados,
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  tossed trucks aside and blew apart buildings. In South America, sunsets glowed red with Aussie's
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  suit. NASA released satellite images of smoke plumes circumnavigating the planet, drifting
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  around the globe and back to their birthplace, like some deranged cosmic salmon swimming home.
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  I sat at the desk in the ABC television studio and clenched my teeth.
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  Live on air, a senator was explaining to me that the federal government was doing everything
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  asked of it by the states and territories, because as I may not understand, under Australia's
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  federal system, emergency management is a responsibility of the states and territories,
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  and the federal government was doing everything being asked of it by the states and territories,
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  which as he'd mentioned, are responsible for emergency management under Australia's federal system.
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  So really, thusforth and hensley, we should all in fact be really satisfied, really really
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  grateful, actually, for the government's contribution to something that really wasn't
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  constitutionally speaking its problem. Quad era, demonstrandum. The public didn't buy it.
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  We'd reached a tipping point, you could feel it. I heard it every day, from listeners who were
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  exhausted, emotionally brutalized. On the telly, I interviewed reporters standing on the skies as
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  dark as night in the middle of a summer's day, landscapes of blood-red air. I was tired.
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  I was frayed. I was afraid too for my toddlers, for what would become of all of us.
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  Later, much later, a lifetime later, by which I mean two months, when the pandemic derailed the
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  world like a slow-motion train crash, I never felt as fearful as during the fires.
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  Coronavirus felt like a one-off. The firestorm felt like it might become a new normal,
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  the first cycle of some endless annual suicidal opera.
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  On January 2nd, presenting breakfast on ABC Radio Sydney, a channel of the audience's frustration
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  in an improvised editorial that went viral. The federal government was still insisting it was
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  doing everything asked of it by the States. Now, in the book, I write out an excerpt of this editorial,
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  but because we're dealing with audio, I thought, why don't we just go and find it? So, here is
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  the five or six minutes of the editorial that I gave on the 2nd of January 2020. Sydney
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  are exhausted. We are weary. We're over it. We're just over it. I have a Japanese friend who said when
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  there's an earthquake or a typhoon that causes this level of damage, the Japanese armies in
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  they're like a shot. Same in the UK when there are floods. In goes the army. No one's suggesting
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  that we ought to do that on an ad hoc knee-jerk basis right now suddenly sending troops and
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  cause all kinds of kerfuffles where they're not needed or wanted or useful. But how is it that
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  in an era where the climate is changing rapidly, where climate chaos we know is going to bring
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  greater instability, more frequent hazards, more intense bushfires and droughts.
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  Though we're not thinking carefully about setting up a system in which our response to this
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  is coordinated federally and in which we throw everything at this. If this were a foreign invader
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  doing this, if we were a terrorist attack causing this kind of hardship, what would we be doing?
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  I mean, we're sending a naval ship that we sent to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to the south
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  coast. What does this come to? I mean, shops are out of food down there. The lines outside the
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  supermarket you can see in the in the newspaper this morning. The lines outside the supermarkets,
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  it looks like something from the walking dead, the hunger games. The servos are drying up,
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  they're getting petrol in but that petrol has to be used for the generators that are going to pump
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  the water, futile onto the fires that are way too big to stop. This has been going on for not days,
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  not weeks, months. I saw a kid walking around in Sydney probably eight years old with an ill-fitting
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  mask. Yesterday, I thought, Happy New Year. Happy New Year Day.
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  A kid walking around with a mask. We all saw that photo that went viral of the young boy on the boat,
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  blood-red air. Is this okay? Are we okay with them growing up like this? If this would have happened
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  every four or five years, would that be okay? The dying wildlife, the charred bats, the smoking
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  koalas, we don't deserve this. We don't deserve the ruined historic towns. We don't deserve the
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  charred farms. We don't deserve the tourists being trapped. The locals fleeing through that
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  dystopian orange air. Well, maybe we do deserve it. Scott Morrison tweeted yesterday,
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  going to be a great summer of cricket and for our firefighters and fire impacted communities,
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  I'm sure our boys will give them something to cheer for. I'm sure they will.
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  Scott Morrison said the fires were happening against the backdrop of the test match. This is yesterday.
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  He spoke. He said Australians will be gathering whether it's at the SCG or around television sets
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  all around the country and they'll be inspired by the great feats of our cricketers from both sides
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  at the Tasman. And I think they'll be encouraged by the spirit shown by Australians and the way that
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  people have gone about remembering the terrible things that other Australians are dealing with at the
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  moment. This is not a partisan political issue. It's not Scott Morrison's fault that there are fires.
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  Australia could have transitioned to a zero carbon economy years ago. Every coal mine could be
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  shut and we could still have these fires. So I'm not blaming anyone. But I am channeling a sense
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  that I'm getting that is building up, building up too much to be able to ignore anymore.
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  It's a sense of a loss of leadership, a loss of faith, a loss of vision,
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  a loss of being up to the seriousness of the challenge. Why aren't we, why aren't we buying
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  every rusty old Hercules plane that is sitting on a military airfield in every poor country in
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  the world that wants to sell it? Does Thailand have any lumbering old military planes? What hardware
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  does Chile have? Is there any way that we could get them, that we could retrofit them, that we could
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  turn them into bombers, into water bombers? Have we asked the Americans and the Canadians for every
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  spare plane that can be refitted? What are the limitations here? They're not enough airfields.
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  If we commandeered every private air strip in the state, there's a lot of smoke. You can't fly
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  in the smoke. Well, you wouldn't be able to fly in the smoke. Look, we fly planes at night. We
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  fly planes in fog. We fly planes through blizzards. We fly planes through snowstorms. We could find
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  a way. If this were World War II, we would find a way. Are we serious? Sorry to rant.
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  But it's 2020. It's the new year. This has been going on for a while. Are we serious?
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  So that was that, back to the book. Not the most eloquent silo-liquie that's ever graced the airwaves,
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  I wrote, but it hit a nerve. The following morning I interviewed Greg Mullins, the ex-fire boss
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  whose warnings about extreme bushfire weather had been ignored. I wanted him to cool me down
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  with some bland managerial expertise. But he was angry at the night was.
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  Our Prime Minister should be doing is ringing around countries like France, Portugal, Spain,
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  Canada that have all these purpose-built water-scooping aircraft that don't need to land a
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  fill-up. So we got rapid turn around the 6,000 litres. That's the practical sort of thing.
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  Now the ADF are dying to help, but the National Government kept saying, they're not needed.
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  Is there a logistical impediment why that is impossible? Do we not have enough? The pilots,
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  they're not enough. Air strips are the... The impediment is the per strings in Canberra.
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  That's ridiculous. If you're right that it is a financial impediment, then that is absolutely
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  and totally shameful and not just shameful, but a political non-starter as well. I hope
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  that you're wrong. I hope that that's overly cynical because I haven't done a poll in the field, Greg,
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  but I am absolutely certain that if you poll Australians about whether or not we should be taking
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  financial considerations into account in our response to these fires, there would be very,
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  very few people who would say that we should allow these fires to burn a second longer than
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  necessary and burn an additional single square kilometre as a result of the fact that we don't
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  want to spend money on it. Well, I can hear you being bit angry. I'm furious because that is the case.
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  So that was me and Mullins on January 3rd, 2020, now back to the essay. The next day,
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  the Prime Minister reversed course and decided it was a national responsibility after all.
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  He announced $20 million to lease firefighting aircraft and called in the army
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  for the first time in Australian history. As the fire conditions deteriorated,
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  so did the quality of the national conversation. Fire bugs fueling crisis as national
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  arson toll hits 183 a headline in the Australian newspaper said, it wasn't true.
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  That figure of 183 included every fire offence since the beginning of 2019, including such high
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  crimes as operating a campsite barbecue without a permit. The authorities made it clear that
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  fire bugs hadn't been a significant factor in starting any of the major fires.
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  It didn't matter. The Liberal Senator Concerto Ferroventy Wells tweeted that 87% of bushfires were
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  man-made. She stood in the Senate and hinted darkly that the arsonists may be part of a sinister
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  collective, quote, conducting eco-terrorism. The Australian newspaper later qualified the arson
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  claim, but not before it went global. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted it, media hacks fanned it.
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  The Fox News host Tommy Laron editorialized in the United States, the fact of the matter is
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  Australia has an arson problem you can't pin on global warming, climate change,
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  or whatever title you're giving your environmental boogie man these days.
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  While some were blaming arson, others were calling for more of it. The New South Wales
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  shooters, fishes, and farmers potty introduced a bill to allow farmers to start fires in national
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  parks. This was part of a broader narrative pushed by radio hacks and tabloid columnists that
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  the fires were the fault of the Greens party for preventing hazard reduction burns.
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  Certainly hazard reduction burns are a crucial tool in bushfire prevention,
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  but New South Wales had been ruled by a pragmatic conservative government
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  for nearly a decade and had conducted over 137,000 hectares of hazard reduction burns in the
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  previous year alone. But if hazard reduction wasn't to blame, maybe cows were or the lack of cows.
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  The New South Wales agriculture minister called for grazing in national parks to help manage
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  fuel loads. The environment minister from his own party slapped him down, quote,
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  cows can't stop bushfires. The headline in the Sydney Morning Herald helpedfully explain.
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  The CSIRO Australia's peak science body went further suggesting that grazing could make things
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  worse. See dry shrubs are flammable and wildflowers aren't. You introduce cows, the cows eat the
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  juicy flowers and drag the dry shrubs around spreading the fuel load. Quote, there is no evidence
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  that either logging or cattle grazing reduces the risk of fire in forest environments,
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  stated the National Parks Association of New South Wales.
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  So why? Why were some commentators so fixated on hazard burns, national park grazing and
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  arson? Because those explanations shared one virtue, they weren't climate change.
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  Quote, when are we going to wake up and stop using this as an excuse to justify the climate change
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  hoax? Alan Jones, Australia's most influential broadcaster, roared. His Sky News colleague,
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  Rowan Dean, railed about the quote, loonies in the climate cult.
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  Sure, the Australian Academy of Science said human-induced climate change was worsening extreme weather
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  events. Sure, the Australian weather bureaus said climate change was influencing the frequency
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  and severity of bushfire conditions. Sure, NASA agreed. Sure, the CSIRO agreed,
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  but if those pointy-headed nerds were right, then the commentators who'd spent years
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  bamboozling their audiences with nitpicky climate chicainery now had blood on their hands.
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  They needed climate to be irrelevant. What would it say about them if it wasn't?
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  The same conundrum partly explained the Prime Minister's haplessness.
• 26:54
  Scott Morrison wasn't a climate denier exactly, but he was a proud booster of the coal industry
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  and an equally proud poo-pooer of carbon pricing. Besides, climate policy had brought down more
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  than one Aussie leader in the past decade. Morrison wanted no part of it. He dodged climate
• 27:12
  questions with the elegance of a wounded bull. His poll numbers sank. He'd taken a mis-timed
• 27:20
  family holiday to Hawaii in December. When he hurried back to Australia to visit fire-ravaged
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  communities, he was heckled by locals. Footage showed a woman refusing to shake his hand only to
• 27:32
  have him grab her hand and forcibly shake it. When he was at the fires, he looked opportunistic.
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  When he wasn't, he looked neglectful. The guy couldn't win.
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  The Saturday before Australia day, the skies finally opened. Sydney had its biggest single day
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  rainfall in four months. The day after that, a man disembarked at Melbourne Airport
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  from Guangdong. He was Australia's first confirmed coronavirus case. In that single weekend,
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  in two consecutive days, January 18th and January 19th, 2020, Australia transitioned from the beginning
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  of the end of one national trauma to the beginning of the beginning of another.
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  This time, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison didn't blink. Australia's initial response to the
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  pandemic was among the most effective in the world. In contrast to the buck-passing on the bushfires,
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  the PM created a national cabinet to coordinate state and federal pandemic response.
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  Rather than downplaying the problem, he launched a full-scale mobilisation,
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  border closures, quarantine, physical distancing, mass testing, tracing, and isolation.
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  Instead of dismissing expert opinion, he deferred to it. In the flames of the bushfires,
• 29:04
  a leader had been forged. There's an old zen parable about a farmer whose horse runs away.
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  His neighbours all say, how terrible, and he just says, we'll see.
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  The next day, the horse returns, bringing three wild horses with it. How wonderful,
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  the neighbours say. The old man says, we'll see. The farmer's son tries to tame the horses,
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  but gets thrown and breaks his leg, and the neighbours say, how terrible! And the farmer says,
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  we'll see, the next day, military officers come door to door to conscript all
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  my able-bodied young males to fight. They leave behind the son with the broken leg,
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  and the neighbours say, how wonderful! And the farmer says, we'll see.
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  As early as December 2019, countries all over the world were being seeded with a mysterious
• 30:05
  new virus. As Europeans went Christmas shopping, as Americans drank warm wine at office holiday
• 30:12
  parties, SARS-CoV-2 was spilling silently out of planes and rippling through their populations.
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  In Australia, meanwhile, international travelers were canceling their trips in droves,
• 30:27
  the flames were a fire war against the epidemiological inferno abroad.
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  Australia was forced into self-isolation before we'd even heard the term. The tourism industry
• 30:39
  was crushed by the fires. How terrible, we all said. We'll see.
• 30:49
  I drove to Cronullo Beach in early February. The sky was deep blue. It smelled like summer again,
• 30:58
  the brilliant kind. I was getting lunch with Michael Mann, the climate scientist.
• 31:04
  He'd just been on ABC TV's Q&A the first episode of the year. We chatted about the fires,
• 31:11
  politics, the future. As we finished lunch and stood up, I told him about my friends down at the
• 31:18
  party, the goats in the national park, the wife who said we'd remember this summer forever.
• 31:26
  We will, won't we? I said, as we stepped outside, we're going to remember this summer forever.
• 31:34
  That's not what scares me, Mann said. He inhaled deeply and gazed towards the ocean,
• 31:42
  the waves pounding the shore. What scares me, he said, is that we might get used to it.
• 31:51
  So there you have it. That was the essay that I wrote as the epilogue to the official book about the
• 31:56
  Australian wildfires. I don't really know why I felt it was relevant to write that, but
• 32:04
  it means a lot to me. And I hope it is at least entertaining, if not useful to you.
• 32:14
  I see the backdrop to the Los Angeles fires as being bigger than just this event itself.
• 32:20
  They seem to be a kind of a dark metaphor, don't they, for a world that we're about to enter.
• 32:27
  We will be returning to regularly scheduled programming in the run up to the inauguration
• 32:33
  next week, getting a bit more political again. In the meantime, if you're in Los Angeles,
• 32:38
  my thoughts are with you. Be safe, be strong, lots of love, and I'll see you next week.