Fires and Feminism: How the LA fires are gendered
Everything is political. And everything is gendered. Yes, even a fire.
The current wildfires (yes, plural — there are four) blazing through Los Angeles began on January 7 starting in the Pacific Palisades, burning through at least 35,000 hectares in 3 days. The fires currently remain uncontained as the people wait on dangerous winds to die down and stop spreading deadly sparks and embers. Over 200,000 people have been ordered to evacuate and 24 people are confirmed dead. Economic losses are expected to reach $50 billion as neighborhood after neighborhood becomes ash. It’s one of the worst fires the city has ever seen.
The destruction left in the wake of the wildfires in Los Angeles is a disaster — and a preventable one at that. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) clarifies use of the terms “natural disaster” versus “natural hazard.” Natural hazards are phenomena associated with the natural world (fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc.) that have the potential to cause significant damage to people, places, and things. Hazards only become “disasters” if their effects are unmitigated. Wildfires are one such hazard.
What happens when you replace all of the native fire-resistant plant species with invasive exotics, refuse to learn about (or even ban) Indigenous climate care techniques, privatize massive portions of the State of California’s water supply, and fuel endless fracking and fossil fuel extraction while the world speeds dangerously past the 1.5C global warming threshold climate scientists continually warn us about?
This. This happens. This was preventable, and anyone who tells you differently is lying.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) said that “hotter droughts and unusually warm temperatures have created conditions for extreme, high-severity wildfires that spread rapidly.” Most of the severe wildfires in California have happened in the last few years.
Years of research show that any “natural disaster” (or what it really is: “climate disaster”) disproportionately impacts already-marginalized communities — especially women and girls. In an emergency, bad things only get worse. Where there’s inequality, discrimination, bigotry, or any type of injustice, that stuff increases. Take violence, for instance. All the forms of violence that women and girls face everywhere — in every country, every space, all the time — are now everywhere. All forms of violence increase — and new ones are created. That’s during the crisis — and for years afterwards.
Right after a natural disaster or a war, in the midst of the chaos, law and order, support and services, community networks — all these things are damaged and destroyed. At the moment you’d expect us all to stick together — we don’t. At those times, violence — especially sexual violence — actually increases.
And, no, it’s not just “other women” or “over there.” In the US after Hurricane Katrina, sexual violence increased so much that emergency services had to turn women away because they could not help them all. And domestic violence increased for years after the tragedy. For years.
A wildfire, especially on this scale, poses other significant health risks, especially to pregnant women. Wildfire smoke has been linked to increased preterm low weight birth rates. Water and air quality have been severely compromised, and toxic and carcinogenic particles lead to severe respiratory and cardiovascular problems.
My sister lives in California. In Los Angeles. Right in the middle of it all. She’s thankfully safe, and gave me a realistic picture of the city before the fire: a stark contrast between rich and poor, glam and garbage, mansions and homelessness. She expressed concern about the city’s already staggering homeless population. In Los Angeles, over 75,000 people are estimated to be unhoused and unsheltered. Around 30% of these are women, mostly women of color. Women living on the streets face daily threats, abuse, sexual assault, and exploitation such as human trafficking. Women of color are even more harshly impacted in their daily lives as they face racial and ethnic disparities in poverty rates, lower educational attainment, housing discrimination, less access to health care, and increased likelihood of incarceration.
A tragedy on a massive scale, one that could be dramatically reduced — if not altogether eliminated — with the right kind of support and services. The wildfire only adds to the mounting pressure and danger these women face. Many will lose the little that they had — even if just a tent or a box — and find themselves without anything at all. Without access to proper masking equipment, safe indoor spaces with ventilation/filtration systems, or potable water, this fire will push entire communities further into the unknown and insecure, destroying any of the meager support they had to survive.
When women and girls are forced out of their homes, this makes them increasingly vulnerable to outside threats. Not only are they now worse off financially, but they are facing increasing risks of violence due to forced displacement. I know this because I’m a former humanitarian aid worker with a too-long history of warzones and disasters, deployed to both Haiti and Nepal following their massive earthquakes. I have seen what natural disasters do to individuals, communities, and countries. And — to women.
Women serve as the primary caregivers even in times of stability. In a crisis, this burden increases with the additional work to support family members who become injured or sick. This adds huge pressure to women’s lives, increasing their uncompensated workload, leaving them emotionally, financially, and physically drained. Yet they are expected to just…carry on.
My sister explained that even those who are fortunate enough to have their homes are still experiencing the gendered implications of this tragedy. Women are managing the children, managing the households, managing the elderly and sick, managing the insurance claims. Women are the ones packing the medications and valuables in the go-bag. And women are the ones launching GoFundMe pages to start to recover. All while navigating their own traumas around this crisis.
In another preventable tragedy — Palestine — women and girls have been forcibly displaced as a result of Israel’s genocide. Women are the primary caregivers, and yet they lack ownership or control over resources due to legal, cultural, and societal barriers. In these circumstances, women need access to shelter, safety, safe birthing places, menstrual health products, and contraceptives. This is true everywhere. Even in LA.
My sister explained that for her, right now, top of mind, is “the massive feat it takes to present a brave face for my daughter, which I feel falls maternally.” And she added that even just saying this, she can only think of the burden of a Gazan mother and what she has had to do to keep her children alive and safe for the last 16 months. The worst part? As terrible as these fires are to LA, it’s only a fraction of the amount of damage that Israel’s genocidal campaign has wrought on Gaza. The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights notes that, as of September 2024, nearly 70% of all buildings in Gaza (home to roughly 2 million people) were destroyed or severely damaged. That’s like obliterating one-third of LA.
But LA isn’t Gaza, I hear you say. Why aren’t we better prepared?! We’d like to think that the US has better prevention, early warning, and response/recovery systems in place, but LA’s fire budget was slashed by 2.3% — $23 million — last year. Meanwhile, outgoing President Biden and his administration recently approved $95 million for the US military to continue to wage its endless wars and genocides abroad. Where are our priorities?
Sure, the firefighters got a raise — but that’s only the non-incarcerated ones. Those on the frontlines are incarcerated young people who get paid around $6 per day, while minimum wage in California is close to $17 per hour. Meaning, the prison-industrial complex allows modern-day slavery. Under California law, involuntary servitude (or what they call “rehabilitation”) is legal for those imprisoned for committing a crime.
On the upside, the LA fire chief is a woman — Kristin Crowley. She’s incredibly qualified for the job, but also facing incredibly misplaced scrutiny.
As the presidential inauguration looms ever closer, we imagine what might happen if Trump wakes up to this climate disaster and takes proper action. Instead, it is more likely that he remains a climate denier, referring to the global crises as a “hoax.” We can also imagine he begins to see the military-industrial complex for what it really is: a force to destroy humanity — and the climate. We can imagine…
And we can imagine our taxpayer money going to frontline workers, to communities, to firefighters, to families, to women and girls — instead of the genocide in Palestine. We can imagine…
But in reality, the lives of those in Los Angeles are inextricably linked to those in Gaza. Climate crises remind us that we’re all connected. And wars remind us that none of these human tragedies stay neatly confined within their borders. And LA is just like Gaza because when the chaos subsides, women will be the ones who rebuild families, communities, societies. In every tragedy I’ve seen, women are always the ones who know what’s going on, who needs help, and how to help them. They are the world’s social safety net.
The sooner we start to see these connections, and to care about each other, the better off we’ll be. All of us.
