Upon leaving the U.S. Navy in 1997, I moved to Riverside, Calif., to stay with a friend. That summer, I thought the apocalypse was upon us. Mountain lions were coming out of the hills to gobble up suburbanite babies, the L.A. robberies were still the talk of the town and “road rage” had just made its big debut on the evening news. And then there was the ever-present smoke and ash that wafted through our neighborhoods from one end of the county to the next. Whenever you turned on the TV or went out at night, the hills were burning.

On one occasion I voiced my concern, rather panic-stricken, “What the hell is happening to the world?!” My friend, a lifelong Southern Californian, simply said, “That’s California, baby.” He had witnessed the explosion of unrest in L.A. after the police beating of Rodney King and confirmed for me what the working poor of L.A. all know — Rodney King was just a spark. And as anyone who’s ever taken high school chemistry should know, a spark only ignites a fire when the conditions are right.

So, when confronted with a “natural disaster,” we’ve got to take a critical look at the conditions prior to it. With this season’s California fires hopefully subsiding, however, a search for the arsonist has begun. As of this writing, the FBI and ATF are offering a $250,000 reward for information, and the Governator recently warned, “If I were one of those people who started the fire, I would not sleep soundly right now, because we are right behind you.”

While the fires destroy trailer homes and mansions alike, it is the political sway of wealthy conservatives who decry the horrors of “Big Government” that determines the availability of resources needed to fight fires. Add to that a mad-dash of land developers, and you get what Mike Davis calls “a bumper crop of combustible wood frame houses.”

In “Ecology of Fear,” Mr. Davis writes, “For generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense. “