Be still my beating heart!

To break the cycle of build and burn, those who create and approve subdivisions in Southern California must take site and climate into consideration.

Christopher Hawthorne explains the truth that people do not want to hear — but need to. Because the truth is fundamental to understanding life in southern California, and to understanding feng shui.

… maybe our nostalgia should extend beyond red-tile roofs to include earlier lessons about how and where it is safe to build. This country’s culture as a whole is in the midst of a profound shift from the unquestioning confidence that marked the so-called American Century to a new recognition of risk, conservation, even fragility. Green architecture, with its rather old-fashioned emphasis on paying attention to site and climate, is part of that shift. But those who build and approve new hillside development — “the lords of subdivision,” as the nature writer Richard Lillard called them, the “replanners of the Earth’s surface” — have barely acknowledged it.

It is true that the wildfires found it easy to jump from one cul-de-sac to another. That indicates the subdivisions were designed to be destroyed.

Now what should take their place that will be more nature-friendly?