After Paradise, Living With Fire Means Redefining Resilience
Dan Efseaff, the parks and recreation director for the devastated town of Paradise, Calif., looks out over Little Feather River Canyon in Butte County. The Camp Fire raced up this canyon like a blowtorch in a paper funnel on its way to Paradise, incinerating most everything in its path, including scores of homes.
Efseaff is floating an idea that some may think radical: paying people not to rebuild in this slice of canyon: "The whole community needs some defensible space," he says.
Residents would get expanded green space for recreation and a vital safety buffer to help protect Paradise from future fire calamities. "We would work with either landowners on easements," he suggests, "or looking at them from a standpoint of some purchases in here."
"There are areas you just don't build in," he says.
Right now it's merely a vision.
The disaster industrial complex
He is up against the two-centuries-old American ethos to build, build, build, no matter the costs or the wisdom. It's an ethos baked into the federal disaster response system, what critics call the "disaster industrial complex" — a system constructed around responding to natural disasters, delivering immediate and long-term aid.
Politicians vow to rebuild.
The federal agencies swoop in.
The signs sprout: "Paradise Strong!" and "We Will Rebuild!"
But wildfire and recovery experts warn that this immediate impulse to re-create what was there before the disaster is misguided, expensive and dangerous.
There need and a warming climate.
