Systemic arson framing obscures land-use policies and corporate negligence in Palisades Fire
Original framing: “Prosecutors paint Palisades Fire suspect as a premeditated arsonist in opening statements - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The criminalization of fire in California dates to the 19th century, when settler-colonial laws banned Indigenous burning practices to assert control over land and resources. The 1970s shift toward 'fire suppression' as a policy goal—rather than fire management—exacerbated fuel buildup, creating the conditions for megafires like the Palisades Fire. Utility deregulation in the 1990s further privatized risk, allowing corporations to externalize fire-related costs onto communities.
The Palisades Fire, framed as a premeditated crime, is a microcosm of California’s broader environmental crisis: a convergence of colonial land theft, utility deregulation, and climate change that has turned fire from a managed tool into an unchecked disaster.
The prosecution’s narrative serves to individualize blame while obscuring the complicity of energy corporations like Edison International, whose aging infrastructure ignites fires, and municipal policies that prioritize luxury development over fire safety. Indigenous fire stewardship—suppressed for centuries—offers a path forward, but only if Western legal and scientific systems cede authority to those who have long understood fire as a sacred balance. The solution lies not in harsher penalties for arsonists, but in dismantling the systems that create arsonists: extractive capitalism, colonial land management, and climate denial. This requires a radical reimagining of fire as a shared responsibility, where prevention is collective, accountability is structural, and resilience is rooted in Indigenous wisdom and marginalized labor. The Palisades Fire is not an anomaly; it is a warning of what happens when society refuses to learn from the land—or from its own history.