A wildfire in Southern California grew to 1,325 acres on Sunday as roughly 1,000 Topanga Canyon residents had to be evacuated from their homes. Just like that, fire season has started again in California. As an extreme drought worsens across much of the state, 2021 is shaping up to be potentially another deadly year. The state’s warm climate and lack of rainfall makes it especially prone to wildfires, but nature is not the only reason large parts of California are regularly set ablaze every summer. As Jeffrey Ball wrote for Mother Jones in 2019: Today’s monster fires result largely from three human forces: taxpayer-funded fire suppression that has made the forest a tinderbox; policies that encourage construction in places that are clearly prone to burning; and climate change, which has worsened everything. That last point has become especially crucial as scientists have searched for ways to explain why the […]