The Fires in Gaza are the Fires in LA

Videos of the massive, Santa Ana wind stoked wildfires in Los Angeles (LA) have captured the focus of the country.

I have the sense that the reactions to this latest example of environmental catastrophe are different than the reactions to previous disasters. Exhausted fire officials tell us there could never be enough resources to stop such a conflagration. We see the truth of that. Many people are finally being forced to acknowledge the consequences of rapidly evolving environmental chaos. Thousands became homeless overnight. Different from before, few people are declaring they will rebuild. Many don’t have the resources to do so even if they wanted to.

I was immediately drawn to the title of the article “The Fires in Gaza Are the Fires in LA” by Aaron Kirshenbaum. The article is subtitled “Making the connections between the war machine and the climate crisis.” Fires in Gaza refers to both:

the fires and environmental catastrophes occurring from military operations and bombing Gaza, and
the billions of dollars sent to Israel from the US, funds that were desperately needed to address pollution and invest in disaster preparedness here. Which contributed to the LA fires and their consequences

Climate-sacrificial militarism

The world’s largest polluter

The U.S. military is the largest polluter in the world. The most effective and practical step to begin to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to decrease U.S. military operations. In 2015 I created the Facebook page No War No Warming US to promote that idea.

The US military is the #1 institutional polluter in the world. Cities across the country have been sacrificed by the local and federal prioritization of militarism and policing. Our endless wars have pushed forward the climate crisis, and now its catastrophic results are once again terrifyingly visible inside the belly of the beast.

For decades, the military-industrial complex has been destroying ecosystems, cities, and nations across the SWANA region for the sake of dominance in the oil industry. For 15 months, the US-Israeli bombing unleashed on Gaza has released insane amounts of fossil fuel into the atmosphere while poisoning the soil with each shell. Israel recently detonated an “earthquake bomb,” which some reports have suggested could have been possibly nuclear. The genocide in Gaza has devastated the ecosystem and will make agricultural survival in any eventual rebuilding effort extremely difficult. The war in Ukraine has resulted in explosions of the Nordstream pipeline. Bases around the world, expanded for meaningless escalation with China, have resulted in soil contaminated with toxic PFAS chemicals, harming the soil. Biodiversity is at risk globally.

“The Fires in Gaza Are the Fires in LA” by Aaron Kirshenbaum, CODEPINK, January 11, 2025

The Fires in Gaza and the ‘Lungs’ of the Atlanta

In 2023 I was part of the national movement to stop the construction of “Cop City”, a massive police training facility that would be built on the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta. This is a photo I took at one of our actions in Des Moines.

…the interests of the war economy that prioritizes those in power are what remain above respect for Indigenous caretaking practices and life. And the results in both cases are catastrophic. Amidst a world that has gone through imperialist ecocidal war for decades, the world’s biodiversity, much of which is in sovereign Indigenous land, has been decimated.

This climate-sacrificial militarism isn’t just on the international stage either. In Atlanta, the proposed “Cop City” police training facility is supposed to be built on the Weelaunee Forest: sacred indigenous land also described as the “lungs” of the city. Not only does the forest provide crucial air quality, but it also acts as flooding protection. Recently, Appalachia and Atlanta suffered extreme flooding. Cop City will only make this worse as the forest is destroyed. Those prioritizing these military training facilities and exchange programs with Israeli Occupation Forces are doing so at the expense of the city itself. LA’s Mayor, Karen Bass, recently proposed allocating an extra $123 million to the police while cutting the budget of the fire department by $23 million. Now, the city is burning uncontrollably, and the fire department can only attempt to save residents.

“The Fires in Gaza Are the Fires in LA” by Aaron Kirshenbaum, CODEPINK, January 11, 2025

Billions of dollars from US to Israel

Besides the direct environmental consequences of the military operations by Israel and the U.S. in the Middle East, the billions and billions of dollars of military aid and equipment given to Israel by the U.S. are desperately needed in this country, instead. Those billions could have been invested to get off fossil fuels and to fund sustainable communities and disaster preparedness to name just a few. We literally see the consequences in the LA fires.