The home of so many in the music and musical instruments community has been consumed by fire. Friends and colleagues in the Los Angeles area, you’re on our minds this week; I hope you’ve gotten to safety. And we can’t mince words: planetwide, every second of this climate crisis now counts.
The images this week have been just heart-wrenching. I know we’re looking at homes, schools, memories. There’s nothing I can say, least of all as a lot of LA is busy just keeping in touch with their friends and families and getting to safety. And these fires come atop other crises facing our communities worldwide, many caused by humans.
Because of the LA area’s deep connections to music, music technology, and musical instruments, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the damage in the coming days. I’m at least relieved to see some friends checking in okay. Feel free to be in touch if there’s any message to pass on.
The latest: NBC News has maps showing the devastating scale of these fires, still expansive as I write this, as well as live coverage. NBC’s map data comes from the state’s Cal Fire and the USA’s National Interagency Fire Center.
Mother Jones has a good writeup of the situation from yesterday, to summarize – winds have continued to spread these fires and they’re still finding fuel:
Wildfires Have Engulfed Los Angeles
People in LA are actively fleeing and dealing with this, but we should immediately think about what to do on the rest of the planet. I’m sure electronic music and music technology can play a role. I don’t just mean reducing the carbon emissions or events or manufacturing, though those are always good conversations. This crisis needs immediate social action, transparent and accurate reckoning with the facts, curiosity about science and problem solving, an interest in the natural world, and an empathic response to other people and the environment. All of those domains have the potential at least to overlap with what we do in music. And in electronic music, we’re in a unique meeting place between science and ritual.
(For planetary data on fire detection: NASA hosts a composite with a Web interface.)
While we brainstorm on how to respond, I’ll focus on the science – it’s widely available in forms accessible to us as laypeople, which is important because this is stuff we need to know whether or not this is our field. (That’s true even if we mostly studied humanities and musicology. Though, hey, I did once testify publicly in front of the EPA, true story. Ahem.)
The problem is we now face not just an increasingly hostile planetary climate but a media landscape where journalism and accurate information are struggling. There’s a crisis of information on top of the climate crisis. Slate describes that vividly – and because we share many of the same online platforms, what’s happening in California and the USA is equally relevant worldwide.
Nitish Pahwa wrote for Slate yesterday, observing that misinformation can afflict all sides of the political spectrum, especially via social media. Excerpt:
Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we’re getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future. In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes.
The California Wildfires Just Revealed This Very Grim Truth:
When the smoke clears, the lies remain.
There’s a crisis of information on top of the climate crisis.
Don’t despair yet, though. The article on Slate is part of a multi-outlet collaboration to support and disseminate accurate climate change reporting, called climatedesk. That site also has its own RSS feed – yeah, those are still a thing. (I use a tool called News Explorer, but free Web and offline clients abound for desktop and mobile.)
If you read nothing else, this is presumably the most important information, from a research perspective, on what’s to blame – human changes to the climate. It’s from a study funded partly through the US government from August 2023. Chillingly, that funding could now be endangered by the incoming administration.
Study Finds Climate Change to Blame For Record-Breaking California Wildfires [NOAA/NDIS – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration / National Oceanographic National Integrated Drought Information System]
The original study:
Turco, M., Abatzoglou, J. T., Herrera, S., Zhuang, Y., Jerez, S., Lucas, D. D., AghaKouchak, A., & Cvijanovic, I. (2023). Anthropogenic climate change impacts exacerbate summer forest fires in California. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(25), e2213815120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2213815120
By the way, if you’re having trouble finding mental space for this and multiple wars – I feel you. But they are connected. Warfare and the military are major carbon contributors and are under-researched:
Warfare’s Climate Emissions Are Huge but Uncounted [Scientific American]
Gaza specifically stands out and – this is not one study, but two:
New study reveals substantial carbon emissions from the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict [Queen Mary College]
Environmental Impact of the Conflict in Gaza: Preliminary Assessment of Environmental Impacts [Preliminary Assessment was prepared by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)]
I’m not here to lecture anyone. I am genuinely and personally alarmed, as many of you are. This is about more than just responding to the climate, though. We can all contribute to a world where we remain curious, skeptical, and active. It might be “just” your music or synthesizers that keep people connected to their environment and fellow humans – but that’s a push away from the abyss. Let’s keep talking about how to help one another. I’m absolutely open to ideas.
And in the meantime, take care.
Cover image and above:
Fires Tear Through Los Angeles – NASA Earth Observatory
NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025) processed by the European Space Agency. Story by Emily Cassidy.
Published January 8, 2025
Data acquired January 7, 2025