
From Notes Towards an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism by Javier Sethness
Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country, eds. Dani Burlison and Margaret Elysia Garcia (Chico, California: AK Press, 2025)
Published on East Bay Syndicalists, 8 September 2025
Red Flag Warning is a new collection of essays and interviews dedicated to exploring mutual aid in the face of the wildfires that have devastated Northern California over the past decade. Supercharged by the greater heat and disrupted precipitation patterns caused by global warming—which is itself driven by the greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of hydrocarbons (coal, oil, and gas) to fuel industrial capitalism—these recent Californian megafires have consumed well over a million acres. Accordingly, they have left behind scenes reminiscent of “war zone[s]” and “Armageddon” (121, 127). This anthology, whose title refers to a term used in California to signify a high risk of imminent fires, provides voice to rural, female, and Indigenous writers seeking a “better world” amidst infernal conditions (166). In many ways, the work follows the example of Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), a stirring book that covers numerous cases of mutual aid and systematic rescue being practiced during and after historical disasters.
From an anti-colonial perspective, Red Flag Warning begins with Manjula Martin’s acknowledgment of the Spanish and U.S. suppression of periodic burns practiced freely by Indigenous people in California before colonization. Manjula argues that the centuries-long settler-colonial focus on fire prevention and suppression has needlessly contributed to the mass-destruction wrought by megafires in our own time (1–6). Fellow contributor Jane Braxton Little agrees, directing readers’ attention to how the commercial logging of old-growth forests left an environment “primed for a runaway inferno” (69). In her chapter on the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California’s recorded history, Hiya Swanhuyser educates readers that the word disaster means “no stars,” in the sense of ‘being in the dark,’ disoriented for the purposes of navigation, or, as if by analogy, rudderless. Yet, even as the “climate crisis and systemic disasters” accelerate, there is hope that communities will respond in stellar, pro-social ways (8, 18).
Along these lines, in one of her chapters, co-editor Margaret Elysia Garcia highlights the importance of community as a coping and survival mechanism for working-class families who were affected by the gigantic 2021 Dixie Fire (35–9). Fellow co-editor Dani Burlison likewise underscores the “amazing amount of goodwill and care” that was shown after the Tubbs Fire burned down part of Santa Rosa in 2017 (44). In her chapter, which creatively integrates Daoist, Buddhist, and Japanese motifs, the previously mentioned Little recognizes that “[c]limate change is the disaster lurking for all of us,” yet she stresses the therapeutic potential of self-organized communities of solace (56, 71). In her interview with Burlison, “Parenting in Fire Country,” Kailea Loften insightfully emphasizes the communal aspects of resilience (110–12). The book ends with Redbird Willie’s moving retelling of a community burn performed among Indigenous people that serves the aim of social reproduction by transmitting ancestral knowledge to younger generations (151–61).
Disaster Anarchism?
For all of its strengths, Red Flag Warning sadly does not elaborate a theory of either “disaster anarchism” or its conceptual cousin, “disaster communism.” The editors and contributors certainly do highlight surges of mutual aid in the wake of the various megafires that have ravaged Northern California in recent years, but these episodes are not necessarily connected to a unifying theoretical framework that might help readers understand and resist the established trends toward local or regional ecocide and planetary annihilation—whether that be green anarchism, eco-socialism, or degrowth communism. (The latter concept is part of the subtitle of a 2022 book by Kohei Saito that Paul Messersmith-Glavin recently reviewed in New Politics.) There isn’t much of a sense in Red Flag Warning that the various megafires might be opposed, and in the future potentially mitigated, by a “disaster anarchist” movement like the one that emerged in New Orleans after the destruction and mass-death wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We find no call for a green-syndicalist organizing campaign to contest these grave threats through collectivizing the economy from below, as Tom Wetzel proposes. There is little discussion about the chance for disaster communism, or, as the Out of the Woods collective puts it, “the possibility of communism in the Anthropocene,” a proposed name for the current geological epoch (the Holocene)—otherwise aptly described, by Jason W. Moore, as the “Capitalocene.”
Instead, Red Flag Warning’s political demands include anemic calls for greater “accountability from elected officials,” and the volume betrays a certain defeatism converging with capitalist realism, as revealed through such comments as, “we’ll lose millions more acres of forest [to fire] before the [supposed] reset is complete” (116, 126). Plus, several of Red Flag Warning’s authors and interview subjects openly identify themselves as managers rather than workers, thus contradicting the anarcho- and green-syndicalist causes. Indeed, particular chapters praise the opening of an apparently non-unionized, privately owned sawmill in Indian Valley, together with the Pasadena Job Center, which is described as “connect[ing] small businesses and homeowners with skilled day laborers” (145–9, 165)! Furthermore, the author of one of the pieces discloses that she is a “boss,” seemingly without pause, shortly after complaining about human overpopulation (128–30). Brandon Smith, co-founder of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), points out that many of the firefighters who respond to wildfire emergencies in California are incarcerated workers of color, yet he aims to recruit more people of color to work in wildland firefighting statewide (73–84).
The 2025 Los Angeles Fires
In Ecology of Fear (1998), the late Marxist Mike Davis draws a stark contrast between the vast public and private resources dedicated to wildfire defense for the wealthy capitalists in Malibu, vs. the paucity of efforts and attention dedicated to fire prevention among the working-class and immigrant residents of Westlake and Downtown Los Angeles, who survive in “slum conditions of Dickensian dimensions,” often succumbing to blazes therein (Ecology of Fear, p. 137). Hugh McCagney expands on Davis’s argument in his account for New Politics of the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, as he ties the Palisades Fire to the “madness” of developing real estate in Malibu, which is a fire-prone ecosystem by nature. Recent estimates suggest that insured losses for the dual wildfires that burned nearly 40,000 acres in southern California early this year—not only Palisades, but also the Eaton Fire that affected Altadena—range from $20 to $45 billion. This liability would threaten bankruptcy for the California State fund that was established to compensate precisely for losses owing to wildfires. Were he alive today, Davis would surely be interested in the ways that the fires have illuminated racial and class inequalities in LA, in terms of insurance reimbursement rates and pay-outs, community reconstruction status, and health risks in Pacific Palisades vs. Altadena.
Beyond the vast residential, economic, psychological, floral, and faunal losses for which the Palisades and Eaton fires were directly responsible—not to mention the more than 400 people they killed—it is clear that the immense amounts of ash and debris emitted by these conflagrations into the Pacific Ocean in turn provoked harmful algal blooms (HABs) that have tragically poisoned and proven fatal to many marine mammals on the California coast. Such HABs have also affected coastal fish populations, though apparently to a less extreme degree.
Conclusion
In closing, Red Flag Warning provides readers with timely reflections on the direly important phenomena of wildfires and megafires, which are only getting worse due to accelerating global overheating. Such deadly processes are in turn being driven above all by the mass-emissions of fossil fuels that underpin the capitalist system. In this light, the editors and contributors’ communal, anti-colonial, and ecological insights are most welcome. Still, the book’s argument could arguably be strengthened by integrating anti-capitalism and green syndicalism, rather than featuring bosses and waffling on, and at times even boosting, the exploitation of labor, private property, managerialism, and capitalist realism—the key elements of the very system that is wrecking the planet. That being said, we very much agree that a Red Flag Warning is proverbially in effect for the time being, until and unless capitalism and colonialism are overturned!
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