LA is burning again. This time, it's north of Santa Clarita. There, a wildfire "exploded in size across two counties on Wednesday [and] into Thursday." When will this end? What is to be done? During the first round of LA fires, the Fonz (also known as Harry Winkler) suggested that the whole bad business came down to a criminal whose level of derangement appeared to be the sort we find in comic books. "THERE IS an ARSONIST here in LA,” the Fonz tweeted on January 8, “May you be beaten unrecognizable !!! The pain you have caused !!!” This tweet went viral (it had over 7 million viewers). And the Fonz's response makes perfect sense if it is placed in the context of a culture that, in movies, in sermons, in TV series, and in podcasts, inflates the significance of the individual to proportions no mirror on reality can ever hope to meaningfully reflect. But before we totally dismiss the Fonz, we must admit that his view of the situation is actually not far from the one we find in the first book of Octavia Butler's Parable series, Parable of the Sower.
The grave of renowned writer Octavia Butler, whose novel Parable of the Sower eerily envisioned fires consuming Los Angeles, remains intact at Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery despite nearby blazes. https://t.co/cMEXnU2ntv pic.twitter.com/4ROmReKl5M
— Black Enterprise (@blackenterprise) January 21, 2025
As I explained in my July 23 post “Octavia Butler Saw Our Doom,” the Angeleno—she was born and raised in Pasadena—imagined in her apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower, written in 1993 and set in the year we just passed (2024), a world that’s eerily similar to the one we live in now. This is why when the LA fires erupted earlier in the present month, many connected the catastrophe with her novel. Butler described an LA that was not only on fire due to global warming, but also overrun by a drug whose intoxication was intensified by the sight, smell, and heat of fire. It's called "pyro."
Butler writes:
Then there’s that fire drug with its dozen or so names: Blaze, fuego, flash, sunfire.… The most popular name is pyro—short for pyromania. It’s all the same drug, and it’s been around for a while. From what Keith said, it’s becoming more popular. It makes watching the leaping, changing patterns of fire a better, more intense, longer-lasting high than sex. Like Paracetco, my biological mother’s drug of choice, pyro screws around with people’s neurochemistry. But Paracetco began as a legitimate drug intended to help victims of Alzheimer’s disease. Pyro was an accident. It was a homebrew—a basement drug invented by someone who was trying to assemble one of the other higher-priced street drugs. The inventor made a very small chemical mistake, and wound up with pyro.
True, the Fonz imagines a super-villain behind LA's wildfires, and there was on January 13 the arrest of a person in Pacoima who "admitted he started a small fire that burned a tree 'because he liked the smell of burning leaves,'" and in Butler's novel, the arsonists are motived by what, at the end of the day, comes down to a chemist's fuck up. There is nothing, at the root, really super-villainous about it. We just happen to live in a society that requires some escape from its institutionalized abuses: cocaine, trips on cruise ships, the spectacles of professional sports, and so on. David Harvey, a radical urbanist geographer, describes this form of consumption as not only dominant in our times but as experiential.
What Butler did at the time of writing her novel (the early ‘90s), is extend crackheads to the future we are now supposed to be in. More interestingly, if not tellingly, the pyros are mostly white and come from the upper classes.
Butler:
“They take that drug that makes them like to watch fires. Sometimes a camp fire or a trash fire or a house fire. Or sometimes they grab a rich guy and set him on fire.” “Why?” “I don’t know. They’re crazy. I heard some of them used to be rich kids, so I don’t know why they hate rich people so much..."
But what's important here is not actually this match between the Fonz's imagination and that of Butler's, which, unlike the latter's, was expressed through a deep understanding of capitalism's world-ending determination to accumulate (at all "social costs") value (which is entirely cultural) without end. Butler also predicts a Trump who approximates the one experienced between 2016 and 2020; and, in the follow-up novel, Parable of the Talents, a Trump who looks a lot like the one who returned to the White House at the beginning of this week.
But why did Butler, who fled Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium and settled in the Pacific Northwest as an early climate refugee, know about the future that the Fonz now finds himself in after many, many happy days? That the second law of thermodynamics is real. And what is the law about? The performance of work results in heat, a waste product. We have actually known about this since the second decade of the 19th century (though heat back then was incorrectly described as caloric). It's called entropy. It's the amount of disorder that increases when we consume high-powered energy. The disorder increase is inevitable. It is also described as the "arrow of time," as it leads us from the past (improbably ordered) to a future that some have called the "heat-death of the universe" (probably disordered).
We can't stop this process, but we could, locally (meaning planet Earth), slow it down a lot. This, of course, requires recycling as much energy as possible before it becomes useless. The model for this recycling is, of course, the Amazon. The energy that enters this jungle takes a great deal of time to be degraded (or dissipated) to uselessness. For a better understanding of the second law of thermodynamics, I recommend reading Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life by Dorion Sagan and Eric D. Schneider, and Robert Hanion's comprehensive and, yet, very engaging Block by Block: The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics.
I'm of the opinion that people like the Fonz have no idea that ignorance of entropy is the real villain in this corner of the universe.