I'm on Team Decadence. As @lwoodhouse  (Team Hubris) notes, "The area around Pacific Palisades, in particular, has been on fire countless times before. There was a huge conflagration in Malibu in 1929. Then 1930 and 1935. Then 1938 and 1943, and so on, averaging two per decade up to the current day." Well, that's the point isn't it? There've been fires all the time but the fires have never so decisively defeated the humans. That's what's so ... humiliating. Was it because the climate was a bit drier or because our era's humans fucked up? Mighty convenient to say the obvious fuck-ups made no difference.