The ritual view of nature encourages an attitude of contempt for “mere nature,” of which we are supposedly superior. But the idea of “nature” as an enclosed system, an organism or even an ecosystem, has always been misleading, because it ignores the true source of material wealth, which is the open, developing and unpredictable system of nature and human relationships, including the institutions and cultures that shape our perceptions and experiences of the world.

In Southern California, nature, society and economy exist in a condition of relentless and mutually intensifying chaos. Consider the multiple wildfires that have now formed a ring of fire around Los Angeles, closing the 101 freeway and chasing tens of thousands of people from their homes.

Why do they persist? Are they the result of urban sprawl, of global warming, of the maleficence of the Santa Ana winds? Of course, yes, but also of deeper and much more insidious causes that can’t be easily or quickly mitigated, much less cured.

The first cause is the sequence of land use decisions that created the most dangerous urban interface zones. This is a complex issue that can only be summarized here. In the past, wildland development was confined to elite residential enclaves, such as the aptly named Bel Air, that were mostly safe from fire because they were isolated and had their own private fire departments. Beginning in the 1950s, however, the model was extended to the broader population, especially the urban middle class, as a means of solving the postwar housing crisis and expanding tax rolls.

As historian Phil Ethington has shown, suburbanization in Southern California was based on a trifecta of policies that were intended to create a new kind of utopia: massive freeway construction, subsidization of single-family homes (through the G.I. Bill, F.H.A. loans and the federally guaranteed suburban mortgages of the 1950s), and tax breaks for both developers and homeowners. The result was the creation of an open urban network of low-density, single-family homes that stretched from Ventura to San Diego.

This suburban utopia, however, was not without its dystopian side effects. Most seriously, it created a nearly continuous fuel bed of invasive grasses and chaparral that now covers nearly all of the mountains and hills from the ocean to the high desert. Wildfires are a natural product of the local ecology, but decades of urban sprawl have made them progressively larger, more frequent and more destructive. More than a century of fire suppression has also allowed dead wood and other combustible material to accumulate.

The second cause is climate change. Although there is always year-to-year variability, it is now clear that Southern California is trending toward a much more incendiary climate. Over the last 30 years, the region has experienced an overall warming trend of more than 1 degree Celsius. Although the summers are not appreciably hotter, the autumns are much longer, with fewer and briefer intervals of precipitation, which means that fuels remain dry and ready to ignite far later into the year.

The third cause is an institutionalized culture of fire suppression that arose during the early 20th century. After the catastrophic fires of the 1910 fire season, in which 3 million acres of Montana and Idaho burned, the United States Forest Service decided that it had to assume total responsibility for protecting the public lands from fire.

This led to a remarkable system of forest management that relied on the establishment of fire breaks, suppression of small fires and, after World War II, the development of an almost religious fervor for putting out all wildfires, including those in remote wilderness areas. It was a culture of fire suppression that assumed that all fire was bad