The truth resists simplicity. When it comes to everyday affairs, there may be one simple cause or solution. However, the reasons for every action and reaction are complicated for events that affect numerous people and places. Therefore, if you find someone blaming any one thing, person or entity, be wary of their claims.
This is especially true of the fires in Los Angeles County. The fires are the result of numerous factors. One is policy. An approach that emphasized outright fire suppression rather than the prevention of large fires through smaller controlled burns likely allowed a large amount of dead/dried debris to accumulate, providing the fuel for a series of tragically massive fires.
Another factor is climate change. Warmer temperatures mean higher evaporative loads, which, even with significant rain, can still lead to droughts. Common sense dictates the dryer something is, the easier it burns. Combined with unusually strong Santa Ana winds, the Palisades fire and other fires were able to spread out of control rather quickly.
Although we do not know the original cause of most of these fires with any certainty, we can assume certain factors aided their spread. However, it is hard to guess how much each of those factors contributed without a lot of data about the vegetation and weather and a computationally intensive (a.k.a. impossibly detailed) model or simulation.
However, the blame game has started again, with the usual suspects blaming the usual scapegoats. For some, that means climate change, which, as mentioned earlier, certainly plays a large role. However, it should not be used to prevent us from analyzing bad decisions those in leadership positions may have made. For others, that means DEI.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are alleged to have caused much adversity, from unreleased video games that will apparently be bad because they include DEI to wildfire prevention and response to all manner of decisions and results in the private, corporate and political spheres.
The current reasoning is because time and money were spent on DEI, they were not spent on things that the Los Angeles Fire Department should have been doing, like controlled burns. This, in turn, led to the size of the wildfires. In simple terms, the argument is we went from hiring people based on merit and their capacity to succeed in the mission to hiring people based on diversity.
I would then like to ask this question: Would the fire have been significantly smaller if all the money and time spent on DEI had been spent on supposed “merit-based” hires and “relevant” activities? Would any lives have been saved?
Again, without a very complex model to analyze the results of a few different decisions, it’s impossible to get an exact correct answer, but odds are the answer is no. How much time do organizations that promote DEI-related activities, such as diversity trainings, spend on them? From my experience, it’s approximately six hours a year – less time than they spend on company outings. HR departments spend more time planning such activities, but even then, that is a small portion of the workforce spending an overwhelming minority of their time. How much money do they spend on those activities? In my experience, they were volunteers, which is not always the case, but nonetheless, it’s an insignificant amount of money. Even if it was enough to pay a seasonal salary for 10 firefighters (it is not), do you think 10 more firefighters would have made the difference we needed?
Since DEI has become a dog whistle – a word that automatically generates rage among many people even before they have fully analyzed its implications and effects – we are uncritically accepting that DEI is to blame for the size of the California wildfires and many other issues. Therefore, I ask people take a deeper look at the problem before utilizing preconceived notions.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
