The future we're already in
L.A.'s wildfires and the NBA's broader response to climate crisis. Plus: resources for wildfire aid.
Around the time I meet Jerome for a late lunch in Chinatown, my dad is flying solo over Lake Superior, on his way to the quarter of our family in Japan.
My mom sends a photo to our family group chat of my dad in line at airport security. He’s waving, has a cheesy grin, but more than anything I’ll return to how small he looks. How much older he seems than even the four days I saw him before, like my eyes were the unreliable witness.
He used to travel alone all the time in his career as a DJ. Fly cross-continent, stubbornly drive rental cars through the night up snowy canyons and over the occasional desert because he didn’t want to pay for a night in a roadside motel, all to bring hotel ballrooms filled with hundreds of strangers to fervor with Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration”.
He’s made this exact trip before, knows where the Lawson close to the airport hotel keeps the instant ramen he likes. Still, leading up to his departure and then while he’s in the air, my mom, brother and I triangulate our worry, sharing the points of transfer that might prove hardest for him, projecting future versions of him into possible situations to play out his reaction.
Off the eastern coast of Siberia, realizing the wifi is free, he texts that he didn’t finish Deadpool & Wolverine — Tooo long. It was really bad! He chooses the gently smiling emoji shedding a single tear.
I don’t know why the thought of him going through familiar motions abroad, alone, calls up such a sensation of vulnerability. Like the carapace we all form to varying degrees of thickness, out of necessity, knowing everyone we love is out there walking around, has been yanked off me.
I can admit having a gut reaction that skews critical isn’t always ideal. I’d argue that rather from stemming out of a lack of empathy, it’s rooted in an abundance of it — at times too much.
When the NBA announced the postponement of its L.A.-based games earlier this week because of the city’s ongoing wildfires, and it was aggregated like trade news, the decision was widely applauded. Here’s where my gut kicked in. This was, functionally, the bare minimum. A scheduling concern. The league added a caveat that the decision was made so no resources would be diverted from the fires, but the main resource in question, for the NBA, is attention. I don’t think that’s callous to say when the NBA — and those in its extended professional atmosphere — refer to its basketball as a product, and we field alarmist report after alarmist report about broadcast ratings and any oscillation in viewership.
Admittedly, it would be hard for people to pay attention to a game if their home might be a smoking, black skeleton when they returned to it.
By the time the league postponed the first of its L.A. games, Lakers vs. Hornets on January 9th, the Palisades Fire had jumped from 4.6 square miles to an inferno engulfing 24.7 square miles. The night the game was scheduled, the Palisades Fire grew to 31.2 square miles, a blaze bigger than Manhattan. At that point, none of the city’s three major fires had more than a 3% rate of containment. The idea of a basketball game continuing as planned in that — while homes of those within the league’s ranks burned or were threatened by fire — has a specifically dark, apocalyptic undercurrent.
But this isn’t a dark, distant future. This is the future we’re already, unequivocally, in.
Yesterday afternoon, a day after the NBA and NBPA announced a $1 million donation to wildfire relief efforts in L.A., the league postponed its Rockets-Hawks game in Atlanta due to “severe weather and hazardous icy conditions”. The winter storm that walloped south Georgia was the largest the region had seen in years, grounding 40% of flights and leaving 34,000 buildings without power. Back in a still burning L.A., where don’t-drink water advisories are in place and it’s unsafe to breath the air for all the toxic materials the fire’s released, both the Lakers and Clippers are scheduled for home games tomorrow.
These weather events (and calling them “weather events”, I realize, lends to this) are still being treated as anomalous. The NBA’s first postponed game notice said the league’s prayers were with those affected by the fire’s “unimaginable devastation“, but we don’t need to imagine, we’ve seen this before. Not to the scale of the Palisades Fire, but even that felt not a matter of if, but when.
The part of me that prickles when front offices include draft picks for 10+ years in the future in their trade deals is the part, now, feeling a wrench in the gut for the cold calculation of future NBA scheduling that, rather than deal with potential game postponements, sends its Los Angeles teams out on the road for the duration of winter — or from May onward. As California Governor Gavin Newsom pointed out, "There's no fire season, it’s fire year."
How do you optimize games and competitive continuity against the backdrop of landscapes burning, freezing, flooding, wracked by now annually recurring “1,000-year storms”? How many teams will have to vacate their home cities in extreme weather seasons, or permanently, to continue to play so their ownership meets some financial metric?
If attention is the only currency, how do you hold it when people are watching their homes and livelihoods go up in flames, collapse into floodwaters, and pour any of the remaining energy they have into picking up the charred and bloated pieces to start over? Do you, the league, allow the same insurance companies denying coverage to people in crisis to continue sponsoring your teams? That proud patch pressed above the heart of your athletes, a reminder to a growing section of your audience what they’ve lost, could lose.
How do you plan a regular season in a world wherein natural conditions are now anything but? Where what natural is and could be changes every year?
Lakers coach JJ Redick’s house was lost to the Palisades Fire. Redick, who spoke with media on Friday, was renting the house while he, his wife and their two kids searched for a permanent home (and probably saw how the first season with the Lakers went).
Redick said that the feeling of devastation didn’t hit him until he drove through the neighbourhood after the fire, saw the lively community turned eerie and greyscale. That it hit him anew being around so many other people who’d lost their homes, this entirely uprooted community, all staying in the same hotel as his family.
He mentioned the community centre his kids used every day, now gone. He shared how reluctant his wife had been to move to L.A. from Brooklyn, how much she’d loved the community there, how important that would be in a relocation.
“And then we move out here,” Redick said, quietly. ”The Palisades community has been so good to us. And that’s the part we’re really struggling with. The loss of community.”
Loss of community — entire communities like Redick’s, and the historic Black community of Altadena, too — has been at the forefront of these fires. That they have wiped out identity of place as much as the structures rooted within them. There is also the material loss, which is sometimes set in direct conflict with community loss.
A common refrain is that things can be replaced, or things are just things, but things are also indescribably linked to memory, people, identity. Sometimes these “things” might have bigger price tags, but mostly, typically I’d say, they are priceless — in the sense that they have no monetary worth, and in the value of memory they contain. I have a lot of things like this. Trinks, I call them. Rinky-dinks. Chipped tiles I collected with Dylan in Tangier, with Jenner in Santa Teresa. A thimble that belonged to my oma, a photo of my mom in her 30s painting on the shore of a thickly forested B.C. lake, a nautilus shell my brother found in Ecuador’s Cloud Forest, my dad’s high school ring.
“There’s certain things you can’t replace. That will never be replaced. It’s like weird — it’s really weird shit,” Redick said, grappling with the power of these things too. He referred to a charcoal drawing of a lighthouse his son did the year before, when his family still lived in Brooklyn. As he described it, how they had it framed and hung it over the stairs in their new Palisades home, his hand sketched the air. It’s the only time he choked up.
In the days that follow the onset of the L.A. wildfires I watch my Angeleno friends’ social feeds go from panic and fear into action. They share active fire maps and spreadsheets with the locations of grassroots relief centres and aid organizations. The next day, they share themselves volunteering at these relief centres and aid organizations, squinting over N95 masks, with a list of supplies needed most. Intermittently, they share fundraisers for friends, and friends of friends, whose homes have been ravaged by the fires. One friend shares seven in 20 minutes.
The fires grow but so does their sense of agency. They meet the people in their communities, their extended communities, they cry with them and console each other. They organize kits of supplies, they convert their cars into mobile relief delivery centres. Under the tangible weight of responsibility and care the psychic load of their fear shifts, they feel their energy divert from anxiety that left them glued to their phones and unable to sleep into action. The situation isn’t better, but they are making it less bad for other people.
They find ways of interpreting the fires by narrowing down its destruction. Friends with a book podcast share the charred pages of burned books that have been littering down on streets and doorsteps, some miles and miles away from the fires, and the small snippets of meaning people have been gleaning from the found pages. One from The Road, which despite being a little too on the nose, preaches compassion. Another friend, one of the gentlest natures I know, shares a friend’s father who lost his home but also his collection of thousands of cacti and succulents. The ask isn’t for material help, but for anyone who can spare cuttings, propagated plants, pots and dirt, material to start the collection anew.
Chefs cook and deliver meals to firefighters and rescue crews, restaurant and bar owners open their spaces for community reprieve; animal lovers assist rescue organizations and shelters caring for injured wild animals and recovered pets, musicians compile financial and equipment resources to aid other artists. What my friends in L.A. have always had in common is their knack and impulse for connection. Their professional lives spent hop-scotching between industries, finding and figuring out gaps out of necessity and curiosity. It’s why, whether from L.A. or transplants, they love the city, and how they can make sense of its sprawl and surface-level disconnect. Where big institutions are slow to get started in deployment and relief, connectors fill the gaps by doing what they’re good at.
I feel a pride that overwhelms, chokes me up. Where I checked in at the beginning of the week and got long, immediate responses while they waited for evacuation warnings, now I get a quick I’m good, I’m good, hours later. They’re busy. These fires and the ravages of climate change to come, can — will — scorch and scour, but they can — do — jolt to action. There is purpose made out of the destruction.
I track my dad’s 13 hour flight as I track the wildfires bearing down on the hills around Shanon’s house.
The low canyons we climbed in Montecito Heights the last time I visited, where we reached the top and turned west to look at the lonely clump of downtown L.A.’s towers, panting along with her dogs as hawks wheeled overhead.
The sprawl of the city, going out forever, highways like arteries and the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, looming like the shield of a protective shoulder.
L.A. fires, direct aid links and resources:
2025 Wildfires GoFundMe List
Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory
Baby2Baby Fire Relief Fund
Pasadena Humane Society
Donate directly to volunteer incarcerated fire crews (specify ‘firefighter fund’ with your donation)
More resources and direct donation links, local and federal, compiled by LASHA
We need more sports articles like this. Bravo!
Well done, Katie