'You may think you're safe, but you are not'

The climate education scholar whose house burned down

Hello friends.

I want to take a quick moment with you to recognize some good things that have happened since the beginning of 2025. In the media environment we’re in, lamentations are rarely matched in intensity by celebrations. It always seems like the savvy thing to do is to yeah-but everything into oblivion. But there are genuine wins out there. Small and large.

• The ceasefire in Gaza. Tenuous. Long-overdue. And a vast relief.

• Congestion pricing in New York City. Took tens of thousands of cars off the road in its first week. As it continues, the nation’s largest city will have cleaner air, and it could even save lives—not only of pedestrians, but of people rushing to Manhattan’s hospitals in ambulances, which moved at record-slow speeds last year. And the policy could influence other cities to follow suit.

• The absolute worst-case climate scenarios are less likely than they used to be. “The world is undergoing an energy transition away from a future of continuing fossil fuel expansion.”

• GLP-1 drugs could be a breakthrough in addiction treatment. In one large retrospective study, patients receiving these drugs for diabetes showed a 40% drop in opioid overdoses.

Now we’ll get to the interview. Gale Sinatra and I met over Twitter, and when I came to USC for a gig we had a delightful lunch. She’s a psychologist who specializes in science understanding, and has published many papers on climate education and how our emotions influence our understanding of, or attitudes toward, the problem. For example, she found in a study of teachers that “Decisiveness—an urgent desire to reach closure” was associated with less belief in climate change.

She lost her house in the Eaton Canyon fire.
When I reached her, she was staying in a friend’s home, wearing an outfit, each piece of which was borrowed from a different person.

Did you evacuate?

Shockingly we did not suspect a fire. We were so focused on Palisades. They had shut down the power as a precaution, in our neighborhood of Altadena. So I was sitting at my kitchen table playing cribbage with my husband by a camping lantern. We looked out the window and saw our neighbor running across the street with a flashlight. We were like, is that Doug?

And he banged on the door, and said, ‘have you looked up at the mountain? We have a fire!"‘ and I was like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘You’ve got to get out,’ and then he just turned around and ran.

Whoa!

And then we sort of ran around the house. My husband did smart things. I did stupid things. He was thinking. I was crazy. I was, like, throwing random stuff into a bag. It's sad, because in 2020 we had self-evacuated, based on a fire in a similar location, and I had done all the smart things, put everything in the bags, the wedding album, your prescription drugs, the insurance. The whole thing you're supposed to do, the whole drill.

This time I wasn't planning on evacuating. And I wasn't thinking, when we were alerted, that we wouldn't be back.

Now, a lot of people might say, and some people have said, why didn't you realize that? We've had fires before, but they stay up in the mountains. And this one took a left turn, came down the canyon and headed straight for my house like a freight train.

I gotta tell you, when you go outside your house and you see this giant wall of flames, 60 mile an hour wind, you don't necessarily start thinking really rationally.

How long had you lived there?

15 years.

And when did you find out it was gone?

We went to a friend’s. He had power. We're watching the reports, and we're just like, oh, it's on Altadena Drive. Oh, it's on Woodbury. Oh, we’re effed.

Ironically, my kitty-corner neighbor, all four houses around her burnt to the ground. Hers is untouched.

And she somehow, against laws, God and nature, got back into the neighborhood and took pictures. And so the next morning, she sent us the pictures of our no longer existing home. And then she turns around and takes a picture of her house, which is still standing, which was—ouch!

I mean, bless her heart and all, you know. But ouch.

Totally. I can only imagine those mixed feelings. So, where have you been since then?

Another colleague has an ADU—an apartment that she’s able to rent out. We're here until the end of the week, and we fortunately have some other opportunities to stay with other people until February 1. And then thankfully, mercifully, we did find a furnished apartment which right now is kind of like musical chairs, you know, because everyone, of course, is looking for a place. We are fortunate enough to be blessed to have a place to go for 3 months.

It sounds like your network has really been activated.

I didn't know how many people…okay, I'm not gonna start crying because that's gonna suck. Hold on.

I just had no idea. A random person who follows me on social media for my work, in Northern California like nowhere near me. I've never met the man. He emailed me and said I could come stay with him. People have been ridiculously generous.

Is there anything that comes to mind in light of your research and your work? Having gone through this experience yourself, that you're thinking of differently?

People are not even yet understanding that this is a massive challenge that we are facing and that there isn't a particular safe place.

Look at Asheville. People had touted it as a safe place to live.

So you are not safe. You may think you are safe, but you are not.

I don't know if you saw that piece by Peter Kalmus [“As A Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time To Leave Los Angeles”] but, that is not a great piece, because he really, first of all, to say I told you so when he got out safe is kind of a jerky thing to say, but also it's not really true.

We can't just pretend that we'll just go someplace else that'll be safe, and we'll be fine.

Obviously many people can't do that. But even those who can are not as fine as they think they are.

Do you think that the hope or the wish that there's some safe place, does that just connect to our denial?

I think so. People want to believe that they're going to be fine. That's a natural thing. But yeah, I think we are all in denial about the scope. Even people like myself. I have an awareness of these issues, and even I didn't understand that this could happen the way it happened.

In terms of the psychological mechanisms. What are you seeing in yourself and in others?

Well, I think some of the elements we wrote about in the book are you know, present, obviously. You know, motivated reasoning. We talk about confirmation bias. We talk about the politicization of scientific ideas. You're seeing that.

Gale’s book from Oxford University Press

LA didn't burn down because it's relatively liberal. That's not how that works. Covid doesn't know your politics. Fire doesn't know your politics. A lot of the issues that we talked about in our book, they're playing out just as they did with Covid.

How do you imagine talking to your students about this?

I'm not teaching this semester because I'm a associate dean, and I'm very grateful for that, because I’m not sure I could get through a class right now.

Ironically, today we are pushing our faculty Senate for a vote on including sustainability education in our curricula here [ USC Rossier School of Education] in a required way, and I'm supposed to be at that meeting. But I'm not up to it. But colleagues are going.

So, what do I want our students to know? I want our students to be prepared to understand the world we now live in. Climate change is not something that's happening in the future. It's happening now. And we have to think more proactively.

I, honest to God, don't know what they could have done to prevent the Altadena Eaton Canyon fire. I don't know. Maybe a fire expert could tell you that. I have no idea.

What do you do when there's 70, 80, 90 mile an hour gusts of wind carrying a fire? I don't know.

Yeah, no, I mean, it seems like the train has left the station at that point.

Right? So what do we do? How do we start to to confront the reality of where we are? I don't know, and of course the big conversation right now is, you know, everybody was. Oh, we'll rebuild, we'll rebuild, and it's like, well,

How?

Where?

With what materials?

Is that smart? Is there ways to rebuild that would be smart?

Will we be able, if we rebuild, to ever insure our home again?

Should we not rebuild? These are all questions that I don't have answers to yet.

We just can't have whole communities wiped out, rebuild and then wiped out again.

We still haven't confronted the the root causes.

We still elected someone who's yelling drill, baby, drill.

One thing that I've noticed is…this is so obvious, but, like mitigation and adaptation, both have to happen.

Yeah.

And mitigation in the short run is not going to stop this.

Nope.

So adaptation feels very, very important right now.

We do have people who do know how to build more sustainable communities, safer communities, more adaptable, resilient communities. We need to start being very serious about that.

Consider supporting this GoFundMe; I have close mutual friends with this person.

If we were having the most psychologically astute public conversation about this crisis and the response, what would that look like? what would it sound like?