There's More to That
A Smithsonian magazine special report
Looking Back on the L.A. Wildfires Through the Lens of Two Photographers
As wildfire becomes an increasingly lethal force that’s remaking broad swaths of California, people and animals alike are in the hot seat
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/adsheadshotcolor-edit.png)
After multiple wildfires ripped through greater Los Angeles earlier this year, Californians were left to rebuild communities and grapple with the loss of life, nature and property. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and as many as 180,000 residents were under evacuation orders until the flames could be controlled. Unfortunately, this seems to be the new order in California; officials are already working to prepare for the next fire season.
In this episode, host Ari Daniel speaks with photographer Ivan Kashinsky, who witnessed and documented the devastation of the Palisades Fire up close, even as he tried to rescue his cats and valuables from his family home in Topanga Canyon. And we hear from writer and wildlife biologist Anton Sorokin, who chronicled the animals that escaped, fled and perished due to the fiery forces that are increasingly shaping our world.
A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes about a group of people dedicated to saving native bees, the sex lives of dinosaurs and the story of Pablo Escobar’s hippos, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ari Daniel: In early January of this year, photographer Ivan Kashinsky was on vacation about a day’s drive from his home outside Los Angeles.
Ivan Kashinsky: We were in Big Sur in a very remote area, no cellphone reception.
Daniel: One day, Ivan climbed up a dirt path to the top of the hill overlooking the ocean. It’s a place he’s visited for years.
Kashinsky: And it’s in that one place where you can actually get cell reception in Big Sur. And my phone just started blowing up. I was just getting messages from everybody. “Are you OK?” “Are your kids OK?” “Do you have your pets?” All these people were messaging me because of the fire.
Daniel: It was there and then that Ivan learned the Palisades Fire was wrapping itself around his neighborhood back home in Topanga Canyon.
Kashinsky: When I first got the messages, I was like, “This is crazy. I can’t believe this is happening.” And then I started to think about the house and what’s inside the house. I’m a photographer. My wife is a photographer as well. And we store all our images, like our life’s work, on hard drives. So all our hard drives, including all the negatives from before the digital days, are all stored in the house. As well as there were two cats in the house and my mom’s paintings. My mom’s an artist—all her paintings are stored in the house. So I started thinking about: I have to get back and get the cats, get the hard drives, and then get as many as my mom’s paintings as I can and get them out of the canyon.
Daniel: Everything was irreplaceable.
Kashinsky: Yeah. The house is very special. It’s the house I grew up in since the age of 7. And my mom, as I said, was an artist. She put a good amount of time and energy into everything from every doorknob to every faucet, to every tile, to every paint color she chose. It’s basically like a giant art piece. So the thought of losing the house itself was also terrifying.
Daniel: Ivan made the five-hour drive back to Topanga Canyon, and when he arrived, fortunately the house was still standing. He grabbed his hard drives, his two cats and his mom’s paintings. The house was spared, but his community in the canyon was forever changed by that fire.
Kashinsky: I grew up in the canyon and I know all the back roads. So we were able just to pop through into the back end of the canyon through the back roads. And I came to the top of the hill and I looked across the canyon and there was this huge plume of smoke right above my house and all these helicopters flying in and out. And at that point, I was like, “Wow, this is serious.”
I brought my camera because I knew, it was always in my back of my mind, like, “I’m going to need to document this if I can.” I thought to myself, “You know what? This is an historic event, and I’ve been a photojournalist my whole life, and this canyon means so much to me.” That’s when I really made the switch to like, OK, I’m going to photograph this story.
Daniel: From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show that reaches beyond the camera to bring to life the stories captured by film. I’m Ari Daniel. In this episode, two Smithsonian photographers document the toll of the California wildfires on humans and wildlife, and explore the long-term effects on the natural world.
Daniel: Have you photographed fires before?
Kashinsky: Not like this, not really. It was just a different level. Those winds, they were a killer. The helicopters were coming over and dropping water on the hot spots. And slowly but surely, with the wind dying and those helicopters coming over, they won the fight that saved our neighborhood.
Daniel: As the fires subsided, Ivan kept taking photographs. He’d later publish them on SmithsonianMag.com alongside his own recollections from those fateful days.
Kashinsky: There’s a road that goes up in the Santa Monica Mountains called Piuma [Road]. And the tallest mountain in the area is up there, and that area is really special to my family. We actually named my son Piuma. I had to see that.
So I went up there. It’s amazing that they didn’t lose more houses. Everything was completely burnt. It just looked like a moonscape, gray-black as far as you can see, with these demonic black bushes that are just like hands coming up from the ground as far as you can see. And I turned the corner and there was this telephone pole like half-burnt, just hanging. It was very eerie just being up there, nobody up there. The whole place was closed. It was just me, and it was almost dark, and I came across this telephone pole just hanging from the wires.
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. You took a lot of car carcasses.
Kashinsky: Yeah. When I first entered the Palisades, I was completely shocked because I drove around the corner and basically there were cars on each side of the road, and half of them were completely burned out, and the other half were OK. They weren’t burned, but they were all kind of crashed together.
What happened is people just panicked and left all their cars there. And then a bulldozer came through and had to clear out all the cars so the fire trucks get through. And then the fire came through there and burned half those cars. That was my introduction to the Palisades. I drove in there, and that was the first thing I saw. It was shocking.
Daniel: Ivan, what does your community look like now?
Kashinsky: You know, I really thought that I was going to lose Topanga. And I’m so grateful that it’s pretty much totally intact. The park area burned, and then some people did lose their houses up on the Fernwood side. One person died who decided to stay. The terrible tragedy that some people went through is just incomprehensible.
Daniel: So where do you and your neighbors go from here? I’m sure this leaves quite a scar.
Kashinsky: I know a lot of people lost their houses, and I feel really terrible for them. But for me, to go to the point where you’re about to lose everything and then somehow be saved and have your house and have all your belongings and your pets safe, I think you just feel this immense gratitude. It’s almost like a rebirth, like, “Oh, wow, you can’t take this for granted, because it can just go like that.” So I feel like it’s like an intense gratitude that the house didn’t burn down, and I didn’t lose everything and have to start from scratch.
Daniel: While Ivan was documenting the fires farther south, Anton Sorokin was watching the fires from his home near Santa Cruz, more than 300 miles to the north.
Anton Sorokin: When it broke out, initially, I was surprised. They kept ballooning into larger and larger footprints, more and more people were affected, so kind of just had no option but to sit back in horror and watch the devastation unfold.
Daniel: Like Ivan, Anton is a journalist and photographer, but he’s also a wildlife biologist.
Sorokin: I’m always thinking about the animals. Everything that happens affects them in some way or other. And especially with the extent of the wildland-urban interface there where there’s so much of the city and urban regions that are kind of enmeshed with wildlife habitat, I knew that the effects would likely be pretty disastrous.
Daniel: Soon, Anton started seeing reports of mountain lions running across roads, trying to escape the fire. He knew this was just the beginning.
Sorokin: Really, for wildlife, the worst of it isn’t that initial fire, because certain animals would’ve been able to shelter or escape, but the aftermath of what goes on in coming months and even years.
Daniel: So tell me about some of those impacts on wildlife that you uncovered.
Sorokin: The immediate impacts of just the fires themselves and the flames were that not all animals can escape that sort of thing. Obviously, some larger animals are able to move relatively quickly. They sense the fire, they smell the smoke, and they might be able to escape. But anything smaller—insects, amphibians that may have been out and active—if they were on the surface, they likely perished in the flames. Some animals might’ve been able to go down deeper underground and shelter.
Daniel: So there would’ve been some animals that perhaps were burrowed underground or already protected from what was going on?
Sorokin: Yeah, absolutely. Anything that could have made it down more than a few inches underground was likely insulated from the heat itself. And the same thing goes for anything in creeks like the endangered steelhead trout. They would’ve been able to shelter from the actual fire itself in deeper pools. That would’ve been the case for western pond turtles potentially, for red-legged frogs in the area, for newts, aquatic insects. The flames themselves wouldn’t have been able to reach them, but the fire is just as damaging in the long run—the burnt vegetation, the lack of shade—as the immediate flames themselves.
Daniel: As we continue to grapple with the human toll of the L.A. fires, understanding their effects on surrounding wildlife can provide clues about the health of the overall ecosystem and may even deliver us some stories of resilience.
So tell me more about the fish and how they were impacted and how officials dealt with them.
Sorokin: The two fish that got the most attention are the steelhead trout and the tidewater gobies. Both these are endangered. Some listeners might be a little confused hearing that steelhead trout are endangered, because they are a widespread species and they are abundant in some regions in the north. However, this is the southernmost population segment of them, which means that it’s unique genetically. These steelhead trout, they return to the same streams to breed from the ocean, and then the young grow up in those streams, go back to the ocean, come back, just like a salmon life cycle.
And so you get in these separate watersheds unique genetic lineages of these fish. And the ones in Southern California are unfortunately all really endangered. There are not many viable populations left. And Topanga Creek was home to quite a few of these steelhead trout.
Daniel: To save the fish from the ash and other debris, conservationists went around collecting them from their ponds and lakes.
Sorokin: After the fire burns through, it burns away all the vegetation whose roots are anchoring the soil in place, as well as all the ash from the nearby fires just settling on the hillsides. And the terrain around Topanga Creek is fairly steep, so you get a lot of runoff. And what biologists saw in the forecast is that rain was expected. And they anticipated that this rain was just going to wash this slurry of ash and mud and chemicals into the water, and what would happen is that the fish would actually just suffocate.
Daniel: Suffocate from the ash coming into contact with their gills?
Sorokin: Right, and the low oxygen content that would be in the water as a result. And there’s been some videos that came out afterwards of rains in and around L.A., of just this current of slush coming down the hillsides. I would describe it as looking kind of like runny concrete.
Daniel: Wow.
Sorokin: You immediately see why nothing could survive that. And so it was kind of a race against time to get in there, scoop up the fish, get them out before the rains wash that in. Biologists needed to go back in there, scramble in with electrofishing gear, with backpacks.
Daniel: What did you say? Electrofishing gear?
Sorokin: Yeah. So electrofishing gear, it looks a lot like a scene from Ghostbusters. It’s this like backpack that they wear with current running through it, and there’s usually a pole and an electric line that is put into the water. And it briefly stuns these fish, allowing for biologists to scoop them up with a net, put them into buckets and catch them that way without harming the fish.
Daniel: Wow. I hadn’t heard about that before. And it’s clearly safe for the people who are administering it.
Sorokin: Yeah, you can feel a little shock, like they wear rubber gloves and boots, and I’ve been around people that feel a little tingling as they’re doing it, but it’s so low of a current that it does not affect the people catching the fish. And it’s probably the best way to catch fish when you’re limited by time just because it gets everything in an area.
And that was the case with the steelhead trout, which they rescued, from memory, 271 of those, which represented, I think, more than half the expected population in Topanga Creek. And then they went down to the lagoon that is at the base of Topanga Creek and rescued even more tidewater gobies than that. And both of those had to be relocated. It’s a little bit uncertain as to when they can actually return to the creek because once this slush that has run into there, it needs to clear out. It just kind of lingers, fills in deep pools, and that might be a long process.
Daniel: So they’re in a captive facility?
Sorokin: They went to Fillmore Hatchery, which ironically, the Hughes Fire broke out just a few days later and there was some concern that the fish would need to be evacuated again from Fillmore Hatchery. Luckily, that wasn’t necessary in the end.
However, since it’s going to be years potentially until they can return to Topanga Creek and their natural environment, keeping them in a captive setting for that whole time isn’t ideal because there are health problems, kind of long-term adaptability to the wild situations. So what biologists ended up doing is they relocated them to another creek elsewhere called Arroyo Hondo Creek, where the fish are going to live for the foreseeable future until Topanga Creek is ready to have them translocated back into it. And the tidewater gobies did go to a nearby aquarium.
Daniel: It sounds like so much effort. I mean, for good reason, but what an effort to go in, relocate these fish and then try to sustain them.
Sorokin: Yeah, it’s definitely a huge effort, but it’s worth it. Once this genetic lineage blinks out, you can’t get it back. So to keep the population viable and to hopefully restore it someday. There’s a big culture around trout. So hopefully, maybe someday they’ll get restored to Topanga Creek, maybe someday fishing will be possible recreationally. For now, we’re kind of a long way from there.
Daniel: What about birds? Were they able to fly out of the flames?
Sorokin: Yeah, birds are interesting because there’s such a wide variety of birds and the reactions are species-dependent. There’s going to be some species that easily would have been able to evade the flames, fly away over the thermals. And there’s other birds that would’ve probably had to hunker down, may not have been able to escape the flames, ones with smaller territories. One thing that all birds would have been exposed to is the smoke and smoke inhalation.
Daniel: Of course.
Sorokin: And birds are particularly sensitive to that. Their lungs are really efficient at oxygen exchange. Unlike our lungs, which are bidirectional, bird lungs are unidirectional and they have a lot of continuous airflow across capillaries. And so they’re really good at sucking out oxygen, but that also means that they’re really good at sucking out those toxins.
Daniel: Oh, that’s fascinating. You mean they don’t breathe out?
Sorokin: They breathe out, but they don’t have a diaphragm like we do. So they have a constant flow of air coming in, and it’s very different than a mammalian system. So they’re constantly bringing air in. And when there’s smoke, especially from an urban firestorm like this was, there’s going to be all sorts of toxic compounds in there, from burning plastics, from burning cars, burning houses.
Daniel: Yeah. And they’re also accessing different heights of the air column where I imagine particulates and pollution might vary.
Sorokin: Absolutely. And the smoke can carry for such long distances. So I talked to Dr. Olivia Sanderfoot, who researches this, and they found effects of wildfire on birds removed by hundreds of miles from where the epicenter of the fire is. And then obviously, I would expect the closer you get to the epicenter, the more inhalation there is.
And this affects the bird’s body condition. They’re less healthy. And right now, we are approaching bird nesting season. So over winter, these birds should be fattening up, eating as much as possible so that they can have a successful nesting season. However, birds that were impacted by this, that might be feeling the aftereffects of smoke inhalation, it’s not unlikely that they’re now going to struggle a little bit more downstream of this.
Daniel: Will this change their way of life?
Sorokin: It’s hard to imagine that it won’t change their way of life just because there are going to be less continuous tracks of habitat for them to nest in. Birds also feed on a variety of things, from insects to seeds, and the insects would’ve been impacted by the fire. In the months to come, it might be hard for insectivorous birds to forage enough in the burned areas to keep themselves well-fed. Same with birds that have evolved to eat native seeds. There may just not be many plants producing seed.
And historically, there were always fires, but we had large continuous tracts of habitat. So one area would’ve burned, but the adjacent area would’ve been OK, and there would be movement back and forth. And nowadays, with as much development as there is, as many roads, infrastructure, it’s all much more fragmented and much more difficult to move between these fragments of habitat for all animals, including birds. We often think of birds as good dispersers, and they are, but there are certain species that just don’t move big distances ever.
Daniel: You mentioned insects, and I’m wondering what sort of impacts did they experience, including things like monarch butterflies?
Sorokin: Yeah, insects would have been very affected. So one of the groves of trees that burned was the second-largest overwintering site for monarch butterflies in the county. And there weren’t a huge number of butterflies there this year. However, that said, there are not a huge number of butterflies in California this year, monarch butterflies specifically. So any loss is pretty serious.
The western monarch is threatened. There’s been a huge decline in recent decades. The long-lasting question is: How bad is the burn? Will they be able to return and overwinter there in future years?
Other insects besides butterflies are going to be pretty affected as well. So there’s a lot of pollinators that love chaparral habitat. And when that burns up, it is replaced by non-native grasses oftentimes, and that’s a big concern.
Daniel: What is chaparral?
Sorokin: Chaparral is a shrub. It is a plant of the Southwest, and it forms bushes that are really dense up top but actually fairly open along the bottom. So there’s a lot of small animals that have evolved to live in that sort of habitat.
Daniel: And it describes a habitat as well, or an ecosystem?
Sorokin: Yes. Correct. So the habitat that largely burned is chaparral. And chaparral is fire-adapted, but it is fire-adapted to burn infrequently but at high intensity. The problem after a burn is that you get these invasive grasses like cheatgrass, which was introduced for livestock very long ago but has now kind of taken over. And it’s an annual plant, so it regrows every year, and it provides more fuel for these fires.
And the problem is that with this grass, it is providing such a bounty of fuel for the fires every year that the habitat can burn more frequently than the chaparral has a chance to recover. And you get this loss of chaparral and takeover of grass and a huge changeover of habitat. The species that have evolved there—various moths, beetles, flies, pollinators—once they’re gone from an area, they’re gone for the foreseeable future because they’re small, they can’t move big distances.
Daniel: It sounds like some of the long-term effects will include extirpation of certain populations and potential extinctions.
Sorokin: Yeah. There are definitely species that are at risk of vanishing from an area and not coming back. The California red-legged frog, which is our largest native frog, was gone from the Santa Monica Mountains, and it was reintroduced about a decade ago. And it was impacted by the Woolsey Fire, and now the Palisades Fire has affected areas that it could occur in. So it’s already a battle to have it there in the first place, and then it just keeps getting battered by more and more obstacles.
Then there’s species which still obviously do occur in the area but are kind of on the edge. There’s a lot of endangered invertebrates. There are endangered snails that live nowhere else in the world except in the regions around L.A. There’s endangered trapdoor spiders, which live nowhere else other than the areas around L.A. And there’s potentially extinction risk.
Daniel: Are there any lessons that we can learn from these fires on how to protect wildlife?
Sorokin: Unfortunately, all predictions are that we are going to keep on experiencing fires more and more frequently in the face of changing climate and unpredictable precipitation. And the lessons to be taken away are that an ounce of prevention goes a long way. Prevention is easier than trying to deal with the repercussions. And that might involve control of invasive vegetation, more funds toward studying wildfire, which will potentially reveal how to better predict it and have resources on standby to combat it when it breaks out in the early stages. Yeah, it’s hard to say what the lessons are other than we need to be prepared for more.
Daniel: Tell me about the word you used in your story, Pyrocene. I hadn’t heard that before, and it felt rather ominous to me. What is it?
Sorokin: The Pyrocene is a term that some climate scientists have begun to use and is popping up with increasing frequency. And it is used to describe this time that we’re living in where the frequency of fires has increased to beyond a natural point where there’s huge fires every year, and it’s become almost commonplace.
Daniel: But the word Pyrocene extends beyond California. We’re talking about a global phenomenon, right?
Sorokin: Yes, definitely. So as I was writing this piece, I was seeing reports of massive fires in Madagascar. Just last year, we had massive fires in South America, across Peru and Bolivia and Brazil, that covered huge swaths of land, and the toll of environmental damage is immense. And every year, there are more and more. Australia experienced massive fires recently. I’m not as familiar with the footprint of these other places. However, I do know that these mega-fires are a global phenomenon.
It’s not just unique to California. It’s everywhere. And we’re all going to have to learn to live in a world where these fires break out—and also be aware of how our wildlife neighbors are faring in response to it as well, and do what we can to help.
Daniel: Anton, thank you so much for bringing your reporting to us and talking to me about the ways in which animals, including birds and insects and mammals and reptiles and amphibians, are really struggling in this new age of fire.
Sorokin: Thank you.
Daniel: To see the photos and read the stories from Ivan and Anton that we talked about in this episode, head to SmithsonianMag.com. We’ll also put links in our show notes.
Thanks for listening to “There’s More to That.” You can help others find our show by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the iHeartRadio app and wherever you get your podcasts. We’d really appreciate it.
From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.
Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music. I’m Ari Daniel, thanks for listening.
