The Future of the Foothills: America’s 250th

Our family went to the La Cañada Library a few weeks ago to hear Jacob Soboroff speak about his book “Firestorm.” The room was packed. It was sobering to hear a journalist lay out the events of Jan. 7, 2025 so succinctly and professionally but also with real personal feeling. His brother’s house in the Palisades was destroyed. He covered the fires live while watching his childhood burn.

What stayed with me most was not the account of what happened but his framing of what it means. Soboroff describes the 2025 fires not as an isolated tragedy but as a preview. The fire of the future, in the words of one emergency management official he interviewed. That phrase has been rattling around in my head ever since.

This July 4 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There will be celebrations, fireworks and speeches about the American experiment. All of that is fitting. But I keep finding myself drawn to a different question. Not what the last 250 years have meant but what the next 250 might look like.

Start with the hopeful part. Just down the road at JPL in Pasadena, engineers are operating rovers on Mars and recently completed the first drives on another planet planned by artificial intelligence. The Perseverance rover is crawling along the rim of Jezero Crater right now, investigating what may be traces of ancient life. SpaceX launches are visible from our local parks. It is not crazy to imagine that within the next 250 years, human beings will have established settlements on Mars and begun the long work of terraforming another world. The seeds of that future are being planted a few miles from where we live.

Now the harder part. Back here on Earth, the climate has shifted in ways that reshape daily life in the foothills. The massive atmospheric circulation patterns, called Hadley cells, are the engines that determine where deserts and rainfall occur across the globe … and they are drifting poleward. The dry zones are expanding north. For a city at LA’s latitude, that means increasing aridification along with booms of precipitation – like the atmospheric river we had this past December. 

Much of March, including many days technically in winter, felt like summer. Sierra snowpack, the source of so much of California’s water, is already melting. The Colorado River, which supplies water to our region, has been in crisis for years and for the first time in U.S. history is in the thick of negotiations regarding federally mandated cutbacks. These are not future problems. They are present ones accelerating.

And then there are the fires. As I write this, communities across Altadena and the Palisades are still rebuilding. Foundations are being poured. Permits are being filed. Families are making hard choices about whether to return. That rebuilding is an act of courage and love. But it is also incomplete if it is only about restoring what was lost. The question is whether we rebuild in a way that prepares for what is coming.

I understand that it is easier to focus on recovery rather than on adaptation. People are exhausted. The bureaucracy is maddening. Insurance is a nightmare. But the atmospheric conditions that created the Jan. 7 fires are not getting better. They are getting worse. That is just the reality of the world in which we live.

What gives me hope is what I see in this community. The Eaton Fire Collaborative. The LCF Climate Adaptation Committee. JPL scientists sharing climate research at churches here in La Crescenta. (There has been some fascinating coverage of that work in these pages.) Foothill Strong, which brought people together for mutual aid when the fires were still burning. These are not abstract institutions. They are neighbors doing the practical work of facing reality together.

The Declaration of Independence is often remembered for its soaring language about rights and equality. But it was also, at its core, a document about self-governance, about people in a specific place deciding they had the capacity and the obligation to shape their own future rather than wait for distant powers to shape it for them. That is a small d-democratic impulse and it is alive in the foothills.

I have been thinking about what it would look like to channel that impulse into something more deliberate. What if the foothill communities came together in some kind of forum to envision how we adapt and thrive over the coming decades? Not a government body. Not a task force with an acronym and a sunset date. Something more like a sustained conversation among neighbors about the future we want to build, informed by the best science and the deepest local knowledge we have. A forum for the future of the foothills.

I do not have the answers. Nobody does. But 250 years ago a group of people in Philadelphia decided that the future was worth arguing about together. They did not agree on much but they agreed on that. I think we can do the same.

Happy birthday, America. The next 250 years are ours to shape.

Patrick’s a husband, father, son, brother, avid cyclist, fervent reader, enjoyer of adventures, lover of board games and the author of “A New California Dream.” He blogs at PioneeringSpirit.xyz and writes for CV Weekly in his personal capacity.