Earlier this year, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a graveyard was spared by the fire that sent thousands of Los Angeles residents fleeing into the coal-black night. Here, in Mountain View Cemetery, lie the bones of Octavia Butler, the famed science-fiction writer who spent her life in Pasadena and Altadena, both of which had burned. Trinkets offered by fans often decorate Butler’s unassuming grave. A footstone is inscribed with a quotation from her Parable of the Sower : ALL THAT YOU TOUCH, YOU CHANGE. ALL THAT YOU CHANGE, CHANGES YOU.

Explore the December 2025 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More

In that dystopian novel, published in 1993 and set in the mid-2020s, the United States still exists but has been warped by global warming, and its authoritarian government has ceded most of the administration of day-to-day matters to corrupt companies. In Butler’s neo-feudal vision, states and cities erect strict borders to deter migrants, the gap between rich and poor has widened, and massive wildfires in Southern California drive the state’s decline.

It has become commonplace to label Butler a prophet. She didn’t get everything right about the United States today. But even in the things that haven’t happened, exactly, one can see analogs to real life.

Butler, however, considered herself merely an analyst—a “histofuturist.” She often said that her primary skill was simply learning from the past. In her research for Parable, she studied times of rising political strife and demagoguery, along with America’s history of class and racial inequality. She studied what was at the time an emerging scientific consensus regarding global warming, a body of research that even then predicted fires and floods, and warned of political instability.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” Butler wrote in an essay for Essence in 2000. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” That same year, she said in an interview that she dearly hoped she was not prophesying anything at all; that among other social ills, climate change would become a disaster only if it was allowed to fester. “I hope, of course, that we will be smarter than that,” Butler said six years before her death, in 2006.

What will our “full-fledged disasters” be in three decades, as the planet continues to warm? The year 2024 was the hottest on record. Yet 2025 has been perhaps the single most devastating year in the fight for a livable planet. An authoritarian American president has pressed what can only be described as a policy of climate-change acceleration—destroying commitments to clean energy and pushing for more oil production. It doesn’t require an oracle to see where this trajectory might lead.

From the July/August 2024 issue: George Packer on how Phoenix is a vision of America’s future

Taking our cue from Butler, we would do well today to study the ways that climate change has already reshaped the American landscape, and how disasters are hollowing out neighborhoods like the one where Butler is buried. We should understand how catastrophe works in a landscape of inequality.

Over the next 30 years or so, the changes to American life might be short of apocalyptic. But miles of heartbreak lie between here and the apocalypse, and the future toward which we are heading will mean heartbreak for millions. Many people will go in search of new homes in cooler, more predictable places. Those travelers will leave behind growing portions of America where services and comforts will be in short supply—let’s call them “dead zones.” Should the demolition of America’s rule of law continue, authoritarianism and climate change will reinforce each other, a vicious spiral from which it will be difficult to exit.

How do we know this? As ever, all it takes is looking around.

In August, as the setting sun sent a red glow up the San Gabriel Valley, I surveyed a stretch of western Altadena, just blocks from Butler’s grave. The better part of a year had passed since the Eaton Fire—which destroyed some 9,400 buildings here and in Pasadena while the Palisades Fire raged simultaneously to the west. Still, the moonscape in front of me was unsettling. Much of the debris had been cleared, which made the houseless lots seem even more eerie. Here and there, a brick fireplace stood watch over an otherwise empty lot.

In January, when the Santa Ana winds came, Altadenans weren’t too worried. In this part of California, small fires were just part of life. “We always think it’s going to be an earthquake that takes us out,” Veronica Jones, the president of the Altadena Historical Society and a resident for six decades, told me. For many Altadena lifers, the memory of the 1993 Kinneloa Fire, which destroyed almost 200 buildings and burned for five days, was the guide for what to expect in the worst case.

But 1993 was billions and billions of tons of carbon pollution ago. This time around, the physics of the planet were different. In 2023, high temperatures in the Pacific had helped incubate Hurricane Hilary, which led to the first-ever tropical-storm warning in Southern California. The storm dumped buckets of rain on the region, helping spur rapid plant growth over the next several months. But then the rain dried up completely. In the second half of 2024, Los Angeles County received only 0.3 inches of precipitation—the lowest amount on record. The drought and near-record temperatures dried out the lush scrub, turning it to kindling. In just 16 months, multiple supposedly once-a-century weather events had worked in concert to make the hills perhaps more combustible than they’d ever been.

When the winds blew in, bringing dry, warm air from inland over Southern California, they were unusually strong, approaching hurricane strength. Strong winds can damage power lines, and evidence now suggests that a malfunctioning power line helped spark the Eaton Fire. Early in the morning on January 8, Jones was startled when her husband told her they needed to go because embers—“big chunks of fire,” as Jones put it—were falling into their yard.

The story of the Eaton Fire itself is tragic, and an omen: In ways that are straightforward and in ways that were largely unanticipated, global warming is quickly expanding the potential for large fires. But catastrophes also tend to reveal deficits in society, and the patterns of destruction and abandonment that followed the fire—which have roots in America’s past and its present—tell u