I wasn’t there when the Los Angeles burned earlier this year. I had just landed in Tokyo, watching the orange glow of my Los Angeles from a world away, a helpless witness to something I know very well. I grew up with the smell of fire season and Santa Ana winds woven into the October air, with news anchors naming canyons like old friends. LA burns, rebuilds, burns again, rebuilds again. But this was January, an unheard-of fire event. An attack.
Maybe because of this, the ache felt deeper. The fire was everywhere. What was lost - homes, hillsides, habitat, humans. All of it refusing to grow back the same way. Regeneration is slower than we want it to be. Harder. It asks more of us than rebuilding ever does.
From where I stand now, in Manhattan Beach, looking across the Bay at the still-scarred hillside, I keep wondering what it would look like if LA learned from the way nature regenerates. To survive, and to come alive again.
I write this as an LA native, down to my socks and my sandy soles, and as a parent whose son attends Green School Bali, where regeneration is not theory but practice. Regeneration means restoring, renewing, and allowing the systems, human and other than human, around us to truly flourish. In nature, it happens constantly and consistently. Forests regrow after fire, coral reefs rebuild, rivers carve new paths. Life knows how to heal itself if we learn how to listen and work with it. If we can sit down and be humble.
The Palisades fire was started by a Florida man (insert irony here), a repeat arsonist who reignited a blaze already set once before. Arrest made, justice pending. But the bigger question lingers. What went wrong? What mistakes allowed a spark to become catastrophe? And what does it mean for those of us who claim this city as home, whether we stayed or left?
I watched from Japan as the smoke curled over the coastline, knowing that the people who fled those hills would eventually find their way southwest, along the ocean, toward towns like mine. Manhattan Beach, where progress moves slowly, where the word regeneration can sound like a yoga class, rather than a community plan. For those who relocated here, I wonder if we have been good neighbors.
Regeneration asks more than rebuilding. It asks for remembering, for humility, for participation. We cannot pave over what burned and call it progress. We have to sense, seek, shape, and tell the stories that help us move forward.
Could the planners of the “new Palisades” approach reimagining their corner of LA with the principles of biomimicry in mind? Simple and powerful. Could this work for the Palisades, for all of LA, for all of us?
Sensing - tuning into the living world around us. What is vibrant? What is fading? What stories are hidden?
Seeking - asking deeper questions. What does regeneration mean here, in this place, in this community?
Shaping - experimenting and building solutions inspired by nature’s own systems
Storytelling - sharing what we learn in ways that move people and invite others into renewal.
Could we approach with curiosity, care, and courage? Maybe in every way that we do this life?
LA is one of the most creative, resilient places on earth. The question is whether we will use that creativity to keep patching over the cracks or to reimagine how we live with fire, drought, displacement, and each other.
Regeneration does not mean going back. It means beginning again, with intention, imagination, and the humility to admit we have scorched some of our own roots. This is home. This is my story too.
I was not in LA when the Palisades burned. But I am here now, still watching, still hoping we can learn how to love a city that burns, and how to let it bloom again.
