All of our instincts seem to make things worse. Our de facto solution to housing affordability has been forcing people to move farther and farther away from cities, so they commute longer, make traffic worse and increase the population of fire-prone areas. We “solved” the problem of poor urban transportation by inviting private companies like Uber and Lyft to take over our roads. To keep the fires at bay, we are now employing the oldest I.T. hack in the book: turning the power off and then turning it back on again. Meanwhile, the rich are getting by: When the fires come, they hire their own firefighters. (In the case of the Getty fire in Los Angeles, their gardeners and housekeepers still had to go to work, though.)

Does all this sound overdramatic? You might point out that if it seems like dystopian apocalypse in California, it’s because it has always felt like dystopian apocalypse in California. The California of Joan Didion, Charles Manson and Ronald Reagan was no picnic; nor was the California of Pete Wilson, Rodney King or Arnold Schwarzenegger. California has always been a place that seems to be on the edge and running on empty, and maybe the best you can ever say about it is, hey, at least we’re not Florida.

But this time it’s different. The apocalypse now feels more elemental — as if the place is not working in a fundamental way, at the level of geography and climate. And everything we need to do to avoid the end goes against everything we’ve ever done.

The long-term solutions to many of our problems are obvious: To stave off fire and housing costs and so much else, the people of California should live together more densely. We should rely less on cars. And we should be more inclusive in the way we design infrastructure — transportation, the power grid, housing stock — aiming to design for the many rather than for the wealthy few.