Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

We all think we live near glitzy Hollywood-style Los Angeles; we've sung the praises of its temperate weather. We complain a bit about smog; but when a hurricane hits the East Coast, we feel smug that we only have earthquakes. Every one in Los Angeles who has had any of these thoughtsmust read the Ecology of Fear. Anyone who has ever wondered just how urban sprawl came about must read this book. Mike Davis has done the perenially-new Los Angeles a favor by gathering together the facts and insights of this book. The Ecology of Fear reveals how this very real place and its problems are founded upon a number of very poor decisions. This book demonstrates how much of Los Angeles' disasters are simply a function of decisions that are poorly-made in light of the natural environment. Even though we have built and paved mightily, L.A.'s natural surroundings are not going away. Earthquakes, coyotes, hunters, xenophobia, fires (wild and otherwise), land grabs and twisters are all part of what makes up the fear ecology of Los Angeles. If you have ever addressed your local City Council, or worked on a general plan, or wondered why open space was vanishing, or even voted, you should read this book. It will open your eyes.

I read Ecology of Fear and City of Quartz in a college seminar on the American West, and was blown away by Davis' work. I gave it to my Dad, who tends to be right of center, and even he was enthused. I'm always interested by the people who discredit scholarship by claiming that the author is simply a "liar." Certainly Mike Davis has a distinct political, leftist view point, which he never tries to hide. But just as certainly, the authors of articles "discrediting" Davis also have poltical viewpoints. I believe one of the articles trashing Davis appeared in, ahem, The National Review, hardly a bastion of unbiased reporting. A reader should always go into a book with a certain level of skepticism, certainly. Just because you don't agree with someone, however, is no reason to claim that they're "lying." That said! Davis pulls no punches. You want to see someone kicking a** for the working class, read it. Basically Davis looks at how nature-made and man-made enviroments of southern california inluence race and class relations there. As an earlier reviewer pointed out, "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" is a particularly good piece. As the media and authorities madly scramble to save the playgrounds of the rich and famous, houses that should never have been built in the first place, tennements burn and children die in South Central and no one blinks an eye. Even if you don't agree with Davis (and I'm hardly asking people to join the revolution, particularly the person who pulled "pinko" out of the mothballs in his review) read him. Maybe he'll open your eyes, and maybe he won't, but man, he'll take you on one wild ride.

I find the negative reactions to Mike Davis' book very interesting, since they're predicted by the very model of reactionary short-sightedness that Davis suggests is one of the reasons why LA has got itself into the state that it's in.Davis' picture of a city in which the rich wield most of the power and the poor are regularly forgotten, marginalised and sacrificed to the needs of wealth is hardly a commie fantasy. That's how you make big cities! Face the facts, people! It's been happening in my own city, Dublin, albeit on a smaller scale, for the last ten years. I too lived in an under-maintenanced firetrap which ended up being burned out. I too have witnessed the construction of mass housing with severely under-code safety features bolted on in the name of a quick profit. I don't know about the chapters about wildlife; we don't have anything nearly as lethal as cougars and rattlesnakes in Ireland. But, at the very least, the chapter on the role that LA plays in the cultural imagination as a sort of modern-day Sodom ripe for armageddon is worth the price of the whole book. This is not, in the end, a book about LA in particular, although it's full of fascinating material. It's about blindness, paranoia, greed and inhumanity. As such, it's accurate about any First World city. The one-star reviewers are simply behaving like some of the characters in this book. (I wonder, sometimes, if non-Angelenos have any idea just what the rest of the world actually thinks about their city, and how weird and hallucinatorily awful we find it when we go there.)According to the sources Davis cites, LA is due for a seriously major quake some time in the next quarter-century. I don't wish that on anyone, but I do hope that people can take the hint. In the meantime, the bad reaction is just the usual story - God forbid that anyone should suggest that the pursuit of the dollar is not the only value in the world. Davis has a sense of the worth of human life that puts him miles above his critics. This is a book that stops people like me from despairing entirely about America.

As a native New Yorker, I am very familiar with smug views of urban history, written by apologists for the economic elites. As every New Yorker "knows", the city was brought to near-ruin by an excess of genersosity towarda the poor and a general attitude of permissiveness. In this potted-plant view, New York was "saved" by the bankers who slashed city services and, ultimately, the law-and-order policies of Rudy Giuliani. Coveniently ignored is the damage done by policies and urban planning that assisted the city's corporate sector and its wealthiest citizens. New York needs its own Mike Davis, whose "The Ecology of Fear" demonstrates the disastrous impact of reactionary planning on Los Angeles.Davis deals with a wide range of subjects, from the fires in Malibu to mountain lion attacks. The common thread is the irresponsibility of the people who run the city. In all instances the governinment has chosen mindless privatization of the environment over the creation of a healthy public sphere, shown a lack of concern for the reality of Los Angeles's physical environment and catered to every whim of its wealthiest citizans. As was the case in New York, LA's leaders have circled the wagons and blamed everything on the illegal immigrants and the "underclass".Davis's adversaries have tried to piant him as some form of radical, pathological doomsayer. He occasionally exagerrates; the tornado problem probably is overblown. The real pathology belongs to those people who would build a home in the fire trap called Malibu, watch their houses burn regularly and then scream for federal assistance for rebuilding, while blaming mysterious left-wing arsonists. The current Ramparts division police scandal only underscores everything that Davis says. A police department that holds "shooting parties" when an officer kills a civilian and frames subjects can exist only when in a city where government abdicates its responsibility to its citizens. Nike Davis aptly describes such a city. New York may not be as bad, but I would love to see Davis turn his attentions there.

I'm writing to respond to the one-star reviewers who dismissed _Ecology of Fear_ out of hand as "communist." What a great example of how we got where we are--if you disagree with someone's conclusions, call him a Commie, avoiding the need for any depth of thought or pretense of analysis.I found "The Dialectic of Ordinary Disaster" and "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" two of the most enlightening chapters I've read lately. Drawing on the work of a variety of scientists to show that Southern California is a distinctive, cataclysmic environment, Davis shows how "natural" disasters are socially created, and the consequences of this, especially for the poor.Despite his environmental focus, Davis clearly cares more about human life than anything else. He draws attention, rightly in my view, to the enormous level of local, state, and federal money spent to save celebrity properties in Malibu (not to mention the risk to firemen's lives) and official indifference to the deaths of dozens of immigrants in tenant-house fires in inner-city L.A. Davis implicitly challenges the environmental movement, as well as Americans generally, to rethink our priorities in light of what we know.A spectacular stylist with an insightful phrase on every page, Mike Davis is not easy to listen to. All the more reason we should pay attention.