Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster [Hardcover]

Mike Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998

From the author of City of Quartz, a startling new view of Los Angeles, the disaster capital of the world--and what it has to tell us about America at the millennium.

Los Angeles has become a magnet for the American apocalyptic imagination. Riot, fire, flood, earthquake . . . only locusts are missing from the almost biblical list of disasters that has struck the city in the l990s. And the force of real catastrophe has been redoubled by the obsessive fictional destruction of Los Angeles--by aliens, comets, and twisters--in scores of novels and films. The former "Land of Sunshine" is now seen by much of the world, including many of L.A.'s increasingly nervous residents, as a veritable Book of the Apocalypse theme park.

In this extraordinary book, Mike Davis unravels the secret political history of disaster, real and imaginary, in southern California. As he surveys the earthquakes of Santa Monica, the burning of Koreatown, and the invasion of "man-eating" mountain lions, he exposes the deep complicity between social injustice and perceptions of natural disorder. Los Angeles, Davis argues, has deliberately put itself in harm's way. And he shows that the floods, fires, and earthquakes that the city has reaped were tragedies as avoidable--and unnatural--as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets.

Rich with detail, bold and original, Ecology of Fear is a gripping reconnaissance into the urban future from our most provocative interpreter of the American metropolis.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The 1990s have not been kind to Los Angeles. As Mike Davis writes, "The destructive February 1992, January 1993, and January 1995 floods ($500 million in damage) were mere brackets around the April 1992 insurrection ($1 billion), the October-November 1993 firestorms ($1 billion) and the January 1994 earthquake ($42 billion)." But, he argues, the increasing fear about nature's reign of terror in Southern California reflected in Hollywood's preoccupation with apocalypse--L.A. has been destroyed on screen by everything from lava (Volcano) to nukes (Miracle Mile) to alien death rays (Independence Day)--is in reality a strong case of denial. Again, Davis himself says it best: "For generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense. Historic wildfire corridors have been turned into view-lot suburbs, wetland liquefaction zones into marinas, and floodplains into industrial districts and housing tracts. Monolithic public works have been substituted for regional planning and a responsible land ethic. As a result, Southern California has reaped flood, fire, and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets."

As in City of Quartz, his earlier book about Los Angeles, Davis reveals the deeper ideological narratives behind historical events. Whether he's explaining the motivations behind the persistent refusal of civic leaders to admit that a tornado alley runs down the middle of the region, from Long Beach to Pasadena, or discussing, as one chapter refers to it, "the case for letting Malibu burn," he outlines his arguments with a fascinating amount of detail and a subtle sense of irony. There are wonderful chapters here, such as "Maneaters of the Sierra Madre," a zoology of the wild beasts Angelenos fear, including mountain lions that descend from the hills to eat joggers and small children, swarms of Africanized killer bees making their way across the deserts, and El Chupacabra, the "goat-sucking vampire" that joined L.A.'s roster of faddish icons in 1996.

Although this book is specifically about Los Angeles, its lessons about the relationship between urban developments and natural ecosystems and about the dangerous influence of class politics on environmental safety policy are applicable to any city. Anyone with a serious interest in natural history or urban policy should make a point of reading this book. --Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

"I'm not summoning Armageddon," affirms Davis, a social historian and urban theorist whose 1990 NBCC-nominated, dystopian history of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, City of Quartz, is now a cult classic. Maybe so, but the portrait of a city on the brink presented in this powerful, if sometimes scattershot, follow-up volume is sure to remind readers of the Book of Revelations. The book takes Davis in a new direction?away from the politics of L.A. urban planning, toward geophysical threats to the city, ranging from earthquakes to fires, floods and killer bees. Davis's polemic will raise as many hackles as concerns: while L.A. officials proclaim each earthquake, flood, mud slide and wildfire as an exceptional event, southern California has been actually enjoying a benign climatic and seismic period, and more serious disasters lie ahead, he argues. These natural catastrophes have been compounded by the fact that in building L.A., developers have largely disregarded the region's topography and environment and built in areas prone to such ravages as wildfires and floods. As the population continues to spread into new areas, there will be, predicts the author, an increase in confrontations between the region's wildlife and settlers, a situation rendered more explosive by the widespread poverty and racial problems endemic to the city, and the vast disparities of relief services. As tense as the situation has become, it will worsen as the gap between the have and have-nots widens, he says. The future Davis envisions is credible and alarming, and his argument is bolstered by prose that is machete sharp and accompanied by an archive of stunning photos. Satellite photographs of L.A. during the riots of 1993 resembled those of an erupting volcano, he shows. Which, in Davis's blistering critique, is precisely what it is. Editor, Sara Bershtel (Aug.) FYI: Davis is a 1998 recipient of a McArthur Fellowship grant.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 484 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1 edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805051066
• ISBN-13: 978-0805051063
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #476,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, Planet of Slums, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biased? Yes, but contains simple, devastating truths., November 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Paperback)

Point One - if Davis did indeed fudge his research, invent stories or fabricate evidence, then he's broken the ethical and intellectual standards by which historians are constrained. If such accusations are true, then let him drain the poisoned cup he mixed for himself.

To be fair to the author, I spent a few hours in the library checking his footnotes. No, I didn't have time to review the whole book, since I do aspire to something of a life beyond the stacks; however, I didn't find anything unsupported by the sources cited. If anyone is inclined to respond to this post, could you please point out just where he lied? I'd appreciate your insights, since I didn't unearth falsification myself.

Point Two - the moral of the story is simple, and one that no ad hominem attack (Communist! Socialist! Liberal! Leftist! Phony!), however venomous, can weaken. The moral has nothing to do, in fact, with Davis' obvious leftist leanings. Los Angeles today, more than any other single location in the developed world, represents a nearly total disconnection between what people imagine their lives to be and what physical reality is.

If you wracked your brain for weeks, you couldn't come up with a worse place for millions to live. A semi-desert to begin with, the city depends on the vagaries of the Sierra snowpack and the flow of the notoriously capricious Colorado, among other rivers. LA sits in the middle of one of the most seismically active regions on the planet. Toss in a continual, interlocking cycle of horrendous wildfires, torrential rains, flash floods and mudslides for good measure. The result is a violently dynamic land, subject to sudden change.

Yet the detachment of the good burghers of Malibu from their surroundings is such that they demand fire protection for each and every inaccessible house sited in tinderbox terrain while refusing to pay for improved water lines or widened streets. Willful ignorance of the geophysical facts of life prevails in Thousands Oaks as well, and in Orange County, and throughout the region. There's a handy English word for this kind of behavior - stupidity.

What this book does, and does superbly, is reflect the undying human desire to make uncomfortable facts vanish by fervently pretending that they do not exist.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Put Your Far Out Cap On..., December 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Paperback)

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.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't believe the hype, October 3, 2000

By 

"lexo-2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Paperback)

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.