Customer Reviews

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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.

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.

It's too bad Mike Davis settled for this book. After reading his first book, City of Quartz, I expected more. Ecology of Fears lacks the energy of City of Quartz, the writing style becomes more erratic, and the subject matter is nowhere near as compelling.

The events that took place in Southern California in the 1990's would have fit perfectly in Davis's world view that Los Angeles is a city fated by the gods to die an early and tragic death. Anyone who lived in Los Angeles through the 1990's knows that this was a dynamic period of big events and major changes - for good and bad. This decade deserves a good book worthy of its tumult and transformation. Ecology of Fear is not that book.

Unfortunately, what he produced ventured frequently into the bizarre and byzantine, and if the Los Angeles Times is to be believed, downright falsehoods. The book's basic premise was that Los Angeles is a land fraught with Mother Nature's castatrophies that has been misrepresented to the masses as an earthly paradise. To support his point, we get a chapter on Southland tornadoes, a chapter on man eating mountain lions living in the hills, and then a chapter on apartment fires of the 20th Century. Don't forget the chapter on L.A.'s propensity to flood where he repeats all the cliches about the Los Angeles River. Honestly, as an Angeleno, these are the last things I'm going to worry about (earthquakes, to which he also devotes a chapter, are another matter). It was as if Davis was trying to will his fantasies about the destruction of L.A. into existence through this book.

Now for the positive things about this book. The chapter on the destruction of the environment and the neglect of building an adequate park system is very good. This is surely one of the tragedies of Los Angeles. His chapter on the Los Angeles riots is excellent, and he has a section on Mayor James Hahn, who was then City Attorney, which was enlightening.

This is a good book to skim. Many of his statements have been proven to be false, and who really wants to read 50+ pages about the danger of tornadoes in Los Angeles? Davis could have done better than this.

After reading the numerous attacks on this book in our local LA media (mostly in the New Times, a local paper desperate to establish itself as the screaming tabloid alternative to the L.A. Weekly), I was fearful that upon finally buying this book (yes, I had to wait for paperback) I would find it to be just a compendium of outlandish claims and apocalypse hysteria. This is not the case at all.

I read the book, then went back and read the criticism, and I was disturbed to find that few critics actually refute any of the ideas in the book. Most of the comments on this page, for instance, boil down to "I heard he made it up" or "I heard he's a commie" or "LA's not as bad as he says."

Davis never says, "We're all going to be eaten by mountain lions." He never says, "We're all going to be carried off by twisters." These are brought up as part of a larger argument about a metropolis that ignores its own place in the environment of Southern California.

And Bunker Hill may be lovely, but it is indeed a very privatized space. Take a walk around the downtown highrises, and you will see plaques on the sidewalks which read: PRIVATE PROPERTY. The area is not a gated community; you won't see soldiers marching through on patrol; but why are there no homeless panhandling among the sculptures and fountains? After all, there's plenty of that going on down the hill on Spring street. Could it be that the plazas of Bunker Hill are not truly public?

And what's with the bashing of his Westlake chapter? I never thought I'd see so many people come out in defense of slumlords.

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.

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'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.

This book is aimed at popular cultures, history buffs, and quasi-academics. Davis examines "Los Angeles as the magnet for the American apocalyptic imagination. . . . riot, fire, flood, earthquake," under the backdrop of an arena where "middle-class apprehensions about angry under-classes are exceeded only by the anxieties brought by blind thrust-faults underlying Downtown L.A." It examines public and governmental risk perceptions, planning issues, historical events, and media and movie treatments of the "City of Angels as a theme park for Armageddon." Statistical and anecdotal treatments are constructed for everything from Mountain Lion predation on joggers, El Niño-driven floods and mudslides, California as the disembarking point of 'alien' invasions (including people's varying identifications of such to include Mexicans, Orientals, Medflies and extra-terrestrials), as well as "LA's under-rated tornado problem." While the book is insightful in examining the psyche of the American suburbanite in the context of the mystique of nature -- and how risk is exacerbated in the mindset of such cultures -- it is at best a reactionary effort. To note - It is highly likely that there were more tornado deaths in Oklahoma City last year than there were tornadoes in all of Southern California. The book appears well-researched, at least in terms of attempted effort. For instance, Chapter 4: "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" is a holistic and comprehensive treatment of the wildfire hazard. But, other topical treatments are curiously hypocritical in their examination of certain real -- but low-probability risks -- such as cougars or tornadoes.

What appears as a scholarly chapter on Southern California tornado risk is itself a yellow journalistic media-style protrayal of the seemingly sudden realization that tornadoes do in fact occur in virtually all of North America, including California. Davis sermonizes a bit on how economically-driven Southern California has committed numerous and regular environmental transgressions, social injustices, and planning blunders (and makes some great observations). However, his interpretation of pure natural hazards -- most notably tornadoes -- reduces this otherwise fascinating book to a parody of itself - and the fallacies of public risk perception that it seeks to address. "Ecology of Fear" consults all the right scientists and cites all the prime literature (e.g. Court, 1980; Hales, 1985; Grazulis, 1993; Monteverdi, 1996 on tornadoes), yet mostly makes all the wrong conclusions (at least about tornadoes).

Labelling Southern California "Our Secret Kansas" is indicative of Davis' obsession with statistical oddities: "The Oklahoma City metropolitan area, considered to have the U.S.' worst urban tornado problem, is hit every 4.0 years. Yet metropolitan Los Angeles is hit at an average of once every 2.2 years, or twice as often." Aside from problems of scale, and a failure to qualify what an "urban tornado problem" is, Davis simply looks at quantitative data with little apparent understanding of the qualitative meaning. He fails to note that tornadoes in California tend to be weak, with NO violent tornado having EVER been recorded in the history of the state! Likewise, California tornadoes are very brief, relative to their Oklahoma cousins and, most importantly, no one has EVER been killed by a tornado in California. The chapter title is somewhat jingoistic as well, as even in Kansas the tornado risk is generally exaggerated by the media. Comparisons of the two states may not quite be like comparing 'apples and oranges,' but is certainly akin to 'oranges and grapefruits.' There may be some similarities, but the key thing is the differences, such as SIZE and impact!

Still, I like the text and it all makes for a very interesting study of hazard perception, media and cultural constructs, and overall representations of the environment. It is a thought-provoking book, fascinating on differing levels -- such as the wide range of material covered, the inclusions and exclusions, and simply in considerations of why the book is so popular. All make for a great study in hazard perceptions and culture. While I am very critical of a few areas, I applaud the effort and Davis' concept of examining the "ecology of fear."

As a resident of Los Angeles I found Ecology of Fear a great and informative read. I understand those who review it and find things to quibble with. Nothing is perfect. But for someone like me, possessed before reading this with a feeling that so many things in LA were just wrong, but not having a good understanding how how and why things got to be so messed up in so many ways, Ecology of Fear is an indispensible book. Perhaps the greatest thing I took away from this book was an abiding sense of the "alternate reality" LA that perhaps exists in some other dimension-- an LA where greenbelts line the rivers, where the foothills are left undeveloped and able to burn seasonally as meant to, and where resources are more equitably distributed.