Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster - Review

by Mike Davis, New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 484 pages, $27.50

No major American city seems more precarious than Los Angeles. There's a certain moon-base feel to the place, a sense that its inhabitants are living in a massive, well-provisioned bubble resting uncomfortably on a stunning but generally inhospitable landscape. It's damn near perfect inside the bubble, which is really a pleasure dome: glorious day after glorious day; striking mountains running into beautiful beaches; every possible human opportunity and diversion in overabundant supply.

But there are also constant reminders that the bubble might burst at any moment: smog alert days when the ventilation system isn't working quite right; wildfires that deposit ash over large sections of the city; brief but fierce rainstorms that create raging rivers of mud; and, of course, earthquakes that threaten to level the entire place in a few seconds. The potential for physical apocalypse has a psychic counterpart, too, in ever-present threats of race riots, gang warfare, street shootouts, and home-invasion robberies.

This is to say that, at least in terms of its negatives, L.A. is pretty much like every other city on the planet: It is constantly threatened with ruin from within and without. To be sure, on a superficial level, L.A. may seem even more artificial, more obviously constructed than most cities - signature flourishes such as carefully manicured foliage and ubiquitous automatic sprinkler systems underscore the effort necessary to grow things in the region. But that distinction fades when one strives to suggest a more "natural" alternative. None of the other largest American cities - New York, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia - is free of environmental and demographic tensions similar to those found in Los Angeles. While none of those places is prone to the spectacular rupture accompanying earthquakes, none would survive very long without constant maintenance, repair, rebuilding, and repopulation. (Consider, for instance, winter in Chicago and summer in Houston.) In the end, all cities are artificial in the best sense of that word: They are the result of massive, concerted, and continuing human activity.

In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Mike Davis takes a very different line. It's not simply that L.A. is plainly an unsustainable affront to Nature. Indeed, for Davis, author of City of Quartz and a fixture in left-wing publications such as The Nation, even the weather there stinks (he describes Southern California as a "secret Kansas" rife with tornadoes and vicious windstorms that the delinquent media fail to investigate fully). Although theoretically unconvincing and factually dubious, Ecology of Fear is nonetheless a compelling document. That's because Davis embodies fully the contradictory and incoherent impulses inherent in what F.A. Hayek rightly derided as the "engineering mentality," the notion that complex social interactions - such as city building - can be readily managed from above by planners and other wise souls.

If there's one thing that piques such a mind-set, it's messy, volatile, unpredictable market forces that decentralize decision making, thereby confounding prediction and control. Davis wastes no time in fingering the real culprit behind Hell A. "For generations," he writes on page 9, "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."

The bulk of Ecology of Fear is a detailed litany of those various eco-threats to the Los Angeles metro area. The result is a sort of Irwin Allen production that, if nothing else, provides aid and comfort to East Coast intellectuals who scorn Southern California as a Potemkin metropolis beset by everything from killer bees to the Black Death. In wide-ranging and quirky chapters, Davis explores endemic perils both obvious (earthquakes, forest fires) and arcane (mountain lion attacks, plague-carrying squirrels). Despite its often tendentious analyses of specific works, the long section titled "The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles" is a consistently engaging and nearly exhaustive compendium of books and movies that feature apocalyptic versions of the city's ultimate demise. The works surveyed run the gamut from Philip Francis Nowlan's Buck Rogers novellas to the Turner Diaries to Blade Runner, if nothing else, Davis has compiled a useful bibliography on the subject.

Davis simultaneously bemoans a general lack of public oversight and investment and critiques what he deems to be specific misuses of such largess. In doing so, he is not wrong so much as misguided. Hence, he sensibly attacks "public subsidization of firebelt suburbs" in Malibu and elsewhere. He does so, however, not because he is against public subsidies but because he believes it to be money spent in areas best left undeveloped.