Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster Reviews

• 
  Howard Olsen

  This is a good, but flawed, book. Its main attraction is its cataloguing of the many disasters that threaten Los Angeles with Biblical destruction, and the ham-handed ways in which the LA elite have increased the danger through myopic development. Davis devotes chapters to the familar (earthquakes & fires), and the surprising. Who knew that LA had a tornado alley whose existence has been resolutely denied by city officials and the LA Times? Davis is a passionate writer, whose specialty is the depiction of a world gone mad as it is slowly devoured by Angelinos. The human errors shown here give him a broad canvas on which to work.
  
  This book also has some serious flaws. Its structure undercuts the power of its message. Davis begins with a bang, describing the political and economic aftermath of the Northridge quake, but the book becomes LESS apocalyptic with each chapter. His tally of horrors eventually descends to self-parody with warnings about killer bees and flesh-eating vampires. Odder yet, he follows his catalogue of natural dangers with a long chapter (the longest one in the book, in fact) about the many fictional depictions of the destruction of LA. This is a great discussion; Davis seems to have read every lurid paperback, and watched every crummy B-movie, with the death of LA as a plot point. He gives these questionable cultural artifacts the full deconstructionist treatment, using them to examine the signifiers that represent LA's fears of armaggeddon. Obviously, the point is to contrast the fantasy fears of destruction with the very real dangers posed by the natural world. Davis wants to set out what we should or should not be afraid of. That's fine, but the placement of the fiction chapter within the analysis of the "real world" chapters interrupts the logic and flow of his argument.
  
  The other major flaw in this book is Davis himself. His rhetoric and tone are Marxist. He is not a gulag-and breadlines Marxist, of course. Instead, he is the sort of Pop Marxist that is a familiar feature in the cultural and intellectual scene-mostly it's good for getting tenure, seducing nose-ringed co-eds, and impressing the staff at "Vanity Fair." Davis' discussion on the fire danger, contrasting Malibu's wildfires with LA's history of slum fires, is a classic dialectic. He focuses on the evils of Developers, Corporations, and Republicans with the same fervor that the Old Left used to apply to Capitalists and Fascists. He is also at war with human nature itself. I think we can all agree that LA is mostly an ugly, poorly planned city. However, Davis treats this as the result of "greed" and explosive "growth" and the like. He does not admit that this was the result of millions of people moving out west to escape the dreary Midwest to make a new life for themselves and their families. With transplants arriving by the carload, LA's city fathers did not have time to take soil samples and count squirrel populations.
  
  Davis also fails to mention that the post-Sixties LA political scene has been dominated by sclerotic Democrats, not rapacious Republicans. Pete Wilson is repeatedly invoked as a right-wing boogeyman, while Tom Bradley is mentioned only in passing. This is ridiculous, as Bradley was mayor of LA for four terms, during a time when LA began to drift and decline, while Wilson is connected to LA only because he was governor of CA.
  
  (I should mention that the worst writing can be found on the back cover. Some anonymous copyrighter has given us such dubious phrases as "violent malaise," "compassionate rage" and "counterpointing fantasy with reality." "Counterpointing" has to be the most obnoxious misuse of a made up word I have ever seen)
• 
  Jonfaith

  In effect, we think ourselves gods upon the land but are still really just tourists.
  
  Ecology of Fear is loose, if not disparate--an apt analogy of Los Angeles, if you will. It is wild-eyed, it is grim and it does boast a wicked sense of humor. How could it not? Davis embraces the myriad risks and curses which plague this fabled city. Surmising such collectively as fear, Davis concludes that it is only safety (of the Elites only, obviously), a corporate security, which remains a priority, hence surveillance capitalism thrives amongst a low-intensity race war. But the race war is only running cover for the dehumanization of the underclass.
  
  My interest soared with the opening ecological sections and then waned in light of the threat analysis of tornados and killer bees. This is a stirring work, one which has aged rather well.
• 
  Sheehan

  See I would have given this book four-stars in 2002 when I read it, a great social/environmental history of the southland, how human manipulation and attempts to control the environment, have netted some of the unintended climate consequences and urban ills that were already starting to be a nuisance for city planners at the time the book was written.
  
  Fast forward fifteen years, and this book is prescient about every climate concern regarding fires in Malibu and the regions which have burned in cycles to regrow the land, humans are now littered all over the free land and now we are trying to control the genie of fire danger from doing what it naturally does. Los Angeles is re-wilding the formerly paved rivers, bolstering the seafronts from erosion...it is really happening, and this book gives a great clarion call at a time when city planners still thought they had cities designed to perfection, while treating climate as an externality.
  
  Considering CA just turned off power to a percentage of the state to avoid catastrophe in the wooded forests, this book's considerations which were focused on Los Angeles city planning should be generalized to the whole state.
  
  Mike Davis is a very enjoyable writer, I'm pretty sure I have tried to read about everything else he's written since.
• 
  Ken-ichi

  I can now say from experience that one of many excellent places in LA to read this book about the environmental catastrophe that *is* LA is the line for the Studio Tour at Universal Studios Hollywood, a "ride" that, among other things, shows you what it would be like to experience a massive earthquake in... a BART station. The bituminous gloom seeping from its pages was a prophylactic balm against the relentlessly inspiring video distractions that played as I waited with several hundred fellow athleisure-sporting Americans while we suffered another excruciatingly perfect California day in an effort to make the wallet-gouging we volunteered for seem worth it.
  
  One main thesis comes in the tornado chapter: "these low-intensity intervals are nurseries of illusion about the Los Angeles envionrment and the extreme events [...] that constitute its ordinary metabolism" (p. 193). While Davis's focus was LA, he could easily have been speaking about all of California, and perhaps the American West, where equilibrium is punctuated by catastrophe at a cadence our civilization cannot accomodate without billions of dollars in damaged infrastructure and the loss of priceless lives. Every Californian should read this book for this reason: we all need to understand the powers that shape this place better than we do, from earthquakes to fires to floods. As I write this we're at the tail end of a series of atmospheric rivers that are only giving us a taste of what's possible. Davis, who sadly died last year, would undoubtedly urge us to hold on to the fear of Sacramento under water or hill towns below fire scars getting washed into the Pacific, to not forget, and act with respect for these powers by rezoning and not rebuilding in flood plains and steep coastal chaparral, but I suspect he would hardly be surprised at our failure to exercise such restraint.
  
  The chapter on catastrophe in fiction was particularly amazing. The quantity of racist invasion stories was astounding to me, not for their racism, necessarily, but just for their volume and redundancy. I wish Davis had also done something to guage the impact of all these works. Presumably they sold, given how many were published, but how did they do relative to other kinds of fiction? I'm sure you could produce a similarly damning list of vitriolic nonsense today, and I'm sure someone's reading it, but are a lot of people reading it? Is it influential?
  
  I'll stop. If you live in California you should read this book, and if you want a place to start, try
  "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn", which should be required before serving in municipal government in this state.
  
  Notes
  
  p. 15 tocsin (n): an alarm, supposedly derrived from Middle French for "touch a bell"
  
  p. 101 Richard Minnich: "Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never be arrested." As with so many problems, proximate causes are never more important than the context that allows them to do excessive damage.
  
  p. 127

  Beneath the flaming hills, the Pacific Coast Highway was paralyzed by a hopeless tangle of arriving fire trucks and fleeing Bentleys, Porsches, and Jeep Cherokees. Hundreds more trekked out on horseback, by bike, or on foot. A few escaped on roller blades. Three hundred sherfiff's deputies were brought in to guard against looting. The chaotic exodus was oddly equalizing: panicky movie stars, clutching their Oscars, mingled with frantic commoners. Confronted once again with its destiny as a fire coast, Malibu replied in the vernacular. "This is hell, dude," one resident told the Los Angeles Times.

  
  
  p. 128 He recounts an astounding story in the Malibu Times (that I can't verify b/c it's not online) about two housewives who fled the fire in kayaks with their dogs... and left their maids behind.
  
  p. 201 After Barbara Schoener was killed by a mountain lion in the Sierra foothills and the lion was also killed, a fund established to support the cub of the lion apparently raised
  more than twice as much money as a fund established to support Ms. Schoener's children.
  
  p. 205 Gary Snyder: "the wild is perhaps the very possibility of being eaten by a mountain lion." I feel that, but it's rooted in the 19th century European notions of the sublime, like so much of how we think about the non-human world.
  
  p. 206 He tries to claim that there are more mountain lions in LA than in Yellowstone.
  https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature... claims there are only 34-42 lions in Yellowstone... so that claim is probably accurate, at least at the county level.
  
  p. 234 Davis retells several amazing tales of predatorless prey run amok, one of deer on Mt. Hamilton that I'd love to learn more about, but another WAY more insane one about mice overrunning the town of Taft in the southern San Joaquin Valley, where mice clogged mechanical harvesters used against them and supposedly killed a sheep. Sadly this draws from a
  single source that isn't freely available.
  
  p. 250 this chronicle of rat- and ground squirrel-borne plague bears comparison to COVID. Plague got a lot of press and resulted in some
  extreme extermination campaigns, but deaths were in the low to mid triple digits, spread over 30 years, compared to 96,000 Californians dead from COVID in 2 years. From the perspective of our pandemic, or even the 1918 flu pandemic (
  29k Californians killed), this isn't exactly a disaster on par with quakes, fires, and floods. Still, it's not impossible that plague could jump from squirrels to people again. How would our favorite ecosystem engineers fare then?
• 
  Greg

  Mike Davis writes like he is gossiping with you in the corner of a diner. At the same time, he seems like that kid you grew up with who is always embellishing his stories. Although the gossip is good, you don't always know if you can believe that things are really that bad.
  
  I was ready to give this book 5 stars after the first few chapters on earthquakes, city development, and wildfires. But, the following chapters on tornadoes and literary tales of LA's destruction weren't very good. The chapter on tornadoes was too detailed and boring. In literary survey chapter, he seemed to be talking about the same book over-and-over. I think he could have woven the chapter on fiction into some of the other chapters to highlight some of the other disasters. The last chapter on violence was also pretty good.
• 
  Micah

  Absolutely wild book. I loved it.
• 
  David Wagner

  If you're interested in untangling the roots of Los Angeles' ongoing urban identity crisis, Ecology of Fear is a must-read. Davis convincingly argues that the city's defining feature is fear. Specifically, the constant fear of imminent natural disaster and the socioeconomic anarchy that follows in its wake.
  
  Davis summons copious charts and footnotes and yellowed news clippings to argue that L.A.'s unique brand of fear rests on a combustible environment, but is aggravated by terrible allocation of public space, unfettered development, unresolved class tensions, simmering racial animosities, and a gleefully apocalyptic 20th-century pop culture meme where L.A. gets destroyed over and over.
  
  The first handful of chapters deal with natural disasters (earthquakes, wildfires, tornados, man-eating cougars, etc.), and how L.A. has been lucky (?) to blossom during a period of relative tectonic and meteorological calm. These chapters also show that the natural disasters that have struck L.A. so far have had very unnatural outcomes due to race oppression and roughshod development.
  
  The last two chapters are less grounded in environmental science, and it seems like Davis cut loose and had a little more fun writing them. One surveys all the ways Los Angeles has been destroyed in fiction. My favorite chart in the book tallies all these eschatological ends, the most popular being nukes, another popular one being hordes of invaders, and at least one novel about L.A.'s death by "everything." The final chapter begins as a prescient debunking of Blade Runner and its vision of dystopian future L.A., with its impossibly tall skyscrapers and alien/human melting pot. Davis then goes on to map his vision of future L.A., which has more or less come to pass. He takes us on a journey from inner city to outer suburbs, stopping to describe the dominant fears in each zone and the countermeasures taken to contain them. Davis always expects the worst for L.A., but even he couldn't predict just how parasitic the prison system is on schools today.
  
  Ecology of Fear provided valuable context for a lot of the fears I've formed about Southern California, both while growing up in Anaheim and now as a quasi adult in San Diego. I remember kids at school getting news that their houses had burned down in a wildfire (often on live TV). I remember those terrifying mountain lion warning signs from Cub Scout hikes. I haven't lived through any Big One earthquakes yet, and dear god I hope I never do, considering how much the little ones freak me out. Davis' book helped me realize that these fears aren't just biological—they've been stamped into the terrain and made worse by very specific economic, cultural, and racial forces.
  
  If I have any complaint about the book, it's that Davis feeds the stereotype of Los Angeles as an exceptionally, singularly fucked up place. All cities sweep horrors under their historical rugs. L.A.'s rug might be lumpier than most, but I know it's not the only city covering up dirt. On the other hand, I can't fault Davis for limiting his scope. He's obviously knows L.A. very intimately, chewing through the subject like a termite. I got the sense that I could drive him to any intersection in the city and hear him unspool hours of atrocious stories that took place right at that crossroads.
  
  Ecology of Fear isn't the whole story of L.A., and it certainly isn't neutral. But it's thoroughly researched and written in an engaging voice that waffles between controlled outrage and dark, end-times humor. The next time I drive down to L.A. taking the South 5—that moment I come over the Grapevine and catch my first glimpse of that borderless Southern California sprawl—I know I'll better understand why I've always found that vista slightly spooky.
• 
  Anusha Datar

  This book tells the story of Los Angeles's relationship with the natural forces that surround it. To tell this story, Davis recounts historical events where natural disasters or phenomena shaped the development of the city and times where the built environment exacerbated or mitigated the consequences of natural disaster for some citizens (and distinctly, not for others). Then, he summarizes various fictional accounts of the destruction of Los Angeles (and speculation around its future) to solidify his argument that LA is a city defined by its fear (and ignorance, and romanticizing) of disaster.
  
  I found this book interesting and well-researched, but the sheer density of the book also made it tedious to get through. This was especially true in the later chapters, where it felt more as though Davis was cataloging a huge set of stories instead of focusing on synthesizing what their implications are. Also, this is not Davis's fault, but this book was published over twenty years ago, so what may have felt like bolder claims about the volatility of California's weather feel truer than ever, and I would love to read this book from a 2022 perspective. That being said, I did enjoy this book, and I would certainly recommend at least the first couple of chapters to anyone interested in the relationship between the environments we build and the environments we build them in.
  
  
• 
  Mesha

  There's too many spot on lines to possibly narrow down a quote... Such a fascinating read! Who would have thought that Cali is a hot spot for tornadoes, urban fires, wildlife attacks, and hidden pools of Plague?!? To name a few. For anyone who loves history, hazards, and disaster media, this is a book for you.
• 
  Grandpa

  Los Angeles and southern California is undoubtedly the United States capitol for possible disasters. The author walks us through the litany of disasters that have already occurred: earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, floods, droughts, urban-wild interface, and social disintegration. The author also includes a 'goldmine' of literary catastrophe and dystopian novels if that is your type of reading. Although this book was published in 1998, I have to believe that 24 years later it cannot be considered outdated, and that the list of disasters discussed by the author has only grown. This book was one of my late son's college textbooks that I came across while sorting books in his room. The book just happens to be one of the titles cited in the 2020 book, Perilous Bounty by Tom Philpott.
• 
  brian

  really like city or quartz by davis, but this one was just so-so.
• 
  Ella Donnelly-Wright

  Very dense, I found myself putting this book down for several weeks and revisiting it. There is a lot of information presented the reader that the author assumes the reader will remember later on, however I found myself having to go back and forth frequently to understand these references. Overall I still found it to be interesting and shed light on the interesting phenomenon of natural disasters in Los Angeles.
• 
  Brent Turner

  I picked this book up at a store in Coronado when I was out in California on a work trip. I've been interested in learning more about the people and the different cultural regions of that state that occupies such a an important place in the American psyche.
  
  But that's not what I learned. This book is over 400 pages of detailed descriptions of catastrophic California: fault lines; tornadoes; wind storms; mudslides; flash floods; wildfires. I think there was a chapter on tsunami danger as well. California has volatile weather. If you'd like to learn more about the specific events that make the previous sentence a reasonable statement, open this book up.
  
  "The first fatality was a Nisei farmer named Hega who was working in his garden in the Bandini area. Struck directly in the face by a bolt of lightning, he burst into flames in full view of his appalled and horrified neighbors."
• 
  Zach

  Davis, I think, is the closest thing we have today to the early 20th century's crazed and bearded socialist ranting and handing out mimeographed broadsides on a street corner. In this book, perhaps the most apocalyptic of all his works (although, given the number of books he's written, maybe not, I don't know), he exposes the various ways that LA is, basically, an affront to nature that simply will not stand. And then, after tracing all the REAL ways that nature has tried to destroy LA (earthquakes, fire, tornadoes, mountain lions, bees, etc), he goes on to examine every book and movie he can find where a fictional destruction of the city is presented. And then, as if all that wasn't enough, he tells us about how the real development and future of LA is a much more depressing thing than the "dystopian" view of the future city presented in Blade Runner.
  
  Of course, reading this more than halfway convinces you that:
  
  a) There is no chance that the city will survive for any length of time... although it has certainly continued to do so in the 10+ years since this book was published (albeit with continuing wildfires and the nigh-total collapse of the state of California). Of course, Davis is just using this ecological apocalypticism to riff on the social/economic disasters of class inequality and American decadence and racial strife (speaking of which, I'm not entirely convinced by his argument that post-apocalyptic fiction is, at root, obsessed with race war, but more on that later).
  
  b) LA is the most special, unique place in the world. I always thought that was NYC, didn't you?
  
  
  
  Anyway as always with Davis, this is funny and depressing and insightful and makes an eloquent case for the world of capitalist modernity being DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED.
• 
  Abigail

  "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" was assigned reading for one of my classes several years ago and I remember reading the printout while riding in the back of the car on the return portion of a family trip to Death Valley (to see the wildflowers).
  
  I was fascinated. I think I may have even read some key points out loud to the rest of the family. I meant to find the book it was from and read the whole thing. ...which didn't happen. (My stack of "things to read" only ever seems to grow, no matter how much I do read.) Somehow it didn't even make it onto my list of books I want to get hold of.
  
  This past July my buddy Julian/Mitya came up for a camping trip and the book he finished on the train was this one. And he raved, "This is excellent! You should read it!"
  
  And I was like, "I read a chapter years ago and want to read the rest of it!"
  
  And Julian was all, "Here! You may borrow it!"
  
  So I did. And it was indeed excellent. And I recommend it to others.
  
  It's a little bit dated (published in 1998) but there is a lot that's still relevant to today, especially in a "Cadillac Desert" sense. (Also recommended, by the way.) That being understanding the complex history and motivations helps in understanding how we got into such a mess.
  
  An update on some of the chapters in the book that incorporate the past decade would be fascinating.
• 
  Sean

  A wild-eyed book about the apocalypse that is Los Angeles. From fires to earthquakes to tornadoes (strange but true!) to mountain lions to terminators, Davis covers every real and imagined way LA is doomed to die, and the ways in which Angelenos have invited this destruction through greedy and ignorant city planning. Chapters on why Malibu should be allowed to burn and the endless battle against wildlife are the most fascinating.
  
  He gets overly polemical at times. His arguments don't always hold water. And whenever anyone starts concocting elaborate social arguments about why Hollywood has made certain movies, I always find myself thinking, "Are you sure the studios weren't just trying to make a buck?"
  
  The book is about ten years out of date, and suffers a little bit for that, but it was still an interesting and unusual read. Anyone living in LA should check it out.
• 
  Michael Andersen-Andrade

  This book illustrates what I've always thought of Los Angeles. It's an an ugly and poorly planned city--if one can call much of that sprawl a real city--that sits in a zone that is highly unsuitable for a large metropolis. Earthquakes, drought, tornadoes and other calamities all threaten to turn the L.A. basin into a real Universal Studios disaster movie. The ecology of Southern California has been raped and pillaged since Europeans first arrived to the present day. While very well researched, I found some of the book slow moving and the chapter on fictional disasters was unnecessary. Overall, though, it gives a good argument as to why Los Angeles should never have evolved into the giant urban blob that it is today. I made my own escape from L.A. after living there for five years in my teens, and I've never looked back.
• 
  John

  This is an interesting, but not great, book. I read it because my library didn't have a copy of _City of Quartz_. It is a dissection of Southern Californian fears, from fires, earthquakes, and floods to crime to racial demons. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in here (Los Angeles has more tornadoes than Oklahoma City!), but my favorite chapter concerns the literary and filmic destruction of LA. It is occasionally humorous, but I found the history of the popular depiction of racial wars very disturbing - have some of us come nowhere in the last century? I'll finish by noting that many people say that this book is a work of fiction, not history. Had I known that going in, I might not have read it. True or not, Davis' biases are evident.
• 
  Rosalie Ray

  Not as good as City of Quartz, his earlier book. The early chapters did a good job of adding the ecological layer to the older book's discussion of the geographies of class and race in L.A., but as he moved down the litany of disasters available to cause apocalypse in L.A. the tone shifted from critical analysis to sensationalism, only somewhat redeemed by an uneven final discussion of the concentric city model redefined for the new L.A.
• 
  Mason

  Fascinating, leftist journalistic look at natural disaster in Southern California. Of particular interest in the chapter on the destruction of Los Angeles in film and fiction. A representative sentence: "Post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, overrun by terminators, androids, and gangs, has become as much a cliché as Marlowe’s mean streets or Gidget’s beach party."
• 
  Jason

  Another gem from Mr. Calamitous. Davis seems to enjoy cataclysm and apocalypse, especially when it strikes those moronic enough to build their house in a tinder box like Malibu. I tend to agree with him. You can't escape. You're either gonna die from a tornado or from Killer Bees. Watch your back.
• 
  Ann

  I keep this book on my shelf to read again because the history of LA fascinates me. Davis gives an environmental and political history of LA by way of both natural and man-made disasters: earthquakes, floods, housing, recessions, coyotes, mountain lions, the list goes on.
• 
  Steven

  Book about how LA was going to be a disaster area no matter what. Talks about Mulholland, and hurricanes, and earthquakes, and mountain lions and coyotes.
  
  Again, Davis has his detractors, and this book does have a "sky is falling" kind of feel. But it made me view LA through a new lens.
• 
  Jason

  #7