The issue that lies beneath the surface is: Who is allowed to portray LA? The Times and the downtown developers prefer Kevin Starr, the state librarian and upbeat historian of California, who has been quoted more than once recommending that Davis "wake up" and "smell the roses." The Economist complained that Davis neglected the city's "flowering of public spaces," while the Downtown News criticized him for failing to praise the city's economic recovery after the military cutbacks of the early nineties.

It's not unfair to call Mike Davis's work "dark," and for those who live on the sunny side of the street in Southern California, the boosters' picture may be an accurate expression of their own experience. But as Davis reminded me, 4 million Latinos now live in Los Angeles, and they didn't come for the sun:The State of California spends $5 billion a year on prisons, and Los Angeles County has 725,000 people on welfare who have been written off. Davis never denies that LA's winners have indeed won very big. It's his presentation of the experience of the rest of the city's people that the boosters seek to erase.

At least one of Davis's critics admits that this portrayal is accurate. Of Salon's three attacks on the book, one was written by D.J. Waldie, the author of a wonderful book on the LA suburb of Lakewood. Although Waldie dislikes Ecology of Fear intensely, he agreed that its most important claims about LA are true: It was indeed "the most segregated big city in the nation" from 1900 to 1970; it did have "the most destructive civil disturbances in the nation's modern history" in 1965 and 1992; "L.A.'s social landscape was deliberately made a mechanism for sorting communities by race, class and income more rigorously than in any other American big city"; Davis's "criticisms of hillside development in Malibu [and] earthquake failure downtown...are true." Waldie rejects the book only because it is "so hopeless" about the prospects for improvement and reform.

Even if the critics are right that LA's economy has recovered and its crime rate has dropped over the past few years, that doesn't disprove the central thesis of Ecology of Fear, which is a more original and significant work than its critics acknowledge. (Interest declared: One of my books was published in a series co-edited by Davis, and I am listed in the acknowledgments of Ecology of Fear.) The book is far more than a "gloomy" or "hopeless" account of the inequalities of wealth and power in LA today. It looks at the city in terms of its long environmental history--history measured not in decades or centuries but in thousands of years. Davis is bringing to a broad public the findings of scientists who have concluded that, for the past few hundred years, LA has been in a relatively quiet period of earthquake activity (a "seismic siesta"), as well as a relatively wet one in terms of rainfall. Scientists are concerned that the long-term pattern suggests much bigger and more frequent earthquakes in the future, as well as much longer and more devastating periods of drought--lasting possibly for decades.

Davis's critics have avoided those fundamental arguments, and it's not hard to see why. "For a nonscientist, Davis has done an excellent job of synthesizing the state of the field," says Lisa Grant, who teaches earthquake science at UC Irvine. "I was impressed by his chapter [on earthquakes]. He has the right sources, and I didn't find any inaccuracies in the footnotes." Richard Walker, chairman of the geography department at UC Berkeley, agrees: "Most of what Mike is saying is completely accepted wisdom among scholars who work in the area of environmental hazards.... Extreme events, so-called natural disasters, are predictable, inevitable and inevitably made worse by human activity. The character of human activity is absolutely critical to the human losses."

A responsible society would address environmental dangers, Davis argues. Yet the people who control the development of Los Angeles are ignoring them. By promoting high-rise, high-density development, they are creating the potential for immense harm to the millions of ordinary working people who live in the city. Ecology of Fear is intended as part of a dialogue between social justice advocates and environmentalists, and as an undisguised polemic for the city to abandon its reckless pattern of development. The way Davis makes that argument is his real contribution. But on every one of those issues so vital to the city's future his critics have been strangely silent.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.