WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

Twenty-five years after the publication of Ecology of Fear, the book feels as vital as ever. Where Mike Davis wrote about the record-breaking fires, floods, and economic costs of disaster in southern California in the 1990s, these numbers have since been dwarfed as climate-change-induced catastrophes multiply alongside the ever-accelerating pace of development in the region.

As we consider the “intolerableness of existence” and look for “possibilities of living” in a world of expanding crises, as this special issue does, we gain useful insights returning to the words of the “prophet of doom.” Davis, who exited this burning planet in 2022, continually provoked readers to see the world from a different vantage. His writing, too, remains with the reader as he captures the deep contradictions of our unequal and crisis- ridden society.

The opening chapter of Ecology of Fear, “The Dialectic of Ordinary Disaster,” counters the “paranoia about nature” that usually pits humans against the natural environment and, as Davis explains, “distracts attention from the obvious fact that Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm’s way” (9). Of course, Los Angeles as a city has no such agency, but Davis is pushing us to see the ways that those who control the city, business and government in particular, have foisted market-driven urbanization on the population over environmental common sense. Davis puts the social and environmental together, relentless in his goal of showing us the social construction of environmental disasters.

On the particularities of Los Angeles and its surroundings, Davis starts by showing us the essentials of the landscape, including its Mediterranean climate. He engages scientific journals, reads the landscape itself, and pores [End Page 235] over a hundred years of fiction based in the metropolis. The plethora of sources provides the reader of Ecology of Fear with a scientific understanding of both the landscape as well as how it has been popularly portrayed to an ever-eager audience. Through a robust discussion of interdisciplinary sources, Davis astutely portrays Los Angeles as a dynamic environment, ecologically misunderstood, exploited for unseemly amounts of wealth creation, and thus a zone of intense inequality. His unforgettable description of the city is one of “a revolutionary, not a reformist landscape. It is Walden Pond on LSD” (16).

Davis notes that Indigenous knowledge, an understanding of ecological time that takes into consideration ways of living with the land and the climate, was systematically destroyed in favor of the settler-colonial logic of monetizing the landscape. The “single, fatal flaw” of urban planning in southern California is drawing on a disaster record over a shortened time-scale, an anomaly of relative stability in a region that fluctuates between extremes of drought and rain, fires and floods (35). In order to deal with such extremes, urban planning would require that large zones be left undeveloped, in particular areas that burn naturally and periodically. It would require the same around rivers, streams, and arroyos, where water almost never hits its average height but rather, when tremendous amounts of rain fall over short periods of time, surges to several hundred times its common low level. It would require planning with concern for human well-being and with an understanding of ecological relationships.

At its best, Ecology of Fear captures “a lost future,” another path that might have been taken had the interests of the real estate developers, corrupt politicians, and business been rejected (67–68). While embracing Indigenous knowledge and practices was spurned early on in colonized California, the attempt for a ring of Frederick Law Olmstead–designed parks and greenbelts offered an opportunity that would have kept wildlife corridors intact, allowed for flood events that could be absorbed by the landscape instead of wiping out homes, and created spaces for working-class leisure and a healthier city. Those plans were torched in the 1930s in the interest of development and suburbanization as a means for wealth accumulation for the few.

This story is most clear in chapter 3, Davis’s now-classic “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” Here, Davis expertly shows the concrete ways that poor people subsidize the...