Mike Davis - Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster

I started to read Ecology of Fear in the aftermath of the recent LA uprising. In part that was because one of the first great such urban risings I remember was when, around the time I became an active socialist, LA rose up in 1992. What is it about the city that makes it such a place of resistance, and a place hated by the US right? Mike Davis' classic book has the answers. 

For Davis, Los Angeles is a city whose location in time and space places it at the epicentre of disaster, and that disaster is made worse by the history of the city, and the history of America. It is a city of gross inequality, racism and cheap labour, and a city smack squarely at the epicentre of disaster. This is why it is, as he systematically documents, a city that has been destroyed in film, literature and comic book hundreds of times, and why that destruction is often covered with a veneer of white supremacy and genocide. It it is so called "natural" disaster that takes up the first chapters, the threat from earthquake, tornado and firestorm, then Davis systematically shows how those disasters are amplified by the reality of capitalist LA:

Megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather they will stagger on, with higher body counts and gretaer distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region's high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents. Aficionados of complexity theory will marvel at the "nonlinear resonances" of unnatural disaster and social breakdown as Southern California's golden age is superseded forever by a chaotic new world of strange attractors.

While we have long known that "natural" disasters hit poor and marginalised communities first and hardest, Davis' eloquent writing reminds us of how it is the fissures and fractures in capitalist society that creates this reality. 

In the provocatively titled chapter, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, Davis discusses the war that wildfires and their particular threat to the City, arise from a juxtaposition of location and capitalist planning. Putting profits before people meant making decisions that simultaneously worsened the risk of disaster, and turned the city into an unhealthy and concentrated urban area:

The 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Only a few months before... Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr - the nation's foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system - had come out in favour of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain areas... Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936 and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes... public officials stubbornly disregarded the wisdom of Olmsted's proposal.

Almost a century later the homes of this land, now the preserve of the rich and famous, burn over and over again.

The interaction between nature, society and capitalist interests is the great theme of this book, and it's Davis' genius that ensures that the reader never forgets the human cost. But also places the very real story of exploitation and oppression within that wider narrative. Here are the stories of immigrant workers, paid starvation wages, victims of the poorest housing in the most dangerous areas, fighting and organising to improve things, and the callous politicians, city officals and greedy landlords opposing them. But it is also a city bedeviled by official racism and a far-right confident to organise within the space:

According to the Los Angeles Count Commission on Human Relations, attacks on blacks increased 50 percent from 1995 to 1966. Los Angeles became the nation's capital of racisl (539 crimes) and sexual orienation (338 crimes) violence... The commission's annual report also noted that racially motivated crimes had been clearly clustered in older suburban areas... as well as in the economically troubled Antelope Valley. Although the human relations commissioners cautioned that the report "does not say it has become open season on African Americans," the dramatic surge in attacks on blacks suggested otherwise.

While LA has a special place in Mike Davis' heart, the interaction of racism, class, nature and capitalism described in Ecology of Fear could stand in for any number of urban US environments. The history helps us understand the roots of the LA rebellions of 1992 and 2025, and the further resistance. As well as the hatred that the US elite have for the city and its population. It is the book that explains the real background to today's ICE raids and racism, and Trump's military occupation of the city.

Long before many others had even stopped to think about the interaction of these forces in the urban environment, Mike Davis was writing about how global warming would exacerbate the tensions of capitalism. But it is his love of the city, its people and his superb dialectical politics that make this book one to come back to time and again. Its renewed my desire to read his other works on California and US radical history - that's probably the best endorsement the book could have.

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