Ecology of Fear is not just about natural disasters but the disaster of culture, hate crimes being the logical climax: Tina Roxanne Rodriguez (1993), Ruben Vaughn, Jody Robinson, Vernon Flournoy, Rodd Jackson (1994), Mike Robinson (1995), Thien Minh Lu, George Mondragon, Jerry Jordan (1996).

Disaster is in the SoCal ground; it's in the imaginations of the artists who work here (Ironically, Davis misses that Birth of a Nation was filmed in SoCal). Davis notes, "An arroyo differs from a glen or hollow in that episodic storms form them and they are studied by 'cusp catastrophe' models" (11). Of course there are earthquakes and fires to catalog, but tornadoes?! Yes. Rolling up past the Pacific Palisades into downtown and up into the San Gabriel Valley.

Ultimately, location becomes about class. For example, Davis notes that after one earthquake, it Beverly Hills residents received 1,400 FEMA grants (48). Meanwhile, over 4,000 applications for SNA loans are rejected in The Crenshaw district because of lack of savings for collateral (51). When speaking about the deadly flea-bearing rats, Davis uses a flourish of alliteration: "Because of congestion in poor neighborhoods, plagues have often become pogroms" (249).

One omission from Davis' extensive survey of California as a setting for disaster is John Fante's Ask the Dust, made all the more supportive of Davis' thesis by Robert Towne's adaptation in 2006.

Ecology of Fear blends literary criticism with other types of non-fiction, making a leap into the SoCal psyche and trying to land us in the dark, scary spot.

Mike Davis everyone! You are guided by an expert through the ecology of LA and the bigger questions of fear in LA. Davis confronts the ugliness of our urban identity and its racial tensions, class inequality, and ecological disasters.

For anyone who is looking to think more critically about LA and also read about the 1990s predication of LAs future (spoiler alert, alarmingly accurate)

Started out compelling, but lost momentum for me in the “literary destruction” section.

It has been over 15 years since I read this book in college and key points have stayed with me. Whenever I read or hear of a fire, earthquake, or natural disasters in Los Angeles it points back to the key elements regarding the poor choices humans have made when building and expanding this city.

Fascinating, albeit a partial read. Davis's writing reminds me very much of John McFee, and/or Joan Didion.

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."

Every Californian needs to read this book. Fascinating and well-researched. Scary stuff we need to understand!

I'm glad I waited to read this until after I left Los Angeles, otherwise I probably wouldn't have been able to sleep at night...

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.

Nostalgia is a real treat. Through the pains and hardships of everyday life, there are still some names that when ringing through our ears inspire a smile from better times. We may not have met this person; visited this place; or even lived at that time, and yet we can still get that shot of bliss to contrast against whatever “ughships” we may be facing.

True, this is a corny way to start a review, but I suspect my nostalgic feelings towards the author are not dissimilar to popular conceptions of place driving much of this disaster hysteria.

Mike Davis is an author I encountered a few times throughout my Undergrad Human Geo courses, primarily for his “Planet of Slums” and interesting article titled: “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”. His sardonic style, approachable prose, and unmatched topical matter easily cemented him as a classic of my human geo canon, with me (and several scholars) considering him to be the major scholar of the Los Angeles school of urbanism.

So you can imagine my joy at seeing his name at a used bookstore. I purchased the book days before his recent tragic passing. Having learnt of the loss, I quickly moved this book to the top of my reading queue to honor his memory.

And man, was there a lot to honor.

Theoretically, in the year 2022, a book compiling the natural disaster complex of LA should not be full of shocks. It’s been “trendy” for decades now to shit on the postindustrial metropolises of yesteryear, the old suburban orders begging for a spoonful of gentrification to clear their blights. The Clevelands begging to have a shot of being Columbus, the Milwaukees seething at the success of the smarty-pants Madisons, and the LAs writhing under the salience of their younger/prettier brothers San FranJose.

Discursively, LA fits in with this crowd of “losing cities” rusting away in Richard Florida’s rubbish bin, but the question is why?

LA is the 2nd largest city in the US, one of the largest in North America, and a pretty major city on the world stage. It is the largest county in the US (by far), the center of one of the world’s largest economies, and nowadays a major port of entry for our constantly reconfiguring globalizing economy. LA is not bleeding population like it’s Midwestern cousins, LA is not without a dominant industry (Hollywood has yet to return to Hoboken), and LA is not without growth centers (the Inland Empire (who for the sake of Davis’s definition is being lumped with LA) has yet to halt its imperial ambitions).

These questions may seem irrelevant to this review, but I am trying to give the reader a sense of the broader issues Davis is wrestling with here. It would be a mistake to read this book solely as an encyclopedia of LAtastrophes (though if one wishes to do this, they can, and will still be very pleased with the results). Davis discusses too much history, political developments, social movements, ideologies, scientific definitions, and literary oddities for this to be purely an assessment of natural disasters….. right? Well, maybe the two aren’t all that separate.

Natural disasters are a universal phenomenon. Anyone who has been a community long enough will develop an individual and collective memory of a shared disaster/trauma regardless of the nature/intensity of the incident. These catastrophes are the bread and butter of local media and some of the key driving forces behind local histories. We discuss these events as exceptions of our local regimes because of their extreme nature.

And yet, after going through 400 pages of unimaginable LAtastrophes (I will give brief highlights later, but rly the reader should discover these for themselves), it is hard to continue imagining these events as exceptional. Sure, it might be possible that LA really is at the confluence of the most violent natural geographies imaginable for a major metropolitan area, and Davis does provide the exceptional statistics to at least somewhat support this hypothesis. However, there is a likelier explanation, backed-up by the historic power-holders, Davis subtly provides throughout the text: the natural disasters are not exceptional to Los Angeles, they are a built-in feature.

This is certainly more evident in certain LAtastrophes over others, but the way every disaster is handled/reported shows an underlying trend of complacency and subversion. The whole-scale manipulation of SoCal’s fragile chaparral ecosystem, combined with climate change and an endless supply of combustible material has expanded the size and strength of pyrogeographies across the region. Though authorities constantly attempt to blame such fires on the lone arsonist, the historical record is clear on both the precedent for wildfires and the exceptional nature of recent fires. The natural and artificial aspects are not ones to be separated, they interact with one another to produce a terrible hellscape. It’s even worse with the maneaters of LA, unnatural predators humans have cultivated/preserved to feast on unsuspecting humans. The fact that most people (myself included!) was unaware LA even could have a tornado, let alone a tornado alley(!), testifies to the strength of local boosters in promoting a vision of LA that though not disaster free (earthquakes are pretty tough to cover up), is certainly free from the disasters where you (typically, an unsuspecting Midwesterner) are from.

The difficulties of setting aside the natural aspects of these phenomena (Davis provides a sufficient amount of scientific facts to establish that all these problems indeed existed in the LA region prior to urbanization) from the artificial boosters (primarily poor urban design, greedy land grabbing capitalists, and an unfathomable level of official denial/non-responses) highlights an even more fundamental point brought up midway into Davis’ book: the follies of separating man from nature. This dichotomy, an oft-discussed topic of environmental geography, attempts to place people/society in an exceptional light immune to the grotesque aspects of unfettered “wilderness” (I use the cringy term purely to highlight the opposition’s point). What Davis is warning us here is that by maintaining this divide, we must accept that natural disasters are always exceptional events and their severity/frequency are simply the results of some force overtly punishing us, perhaps for aspects of society we are less proud of. Davis’ chapter on the various literary destructions of LA masterfully highlight the alarming bevy of views sympathetic to this local masochism.

But these disasters are only wholly natural to the extent that we accept our society and it’s choices as natural. Regardless of where you draw your definitions, we must accept that our policies can and do affect how we experience natural disasters. The purely exceptional status we afford to them only reinforces the status quo of local regimes, which almost always tilt towards increased severity of disasters. Yea, things are not just getting worse because people are awful, in fact adopting such an overly cynical view only precludes any collective action that may reduce the severity of these incidents.

This book is a treasure trope of urban/environmental geographies, and the points I highlighted are only some of the many Davis makes throughout the work. Like any good author, Mike (can I call him Mike?) forces the reader to ponder questions they didn’t have before going into the work about subjects they couldn’t imagine to be related to the title. Do not be fooled, this is indeed a fantastic book for anyone wanting to learn about LA (and it’s hinterlands) and/or urban scale natural disasters, no prerequisites required! The pages flow smoothly, the prose is very ideal, the tone is witty and sardonic, the chapters are well organized and distinct from one another, and the material comes from all over the historical record. Though a not-insignificant amount of discussion is devoted to Mike’s present of the mid-90s post Northridge neoliberal regime, I would still consider the work to be timeless for any discussion of natural disasters and/or cities.

Additionally, there are tons of little things this book does surprisingly well. This may be the best use of footnotes I have seen from a book, I genuinely felt empowered after reading each one of them. Also, for only having access to 90s-era mapping tools, Mike’s got some of the nicest maps I’ve seen from an academic work. They are aesthetically consistent with the material, placed in a decent interval, and effectively highlight the geographies liberally referenced throughout the book. Mike also has a bevy of photos/other media that really help ground the reader in the subject’s sensibilities.

And for those who like minor references to the historically absurd, this is your book. I kept a list of all the neat “Google laters” Mike generously provides the reader, and it’s got some pretty wack names.

Finally, the diagram of the post-modern Burgess model is simply stunning. Like, desktop background level of stunning.

Overall, this is not just a phenomenal 5-star read, but one that really makes you rethink how you think about the subject matter. Having reached the end I am eager to excavate Mike’s other works, and understand how his teachings influenced one of my other favorite writers, Juan de Lara (Davis’ protege), to write one of my favorite works: “Inland Shift”. Mike, Rest In Peace and Power. A legendary geographer of the likes of Doreen Massey and David Harvey.

So what are you waiting for? Go find out why we absolutely should let Malibu burn!

Mildly interesting. This book was published in 1998 and got a lot of press at the time; its fear-mongering about the "end times" predicted for the greater Los Angeles area may have been especially timely with Y2K in sight. That said, its most interesting passages aren't the ones endlessly cataloguing fictional and real-life disasters in LA...they're the ones about the history of LA, and how developer/politician greed during its boom times 1940-1970 set the city up for one of the worst urban-planning situations in a major American metropolis. LA's poor planning is what's created its now-legendary traffic jams.

But the book loses steam when it gets to the fiction stuff. Davis obviously had fun reading the seamy paperbacks and watching the endless B-movies about LA's destruction...but I'm not sure how it fits his overall message. The book started with what seemed to be a warning, but Davis seems mostly interested in cataloguing drama; not in offering any particular solutions or prescriptions.

An intriguing read that switches from whimsical to dark and foreboding at the turn of a page. The last third of the book is quite dark, given it was published in 1998, years before 9/11, Citizens United, Trumpism, almost daily mass shootings, George Floyd's murder, and the COVID pandemic.

Perhaps, the book was foretelling? It is said that "as California goes, so goes the nation." Well, the "Ecology of Fear" that germinated in Greater Los Angeles is certainly a national epidemic today.

Having visited LA multiple times in the past year, I would like to say that I feel more hopeful given the many positive experiences we've had there. But, when the headlines are filled with mass shootings and murders, climate disasters and manmade chemical accidents, I begin to think I'm just being naive.

The thing is, if we aren't at least hopeful for the future, then we've already resigned ourselves to the "Ecology of Fear." And that (losing all hope) would be the greatest disaster of them all.