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.

The chapter on the perennial fires in Malibu and the overkill efforts to protect an enclave that probably shouldn't exist has only gained strength since this book's publication in 1998. Most of the rest (wildlife, riots, lack of green space, and apocalyptic fiction and movies) is pretty good, if gleefully negative. It's still hard to trust his Tornado Alley chapter, though.

"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.

During the news coverage of the Los Angeles fires a few weeks ago, I saw several references to Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis’ seminal history of Southern California. Re-reading it for the first time in over a decade, I was struck by what Davis foresaw and what he missed when writing about Los Angeles in the 1990s.

Ecology of Fear presents a simple problem: how did Los Angeles transform from a city uniquely resistant to natural disasters to one defined by them? Davis suggests that it was human choices about how to develop and privatize Los Angeles and its surrounding environs that made the city vulnerable to a host of disasters ranging from earthquakes to tornadoes and, of course, fires. He is persuasive in showing how real estate development, particularly for the most affluent Angelinos, increased the danger of natural disasters, while those same developers imported unrealistic standards of safety into the region. Furthermore, Davis reminds readers that it is often the poorest and most vulnerable residents who actually suffer the most harm from these disasters even though their plight rarely receives attention from the national news media.

But what is striking about Ecology of Fear is also what Davis misses. For him, these disasters are driving LA to ruin. He foresees a world where businesses and affluent residents flee sunny Southern California for the less glamorous, but more stable, climes of NorCal and the Pacific Northwest. He is also credulous in buying into several of the moral and media created panics of his day, including killer bees (remember them?), the rise of super gangs, and conquest of the city by the urban poor. Davis largely misses climate change and gentrification even though they would have fit neatly into his argument.

Ecology of Fear is a brilliant book, but it is not a crystal ball. Davis is a talented historian and his understanding of class struggle in America has not been surpassed, but he is also not Nostradamus.

A thorough materialist reading of the ecological and imaginative history of disaster in L.A. that clearly identifies the city's unique "ecology of fear" as being founded in profit-driven city planning and resource allocation amidst huge population growth mixed with the racial and economic conflicts of the city. Davis is an engaging prose writer, and I had to take a break a couple of times from the book due to the visceral nature of his descriptions of some of the human and nonhuman disasters and their effects on the residents of L.A. His sojourn into cultural criticism to close the book provides the theoretical lens that helps explain his early analyses of L.A.'s ecological history: the material reality of Los Angeles' disasters are exacerbated by the social and economic structures of the city, and its role as the center of disaster imagination in the United States is informed by deep racial tensions inflected through those structures. Another thoroughly materialist, highly specific analysis in the vein of Walter Rodney, although not quite on the same level.

rip Mike but definitely his worst book. malibu essay fantastic ofc but mostly everything else is a slog, especially if you have some background in social ecology

Yeah obviously we’re fucked

Very good. But not one of Davis's best or classics. Sometimes his penchant for strong language turns into outright exaggeration, such as his claims about wildcats and the threat they pose to Los Angeles. But, if you've read all that he wrote and are pining for more, I recommend picking this up. Helps if you've spent any time in the American Southwest.

Incredible depth of research and breadth of environmental history, city, county, state, and national politics, economics, and ecology, Mike Davis somehow understands the interactions of it all. I learned more about the development of Southern California than I could possibly know what to do with. I found the sections on edge cities and the pattern of "white flight" experienced by city centers in the 60s and 70s extending to the original suburbs fascinating. It helped clarify a lot of what I didn't understand about the response in Southern California earlier this year to the uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd, and really gave context for the proliferation of neo-nazis in Southern California.

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.

Profound Wake-up call.

'The Case for Letting Malibu Burn' is masterful. The other chapters range from good to great.