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'The Ecology Of Fear' by Mike Davis

Possibilities for catastrophe are all they’re cracked up to be

Sunday, August 16, 1998

By Bob Hoover, Book Editor, Post-Gazette

	The Ecology Of Fear By Mike Davis Metropolitan Books $27.50

Anyone visiting Los Angeles in the spring of 1994 must have felt some uneasiness. Still in shock after the January earthquake, the damaged city resembled the sets from disaster films.

The freeways were chaotic because of crumbled ramps and missing sections. Buildings were unrepaired or abandoned. Memories of the ’92 riots after the Rodney King debacle hung over the brown, dry landscape like the brown smog.

More was to follow shortly, from the O.J. Simpson episode to fires, mud slides and other woes.

It’s easy to feel anxious in this creepy town with its reputation for psychos and disasters natural and manmade. L.A. has given us one horror show after the other, and they weren’t all filmed in Hollywood.

Mike Davis is a Southern Californian who is drawn to L.A. like a pyromaniac is drawn to a house fire. His 1990 study of L.A.’s culture, “City of Quartz,” was a best seller, and later it brought Davis a $315,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.

Between stints teaching urban theory at Southern California Institute of Architecture and driving delivery trucks, Davis has written another quirky book on the city where the concept of “noir” was born.

“Southern California, in the most profound sense, is suffering a crisis of identity,” is Davis’ argument in this book, subtitled “Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.”

Once the mecca for millions of Americans seeking a better way of life, the region is reeling from one disaster after another, creating a huge exodus in residents since 1989. More than a half-million deserted Southern California by 1995, most of them middle-class.

The result, writes Davis, was an “astonishing” 20 percent drop in the area’s median income.

Who could blame them? From its climactic extremes to its powder-keg social structure, this area of more than 4 million people is spoiling for catastrophe, and Davis painstakingly shows the many ways it could occur.

Geographically, “Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm’s way,” writes Davis in several chapters detailing the various threats from weather: tornadoes, brush fires, extremes of rain and drought, and the best-known, earthquakes.

Forget the San Andreas fault, says Davis, because newly discovered “thrust faults” stretching in every direction beneath L.A., coupled with shoddy construction, pose a multibillion-dollar catastrophe so large it will cripple the federal budget.

The ’94 Northridge quake resulted in $42 million in damages and relief costs and 72 deaths, yet business pressures blocked tougher building standards. A quake under L.A. would dwarf the Northridge one in casualties and damages.Davis makes no apology for his left-wing politics as he cites example after example of how L.A.’s underclass of blacks, Latinos and Asians have suffered under the white conservative power structure.

Examples include the constant fire dangers in L.A.’s tenements, some of them more than 60 years old, which are routinely neglected in the face of slumlord influence. When Davis marshals hard facts and figures to support his thesis, “Ecology of Fear” is a scary book, but when he makes assumptions based on a few scientists’ concerns, it’s easy to imagine that he’s pushing a little too hard to be Chicken Little.

A chapter on tornadoes lacks convincing evidence that the “Hollywood” sign will be airborne soon as does one on the “man-eaters of the Sierra Madre” — wild animals that threaten the always-encroaching humans.

“The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles” adds a few little-known books and films to the growing pile of disaster entertainment which the city seems to inspire, but Davis redeems himself in the closing section, “Beyond ‘Blade Runner.’ ”

In it, he raises an issue which is more frightening than a big quake — the specter of class warfare, with the signs mounting in what he calls the “relegitimation of public racism.”

Pacing this social breakdown is the decline of older, middle-class suburbs and the growth of “edge cities” — white enclaves, often gated and patroled by rent-a-cops, which grab the share of government aid and send a horde of Newt Gingrich followers to Congress.

Hate crimes against various minorities, including Asians, are mounting in the face of law-enforcement indifference and perhaps even sympathy, Davis suggests, calling LA the “hate-crime capital” of the nation.

Davis saves his best horror story for last — the California prison system.

The state now operates the third largest penal system in world, behind China and the United States. Filling the prisons are tougher penalties, including the “three-strike” rule. New ones are passed in every session of a state legislature whose members are in a “rush to put their names at the top of new, anticrime measures, while ignoring the progressive imbalance between the numbers of felons sentenced to prison and the existing capacity of the Department of Corrections facilities.”

When told that longer sentences will cause a 262 percent increase in the number of prisoners by 2005, hard-line Gov. Pete Wilson replied, “If these additional costs have to be absorbed, I guess we’ll have to reduce other services. We’ll have to change our priorities.”

Currently, the state spends twice as much on 18-year-old inmates as it does on 18-year-old college students.

These social issues pose a more predictable threat than climate or earthquake and probably deserved a more thorough exploration in this book. Unlike earthquakes, sociological conditions in California can be tempered, but Davis offers no way out of this time bomb.

“The Ecology of Fear” is just the guidebook to the action to come.

Visiting Southern California in the late 1980s, I met an elderly woman who had left Pittsburgh in the late 1940s before smoke control and the Renaissance.

“What a dirty, old place,” she told me, “I couldn’t wait to get out.”

I hope she had a round-trip ticket.