Ecology of Fear: Mike Davis’ history of LA and natural disaster is re-read whenever fire rages in California
- Written by: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
In this month’s massive Los Angeles fires, so far 24 people have died, thousands of structures have been destroyed and approximately 16,308 hectares have been burned. The fires are already among the most destructive in California’s recorded history.
And as happens when major fires erupt in Los Angeles, radical (Marxist) urban historian Mike Davis’s 1998 book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster is being shared. Specifically: its controversial third chapter, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.
Its publication sparked intense backlash. Certain journalists, a former real estate developer and a Malibu realtor masquerading as a neutral fact checker led attacks on Davis’ claims and character. Some minor errors (corrected in subsequent editions) were found in the book’s 831 footnotes.
But, as confirmed by Richard Walker (then chairman of the geography department at the University of California, Berkeley), Davis’ essential arguments were “completely accepted wisdom among scholars who work in the area of environmental hazards”.
Davis, who died in 2022, painted a vivid, if pessimistic picture of Los Angeles as both a real and imagined city perpetually on the brink of catastrophe. “No other city seems to excite such dark rapture,” he wrote. Its obliteration “is often depicted as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilisation”.
Indeed, in 2025, conservative commentators and influencers are taking a perverse pleasure in the challenges facing California, viewing the state as some sort of stand-in for elite or progressive values. Some right-wing media and pundits have eagerly framed the wildfires as proof of liberal mismanagement or flawed policy decisions.
High-risk housing
A Californian born 19 km outside Los Angeles, Davis was no government apologist. Nor, one of his former editors writes, would he have “celebrate[d] misery”. In fact, Davis’ daughter Róisín’s childhood home and school burned in this month’s fires. In 2020, Davis wrote:
After every fire emergency, [Governor of California, Gavin] Newsom and other liberals call for urgent action to reduce emissions. But in doing so, they deliberately elide the question of what needs to be done on the ground, here and now.
Mike Davis argued too much Californian housing is built in high-fire-risk areas.
Verso
In the 20-odd years since his book was published, he continued, too much new housing in California had been built “profitably but insanely, in high-fire-risk areas”. Fire experts call these areas “the wildland-urban interface”.
In 2020, Davis reported, “by one estimate, a quarter of the state’s population now lives in these interface areas – with scores of new developments and master-planned communities in the pipeline”.
Experts say there is a “perfect storm” of factors at play in the current fires, including long-term climate change and extreme weather conditions playing out in a densely populated areas.
Davis’ politically strident, stylishly written book explores the interplay between urban development, natural disasters, man-made catastrophes and cultural narratives.
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
In The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, Davis harrowingly described a 1930 Malibu fire unintentionally ignited by walnut pickers in the Thousand Oaks area. It “quickly grew into one of the greatest conflagrations in Malibu history”, driven by the region’s unique geological features and fierce Santa Ana winds.
Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames, 1,100 firefighters could do little except save their own lives. As the firestorm unexpectedly wheeled toward the Pacific Palisades, there was official panic.
A hundred patrolmen were posted at the Los Angeles city limits to tell residents to evacuate.
This was nearly 100 years ago – but Malibu had already long been subjected to rampant and unregulated property development, Davis wrote. Among other effects, this had drastically altered the chemical composition of the area’s soil. Malibu was spared from total annihilation only when “the fickle Santa Ana abruptly subsided”.
Aerial view from airplane survey of the Malibu mountains fire, October 1930.
UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, CC BY
“In hindsight,” Davis argued, “the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development”. However, no such discussion ever took place.
Despite a series of subsequent fires between 1935 and 1938, which destroyed nearly 400 homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials persisted in prioritising real estate expansion in environmentally sensitive areas where, as Davis notes, “wildfire is king”. They chose to ignore the growing risks to people, animals and the natural habitat.
Davis took a dim – and provocative – view of the levels of state expenditure and ecological costs required to maintain the lifestyles of affluent families who choose to “seek sanctuaries ever deeper in the rugged contours of the chaparral firebelt”.
An imagined urban dystopia
By 1998, Los Angeles had been destroyed in novels and films no fewer than 138 times, wrote Davis. The Thousand Oaks fire, he mused, “may have given Nathanael West the idea for the burning of Los Angeles in his novel” The Day of the Locust, published in 1939. (And adapted for film in 1975.)
Poster of the movie The Day of the Locust.
Wikipedia
In this darkly satirical masterpiece of modern American fiction, West presents the city as both a dream factory and a pressure cooker primed to explode. Ultimately, the simmering tensions of an urban dystopia overrun by disillusioned dreamers appear to erupt into a hallucinatory frenzy of chaos and violence. The lines between reality and fantasy dissolve.
The book concludes with West’s mentally unstable protagonist imagining Los Angeles ablaze:
as a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches.
These fictional destructions illustrate the city’s enduring role as the ultimate stage for cataclysm and reinvention in the collective cultural consciousness.
“The City of Angels is unique, not simply in the frequency of its destruction, but in the pleasure that such apocalypses provide to readers and movie audiences,” wrote Davis. “The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed by the San Andreas fault.”
Firefighters deploy structure defense against the Palisades wildfire.
Allison Dinner/AAP
Commercial greed over common sense
Davis’ Los Angeles is a place where – as he comprehensively details – commercial greed overrides common sense and the social good, where institutional racism marginalises vulnerable communities, and where wilful political inertia ensures history repeats itself with devastating consequences.
This lies at the heart of Ecology of Fear. The book, at its core, presents two central arguments. First, he argues America’s democracy is unsustainable, due to its growing disparity in wealth and power. His second argument emphasises the dominance of economic interests over environmental concerns, which inevitably spawns (or exacerbates) crises. When these crises erupt, they disproportionately affect those least prepared to handle the consequences.
Verso
Davis strikingly illustrates this in The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, by juxtaposing two very different kinds of government response to fires, in very different neighbourhoods.
In Malibu, government resources have historically been swiftly mobilised to rebuild the fire-damaged homes of the wealthy, he writes. However, the fires in Los Angeles’ downtown slum tenements, like the 1993 Burlington Apartment fire that killed ten people (including seven children), receive comparatively little support or media attention. For Davis, it’s just one example of how socioeconomic status determines how lives and properties are valued. It’s a convincing one.
He examines how existing power structures and social dynamics intensify the impact of natural disasters. At the same time, he explores how these disasters are further exacerbated by the city’s inherent vulnerability to such events, including susceptibility to fires, earthquakes, floods and an increasingly volatile climate. These historical, longstanding factors, which Davis covers in great detail, underscore how Los Angeles’ geographical and social configurations leave it especially exposed to danger.
If there has been “a fatal flaw in the design of Southern California as a civilisation”, he argues, it has been “the decision to base the safety of present and future generations almost entirely upon shortsighted extrapolations from the disaster record of the past half-century”.
In his book, he traces natural disaster and climate change in the region over centuries – and shows that LA’s urbanisation occurred “during one of the most unusual episodes of climactic and seismic benignity since the inception of the Holocene”.
Our thinking, he insists, is totally skewed as a result. “These spans are too short to serve as reliable proxies for ecological time or to sample the possibilities of future environmental stress,” he writes. “In effect, we think ourselves gods upon the land but we are still really just tourists.”
Authors: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
Daily Bulletin
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