As Los Angeles burns, the writer Rosecrans Baldwin hears echoes of the furious, compassionate late intellectual.
GQ
January 12, 2025
Rosecrans Baldwin
Getty Images
One of the last times I spoke to the great Los Angeles writer Mike Davis was during the Woolsey fire, in 2018. Before this past week, Woolsey was the last megafire to blast Los Angeles. It burned nearly a hundred thousand acres around Malibu, destroyed more than 1,500 structures. I asked Davis back then what he expected to see once the flames died down. “Bigger mansions,” he said. “What tends to disappear is rental properties, trailer parks, people who don’t have adequate insurance.”
“The fires are like gun violence,” he added. “You always get the same mechanical repetition of action, but nothing changes at the root.”
To live in LA, even if you never leave your neighborhood, is to live in Greater Los Angeles, to know you reside in one of the world’s largest megacities, a mountainous, immense plaited landscape—Los Angeles County alone constitutes 88 separate cities, from Beverly Hills to Azusa—that unfurls in all directions. And one that also burns recurrently. Since the last time I checked the news, 16 people were dead. Tens of thousands of acres torched. More than 12,000 structures destroyed, with several of my friends and relatives burned out of their homes, and a bunch of my favorite restaurants reduced to ash. What’s different this time, compared to Woolsey, is the fires’ bandwidth. We have the Palisades and Kenneth fires to the west. Eaton and Creek in the east. The Hurst and Lidia fires up north. All we need now is Disneyland to go up in flames (we do not need this) and we’ll be surrounded.
The first night of the fires, I spent two hours helping friends and acquaintances sign up for emergency alerts, encouraging them to download the Watch Duty app, which tracks burns. But the person I wanted to speak to most was Davis.
Davis died in 2022, at 76, from complications linked to esophageal cancer. In person, he was a sweetheart—a cheerful man with a buzzcut and an oddly high-pitched voice. As a thinker and writer, though, he was strident, both intellectual and street-smart—Davis was a truck driver and Marxist activist way before he was awarded the so-called MacArthur “genius” grant. Of course, Los Angeles has plenty of other great chroniclers—Carey McWilliams, Lynell George, Octavia Butler through her fiction—but it’s Davis I turn to when I’m confused, especially when things are aflame.
The book he’s best known for is City of Quartz, a dense, controversial opus from 1990. In it Davis showed LA to be both utopian and dystopic, a sunshine-soaked fortress of capitalism-sodden concrete, from vile prisons to the private, gated real estate that fuels so many Netflix shows. Quartz is both fascinating and somewhat impenetrable, which is why I sooner recommend his follow-up, 1998’s Ecology of Fear, which is easier to dip into. That doesn’t mean it’s any less provocative, though, especially the chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”
Davis’s argument in “The Case” is forcible, and kinda obvious: It chronicles the region’s fire history to show Southern California as a place that ignites regularly. Making the point that to live here, alongside the Santa Monica Mountains, in the flightpath of Santa Ana winds, is either to accept fire as part of the ecology, as natural as the Pacific’s waves, or to live in denial. Because the fires don’t care, but that doesn’t seem to stop celebrities from building mansions in fire-prone zones, or the city, county and state to continue blowing taxpayer money to protect and rebuild them. As a result of the cyclical, ever-expanding builds and rebuilds, Davis wrote, “our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.”
On a personal level, it’s an extremely tough argument for me to endorse, especially this week. My mother’s cousin, my first cousin once removed, just lost her adorable, petite hillside home, where she raised her children and survived multiple fires. I enjoyed many beautiful Easter and Thanksgiving meals on her deck while Malibu’s storied sunsets turned everything to rose. Last I heard, she’s staying with friends, she’s okay, but what is okay in this scenario? No one is sleeping well. Everyone is extremely stressed. Last week’s incessant faulty evacuation notices didn’t help. One day I spent the morning volunteering at a food bank, the afternoon clearing brush from a friend’s hillside, knowing the work is only just beginning—because with battleships of smoke on all horizons, it’s hard to guess when this will end. I cry daily for people I know and people I’ve never met; my Instagram stories are one Gofundme after another. So when I indulge my rage toward politicians controlled by lobbyists, toward climate crisis deniers, toward real estate developers who build unaffordable housing in unwise spots, I think Davis was broadly right in his polemic—as Angelenos, we live in Mike Davis’s world—even if he was slightly trolling. “I’m infamous for suggesting that the broader public should not have to pay a cent to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years,” he once told me. “My opinion hasn’t changed.”
I bet his opinion would be as firm as ever.
There’s a lot of Luigi Mangione in the air right now, and I didn’t sense that during Woolsey. We’re feeling the magnitude of shared suffering—you can live in Hollywood or Pasadena and still experience the destruction of the Palisades like a bat to the gut—but that doesn’t mean we’re blind to the starkly unjust dynamics inside the emergency. Los Angeles is charred, hurting, and angry. Altadena, one of my favorite towns, full of middle class homes that rarely experienced fire, is in ruins. Still, there is a compassionate underbelly to be found in all the mutual aid compensating for our government’s gaps and failures—people shuttling supplies, sorting donations, helping the least protected; I spoke to a bartender Saturday night who makes ends meet cleaning houses, and she’s taking on additional jobs just to give away the extra cash. Yasi Salek, host of the great podcast Bandsplain, lost her Altadena house, with all the material things that make up a life—T-shirts, ticket stubs, books she loved. “I felt so protected and cocooned by these things, grounded in my own history. It’s all gone now and that’s okay,” she wrote on Instagram.
Again, what does it mean to be okay, today and tomorrow, knowing fires are still burning and will return again soon? That the climate crisis will continue to make them worse? In my ideal scenario, each round will make more folks open up to and care more for their neighbors. Because what I value most about Los Angeles is its people—all these open-hearted, striving, oddball, courageous people. I remember Davis saying something similar on the phone one time, and I wrote it down: “Whenever you bring large numbers of people from diverse cultures and they have to live with each other, you can’t have a better incubator or crucible for creating new culture. It’s really in my mind the glory of LA.”
Rosecrans Baldwin is a GQ correspondent and the best-selling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles.
Getty Images
One of the last times I spoke to the great Los Angeles writer Mike Davis was during the Woolsey fire, in 2018. Before this past week, Woolsey was the last megafire to blast Los Angeles. It burned nearly a hundred thousand acres around Malibu, destroyed more than 1,500 structures. I asked Davis back then what he expected to see once the flames died down. “Bigger mansions,” he said. “What tends to disappear is rental properties, trailer parks, people who don’t have adequate insurance.”
“The fires are like gun violence,” he added. “You always get the same mechanical repetition of action, but nothing changes at the root.”
To live in LA, even if you never leave your neighborhood, is to live in Greater Los Angeles, to know you reside in one of the world’s largest megacities, a mountainous, immense plaited landscape—Los Angeles County alone constitutes 88 separate cities, from Beverly Hills to Azusa—that unfurls in all directions. And one that also burns recurrently. Since the last time I checked the news, 16 people were dead. Tens of thousands of acres torched. More than 12,000 structures destroyed, with several of my friends and relatives burned out of their homes, and a bunch of my favorite restaurants reduced to ash. What’s different this time, compared to Woolsey, is the fires’ bandwidth. We have the Palisades and Kenneth fires to the west. Eaton and Creek in the east. The Hurst and Lidia fires up north. All we need now is Disneyland to go up in flames (we do not need this) and we’ll be surrounded.
The first night of the fires, I spent two hours helping friends and acquaintances sign up for emergency alerts, encouraging them to download the Watch Duty app, which tracks burns. But the person I wanted to speak to most was Davis.
Davis died in 2022, at 76, from complications linked to esophageal cancer. In person, he was a sweetheart—a cheerful man with a buzzcut and an oddly high-pitched voice. As a thinker and writer, though, he was strident, both intellectual and street-smart—Davis was a truck driver and Marxist activist way before he was awarded the so-called MacArthur “genius” grant. Of course, Los Angeles has plenty of other great chroniclers—Carey McWilliams, Lynell George, Octavia Butler through her fiction—but it’s Davis I turn to when I’m confused, especially when things are aflame.
The book he’s best known for is City of Quartz, a dense, controversial opus from 1990. In it Davis showed LA to be both utopian and dystopic, a sunshine-soaked fortress of capitalism-sodden concrete, from vile prisons to the private, gated real estate that fuels so many Netflix shows. Quartz is both fascinating and somewhat impenetrable, which is why I sooner recommend his follow-up, 1998’s Ecology of Fear, which is easier to dip into. That doesn’t mean it’s any less provocative, though, especially the chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”
Davis’s argument in “The Case” is forcible, and kinda obvious: It chronicles the region’s fire history to show Southern California as a place that ignites regularly. Making the point that to live here, alongside the Santa Monica Mountains, in the flightpath of Santa Ana winds, is either to accept fire as part of the ecology, as natural as the Pacific’s waves, or to live in denial. Because the fires don’t care, but that doesn’t seem to stop celebrities from building mansions in fire-prone zones, or the city, county and state to continue blowing taxpayer money to protect and rebuild them. As a result of the cyclical, ever-expanding builds and rebuilds, Davis wrote, “our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.”
On a personal level, it’s an extremely tough argument for me to endorse, especially this week. My mother’s cousin, my first cousin once removed, just lost her adorable, petite hillside home, where she raised her children and survived multiple fires. I enjoyed many beautiful Easter and Thanksgiving meals on her deck while Malibu’s storied sunsets turned everything to rose. Last I heard, she’s staying with friends, she’s okay, but what is okay in this scenario? No one is sleeping well. Everyone is extremely stressed. Last week’s incessant faulty evacuation notices didn’t help. One day I spent the morning volunteering at a food bank, the afternoon clearing brush from a friend’s hillside, knowing the work is only just beginning—because with battleships of smoke on all horizons, it’s hard to guess when this will end. I cry daily for people I know and people I’ve never met; my Instagram stories are one Gofundme after another. So when I indulge my rage toward politicians controlled by lobbyists, toward climate crisis deniers, toward real estate developers who build unaffordable housing in unwise spots, I think Davis was broadly right in his polemic—as Angelenos, we live in Mike Davis’s world—even if he was slightly trolling. “I’m infamous for suggesting that the broader public should not have to pay a cent to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years,” he once told me. “My opinion hasn’t changed.”
I bet his opinion would be as firm as ever.
There’s a lot of Luigi Mangione in the air right now, and I didn’t sense that during Woolsey. We’re feeling the magnitude of shared suffering—you can live in Hollywood or Pasadena and still experience the destruction of the Palisades like a bat to the gut—but that doesn’t mean we’re blind to the starkly unjust dynamics inside the emergency. Los Angeles is charred, hurting, and angry. Altadena, one of my favorite towns, full of middle class homes that rarely experienced fire, is in ruins. Still, there is a compassionate underbelly to be found in all the mutual aid compensating for our government’s gaps and failures—people shuttling supplies, sorting donations, helping the least protected; I spoke to a bartender Saturday night who makes ends meet cleaning houses, and she’s taking on additional jobs just to give away the extra cash. Yasi Salek, host of the great podcast Bandsplain, lost her Altadena house, with all the material things that make up a life—T-shirts, ticket stubs, books she loved. “I felt so protected and cocooned by these things, grounded in my own history. It’s all gone now and that’s okay,” she wrote on Instagram.
Again, what does it mean to be okay, today and tomorrow, knowing fires are still burning and will return again soon? That the climate crisis will continue to make them worse? In my ideal scenario, each round will make more folks open up to and care more for their neighbors. Because what I value most about Los Angeles is its people—all these open-hearted, striving, oddball, courageous people. I remember Davis saying something similar on the phone one time, and I wrote it down: “Whenever you bring large numbers of people from diverse cultures and they have to live with each other, you can’t have a better incubator or crucible for creating new culture. It’s really in my mind the glory of LA.”
Rosecrans Baldwin is a GQ correspondent and the best-selling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles.
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis
1999
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and The Imagination of Disaster Michael Reilly In Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis contends that Los Angeles is exceptional in the number of major natural and social disasters it experiences, and that both types of tragedy are intensified through similar types of human (in)action. The former argument largely fails because Davis does not control for the enormous size of LA. Nor does he compare the results of these disasters to other dangers threatening residents. He thus makes pointless an assessment of the overall importance of these avoidable tragedies. Unfortunately, his gloomy tone has led many critics to dismiss him as paranoid and to miss the importance of the latter argument. Here, Davis relates three historical accounts where social and political factors are at least as important as the truly natural in determining the understanding and attempted management of "natural disaster." The unsupported argument that LA is exceptional and the narrative power of the case studies, combined with the rest of the nation's latent contempt for LA, may leave readers fantasizing about the ruin of the City of Angels when, in fact, they ought to be bringing this insightful analysis to bear on their own disaster policy questions. Throughout the book, Davis argues that LA is more prone to disaster than other regions of the US but fa ils to support this with any numbers normalized to take LA's enormous size into account. He admits that "other metropolitan regions ... face comparable risks of disaster," however "none bear Los Angeles's heavy burdens of mass poverty and racial violence" (p. 54). This insistence on the exceptional nature of LA is poorly supported by evidence mostly limited to absolute numbers of people killed or dollars lost. Any argument - especially one where risk figures so prominently -about such an enormous region should include relative measurements that account for the LA region having over I 0 million residents and a larger economy than most nations. The definition of "major" disaster employed by Davis is also weak, because he rarely discusses the impact of these events in relation to the impacts of the host of other problems humans face. The number of people dying from storms or fires each year means little unless it is compared to the number of people dying from Berkeley Planning Journal 13 ( 1999): 133-135
Berkeley Planning Journal other major factors. This fa ilure becomes especially clear when Davis criticizes community (over)reaction to crime without noting that - on a purely statistical basis - such fe ars are more reasonable than fear of natural disaster. The only time Davis does hint at a relative comparison, e.g., while assessing the danger posed by a potential large tornado, contradicts his preoccupation with natural disaster: "The dead and injured, in our secret Kansas, should not be much more than the average Friday night carnage on the freeways" (p. 194 ). These two related fa ilures along with the book's pervading tone of gloom have led many critics to label Davis as paranoid. After all, if LA is really so bad, why do so many people keep coming? How important is it to worry about a theoretical hurricane ripping a 747 from the sky when actual bullets fired by angry residents have hit a number of helicopters over the last few decades? Unfortunately, these distractions have obfuscated Davis' more important argument on the relationship between the natural and the social in determining the impacts of natural disasters. The central part of the book sets up a framework for the interaction of social and political processes with natural disasters. Davis illustrates this with three historical case studies where human factors decidedly condition that which is generally supposed to be natural. "As a result, Southern California has reaped flood, fire, and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets" (p. 9). Each history supports this view by looking at one type of disaster: fire, wind, and wildlife. "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" establishes a connection between the very expensive, hightech efforts to protect Malibu from naturally-recurrent wildfire and the almost ignorance of policy directed at deadly tenement fires in central Los Angeles. "Our Secret Kansas" recounts LA's twentiethcentury tornado history and how the Los Angeles Times and civic boosterism successfully downgraded such occurrences to "freak winds." Finally, "Maneaters of the Sierra Madre" compares policy reactions to the seldom-deadly but much fe ared mountain lion and the cute but sometimes plague-ridden squirrel. Together, these cases demonstrate Davis' considerable skill in integrating complex scientific and social knowledge and provide support for his dialectic. Davis concludes with an interesting but somewhat forced connection between natural and social disaster. He uncovers links between literary disaster and racism where the "invading hordes" or superhuman post-disaster societies are thinly veiled appeals to 134
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1999
Reilly, Michael
Published Web Locationhttps://doi.org/10.5070/BP313113034
Abstract
In Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis contends that Los Angeles is exceptional in the number of major natural and social disasters it experiences, and that both types of tragedy are intensified through similar types of human (in)action. The former argument largely fails because Davis does not control for the enormous size of LA. Nor does he compare the results of these disasters to other dangers threatening residents. He thus makes pointless an assessment of the overall importance of these avoidable tragedies. Unfortunately, his gloomy tone has led many critics to dismiss him as paranoid and to miss the importance of the latter argument. Here, Davis relates three historical accounts where social and political factors are at least as important as the truly natural in determining the understanding and attempted management of "natural disaster." The unsupported argument that LA is exceptional and the narrative power of the case studies, combined with the rest of the nation's latent contempt for LA, may leave readers fantasizing about the ruin of the City of Angels when, in fact, they ought to be bringing this insightful analysis to bear on their own disaster policy questions.
Published Web Locationhttps://doi.org/10.5070/BP313113034
Abstract
In Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis contends that Los Angeles is exceptional in the number of major natural and social disasters it experiences, and that both types of tragedy are intensified through similar types of human (in)action. The former argument largely fails because Davis does not control for the enormous size of LA. Nor does he compare the results of these disasters to other dangers threatening residents. He thus makes pointless an assessment of the overall importance of these avoidable tragedies. Unfortunately, his gloomy tone has led many critics to dismiss him as paranoid and to miss the importance of the latter argument. Here, Davis relates three historical accounts where social and political factors are at least as important as the truly natural in determining the understanding and attempted management of "natural disaster." The unsupported argument that LA is exceptional and the narrative power of the case studies, combined with the rest of the nation's latent contempt for LA, may leave readers fantasizing about the ruin of the City of Angels when, in fact, they ought to be bringing this insightful analysis to bear on their own disaster policy questions.
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and The Imagination of Disaster Michael Reilly In Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis contends that Los Angeles is exceptional in the number of major natural and social disasters it experiences, and that both types of tragedy are intensified through similar types of human (in)action. The former argument largely fails because Davis does not control for the enormous size of LA. Nor does he compare the results of these disasters to other dangers threatening residents. He thus makes pointless an assessment of the overall importance of these avoidable tragedies. Unfortunately, his gloomy tone has led many critics to dismiss him as paranoid and to miss the importance of the latter argument. Here, Davis relates three historical accounts where social and political factors are at least as important as the truly natural in determining the understanding and attempted management of "natural disaster." The unsupported argument that LA is exceptional and the narrative power of the case studies, combined with the rest of the nation's latent contempt for LA, may leave readers fantasizing about the ruin of the City of Angels when, in fact, they ought to be bringing this insightful analysis to bear on their own disaster policy questions. Throughout the book, Davis argues that LA is more prone to disaster than other regions of the US but fa ils to support this with any numbers normalized to take LA's enormous size into account. He admits that "other metropolitan regions ... face comparable risks of disaster," however "none bear Los Angeles's heavy burdens of mass poverty and racial violence" (p. 54). This insistence on the exceptional nature of LA is poorly supported by evidence mostly limited to absolute numbers of people killed or dollars lost. Any argument - especially one where risk figures so prominently -about such an enormous region should include relative measurements that account for the LA region having over I 0 million residents and a larger economy than most nations. The definition of "major" disaster employed by Davis is also weak, because he rarely discusses the impact of these events in relation to the impacts of the host of other problems humans face. The number of people dying from storms or fires each year means little unless it is compared to the number of people dying from Berkeley Planning Journal 13 ( 1999): 133-135
Berkeley Planning Journal other major factors. This fa ilure becomes especially clear when Davis criticizes community (over)reaction to crime without noting that - on a purely statistical basis - such fe ars are more reasonable than fear of natural disaster. The only time Davis does hint at a relative comparison, e.g., while assessing the danger posed by a potential large tornado, contradicts his preoccupation with natural disaster: "The dead and injured, in our secret Kansas, should not be much more than the average Friday night carnage on the freeways" (p. 194 ). These two related fa ilures along with the book's pervading tone of gloom have led many critics to label Davis as paranoid. After all, if LA is really so bad, why do so many people keep coming? How important is it to worry about a theoretical hurricane ripping a 747 from the sky when actual bullets fired by angry residents have hit a number of helicopters over the last few decades? Unfortunately, these distractions have obfuscated Davis' more important argument on the relationship between the natural and the social in determining the impacts of natural disasters. The central part of the book sets up a framework for the interaction of social and political processes with natural disasters. Davis illustrates this with three historical case studies where human factors decidedly condition that which is generally supposed to be natural. "As a result, Southern California has reaped flood, fire, and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets" (p. 9). Each history supports this view by looking at one type of disaster: fire, wind, and wildlife. "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" establishes a connection between the very expensive, hightech efforts to protect Malibu from naturally-recurrent wildfire and the almost ignorance of policy directed at deadly tenement fires in central Los Angeles. "Our Secret Kansas" recounts LA's twentiethcentury tornado history and how the Los Angeles Times and civic boosterism successfully downgraded such occurrences to "freak winds." Finally, "Maneaters of the Sierra Madre" compares policy reactions to the seldom-deadly but much fe ared mountain lion and the cute but sometimes plague-ridden squirrel. Together, these cases demonstrate Davis' considerable skill in integrating complex scientific and social knowledge and provide support for his dialectic. Davis concludes with an interesting but somewhat forced connection between natural and social disaster. He uncovers links between literary disaster and racism where the "invading hordes" or superhuman post-disaster societies are thinly veiled appeals to 134
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Copyright © 2017
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