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Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Using the Los Angeles area as its setting, Ecology of Fear vividly illustrates the dynamic relationship that exists between humans, nature, and the built environment. Author Mike Davis shows that hurricanes, drought, wildfires, tornadoes, pestilence, flooding, and the growing presence of cougars, "surfing snakes," and "killer bees" all belong to a larger causal chain. Speculation and greed, activities and attributes associated with an economic and political infrastructure that supports the desires of the rich at the expense of environmental protection and the needs of the poor, have resulted in a series of environmental and social disasters that characterize this "landscape of fear." Davis shows that after having been deliberately put in harm's way, the city's longstanding inattention to regional planning and lack of a responsible land ethic have led to the types of disasters that LA residents are experiencing and have experienced over time. The merging of these themes and issues is perhaps best demonstrated in "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn," a chapter which juxtaposes the causes of and responses to fires affecting wealthy Malibu homeowners with those which have long hit poor urban tenement residents. As in his earlier work, City of Quartz, Davis turns to a variety of sources to tell his story. In one of the concluding chapters he broadens his investigation to include such popular culture sources as disaster fiction and films to illustrate links between white anxiety and xenophobia. As in the discourse surrounding other crises, race and natural disaster became intricately entangled in these fictions. While this book will no doubt solidify Davis's reputation as a social critic and an observer of LA, it is also important for forcefully showing the disastrous consequences of making decisions that ignore the environment. [B. Johansen]