Mike Davis: Ecology of Fear

Davis, Mike. The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. NY: Vintage Books, 1999.

(When President Clinton stepped in an offered to pay $6.6 billion of the damages/repairs of the 1994 Northridge, CA earthquake, republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, held the relief bill hostage “until the Democrats agreed to $16.3 billion in cuts to already budgeted domestic spending” (50).)

As a result of this compromise, earthquake victims in Los Angeles, including the unfortunates in Beverly Hills 90210, continued to receive relief payments and low-interest loans. Freeways were rebuilt and hospitals reopened. But all this was financed by counterpart cutbacks in low-income housing and environmental protection programs, as well as the termination of “unnecessary spending” on rural health grants, the urban parks and recreation program, and summer youth employment funds for 1996. (50)

At the same time there was a virtual media blackout about the extensive quake about the extensive quake damage in the northern part of the Crenshaw district, the retail and cultural heart of African-American Los Angeles… (51)

The Crenshaw district earthquake assistance center, which received 6,726 applications for relief, was the busiest in Los Angeles County. … These quake victims, often elderly African-American on fixed incomes, had to wait two years or longer before they qualified for a last-resort city program for low income homeowners. Community leaders bitterly contrasted the bureaucratic haste to repair the La Cienaga section of the Santa Monica Freeway, whose collapse had forced white commuters to drive through black neighborhoods, with the prolonged neglect of damaged homes and apartments in the same area. (51-52)

Certainly, other metropolitan regions, especially the Bay Area, Wasatch Front, Puget Sound, and South Florida, face comparable risks of natural disaster over the next generation, but none bear Los Angeles’s heavy burden of mass poverty and racial violence. What is most distinctive about Los Angeles is not simply its conjugation of earthquakes, wildfires, and floods, but its uniquely explosive mixture of natural hazards and social contradictions. Not even Miami, that other fallen paradise, can approach the conflagrationist potential of Los Angeles. (54)
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