Few people have so aptly summed up the thinking at the heart of many environmental disasters. A period of bountiful rainfall, for example, led thousands of hopeful farmers to plow up the Great Plains. When drought instead of rainfall followed the plow (not surprising in a place shaped over thousands of years by drought-and-flood cycles of precipitation), a panicked nation watched plumes of fertile topsoil darken the skies of cities as far away as Washington, DC, before drifting out over the Atlantic Ocean. 

Yet few people have mistaken transient conditions for permanent ones more completely than Southern Californians. If you’re in doubt, read Mike Davis’s new book Ecology of Fear. Los Angeles native Davis rose to national prominence in 1990 with City of Quartz, a vigorous expos? of the violent social strife and racial unrest that have long been the dark side of the sunny California idyll widely promoted by land speculators.

In Ecology of Fear Davis trains his remorseless lens on the foundation of ecological denial upon which Southern California is built. According to Davis, land speculators and chambers of commerce have lured people to the region by offering them a sunnier version of the geologically stable and climatically predictable places from which they came—”temperate and forested lands.” In regions like New England or the Midwest, Davis observes, 
 

 Southern California, on the other hand, is characterized by what Davis calls “high intensity, low-frequency events,” known elsewhere as disasters—floods of biblical proportions, catastrophic fires, monumental earthquakes and, one of the region’s best-kept secrets, killer tornadoes. 

While trying to reconcile advertising with reality—the promise of a swimming pool and citrus tree in every backyard with a climate and geology from hell—Southern Californians are bound to get a few things scrambled. Take, for example, the millionaires who erect their mansions in scenic wildfire corridors and then capture national media attention (and the nation’s sympathy) as well as billions in insurance money and federal disaster relief when their properties go up in flames. Instead of admitting and correcting their ecological mistakes, these homeowners sought to pin the blame on arson by everyone from eco-terrorists and vagrants to Latino gangs. Meanwhile, routine Los Angeles tenement fires quietly claim poor people’s lives. The arsonists that cause these blazes have names. They are wealthy slumlords like Sidney and Frances Kaufman, whose flagrant violations of fire codes in one of their rental properties in 1993 burned to death 10 residents, including several Guatemalan immigrants. Needless to say, unlike their Malibu neighbors, the tenement-fire victims didn’t make the national nightly news.

If I have any quarrel with the innovative reasoning and muscular prose of Ecology of Fear, it’s that Davis could have done a better job of convincing non-Californians to care about Southern Californians’ exasperating ignorance, or denial, of the natural features of the place they live. Admittedly, it’s a hard job, given the deeply ingrained stereotype of Californians as the lunatic fringe who deserve everything that’s coming to them. 

But there are reasons to care. For one thing, the natural conditions that make life risky for urbanized humans in the region have created ecological diversity unsurpassed anywhere else in the US. And from a purely economic standpoint, California is now the world’s sixth largest economy and a major food supplier. Each time drought or earthquakes hit, mud slides, or fires rage, Americans will see their federal tax dollars at work—and if scientists are right, these dollars will be working overtime in the future. Davis points out that this civilization in the sun has been built in an anomalous era of relative calm. Recent studies of the climatic record, for example, show that in the past the region has experienced far more extreme cycles of rainfall and drought. In addition, scientists have discovered new geological conditions, known as blind thrust faults, that have intensified previous concerns about earthquakes. Moreover, the relative seismic calm of the last 210 years has built up a massive quake debt whose payment will probably come due without warning. You can bet the reverberations will be felt around the world.

Adelheid Fischer is co-author of the new book Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River Region (North Star: 1998) winner of the 1998 Minnesota Book Award for Nature Writing. Next year, the University of Minnesota Press will publish her environmental history of the north shore of Lake Superior.