BrothersJudd.com

Home | Reviews | Blog | Daily | Glossary | Orrin's Stuff | Email

From the time of the Tapias, the owners of Rancho Malibu had recognized that the region’s extraordinary fire hazard was shaped, in large part, by the uncanny alignment of its coastal canyons with the annual “fire winds” from the north: the notorious Santa Anas, which blow primarily between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, just before the first rains. Born from high-pressure areas over the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, the Santa Anas become hot and dry as they descend avalanche-like into Southern California. The San Fernando Valley acts as a giant bellows, sometimes fanning the Santa Anas to hurricane velocity as they roar seaward through the narrow canyons and rugged defiles of the Santa Monica Mountains. Add a spark to the dense, dry vegetation on such an occasion and the hillsides will explode in uncontrollable wildfire: “The speed and heat of the fire is so intense that firefighters can only attempt to prevent lateral spread of the fire while waiting for the winds to abate or the fuel to diminish.”

Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
    -EXCERPT: Chapter 3: The Case for Letting Malibu Burn (Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear)
Natural disasters bring out the best and worst in humankind, the former in how so many respond on the ground, the latter in how ideologues seize the opportunity to grind their own axes. From fundamentalists eagerly claiming the wrath of God to deep environmentalists preaching that man is a blight upon the Earth. And the nature of the disaster makes no difference to ideology. Recall how Hurricane Katrina–literally the most destructive natural occurrence ever to befall the United States–effectively ended W’s presidency. An unprecedented storm surge inundated a city built below sea-level in a river delta and every tribe found some reason to be apoplectic that government was not prepared to deal with it.

Today we are watching something similar in the California fires, with the Right blaming “wokeness” generally or Democratic politicians specifically and the Left blaming climate change. But, as the passages above make clear, such destruction is an inevitable function of our desire to live in the path of calamity.

It goes without saying that no society could ever afford to remain constantly prepared to deal with every exigency that the planet serves up. Heck, this isn’t even as bad as it gets: imagine that the big quake finally hit Los Angeles? What level of government spending and infrastructure would be required to even begin to deal with that eventuality well? Consider the irony that, for all the “let it burn” rhetoric, Davis himself lived in quake-threatened San Diego. “Pot, you’re black.”

Meanwhile, does anyone doubt that, just as we rebuilt New Orleans, rather than abandoning it, we will immediately redevelop every inch of land that these fires have consumed? Perhaps most dishearteningly, some politicians are seeking to force insurance companies to cover these types of properties, rather than falling back to the ancient legal doctrine of “assumption of the risk.” And the reality of our society is that we are too compassionate to hold individuals responsible for irresponsible decisions. Malibu will burn again in a few years and we’ll go through the whole inane exercise again. The fault is never our own nor that of our own philosophical/political preferences.


(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B)


Websites:

See also:

Nonfiction
Mike Davis Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Mike Davis (scholar)
    -WIKIPEDIA: Ecology of Fear
    -BOOK SITE: Ecology of Fear (Verso)
    -FILMOGRAHY: Mike Davis (IMDB)
    -ENTRY: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster: book by Mike Davis (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -ENTRY: Mike Davis: American historian, urban theorist, and political activist (Nick Tabor, Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-INDEX: Mike Davis (New Left Review)
    -INDEX: Davis, Mike, 1946- (Internet Archive)
    -INDEX: Mike Davis (London Review of Books)
    -INDEX: Mike Davis (New Left Review)
    -INDEX: Mike Davis (Jacobin)
    -INDEX: Mike Davis (Boston Review)
    -INDEX: Mike Davis (Marxists.org)
    -INDEX: Mike Davis (CounterPunch)
    -INDEX: Mike Davis (LA Review of Books)
    -INDEX: Mike Davis (The Guardian)
    -
   
-OBIT: Mike Davis obituary: American writer, political activist and historian who focused on the breakdown of society and urban disintegration (Michael Carlson, 3 Nov 2022, The Guardian)
    -OBIT: Mike Davis, Who Wrote of Los Angeles and Catastrophe, Dies at 76: In “City of Quartz” and other books, he predicted trouble ahead. Events often proved him right. (Neil Genzlinger, Oct. 26, 2022, NY Times)
    -OBIT: Mike Davis (1946 –2022): Enemy of the State: Verso is extremely sad to announce the death of our friend and comrade Mike Davis, the pioneering historian of the US working class and fierce critic of the economic, political, and military apparatuses of the US state machine and the brutalities of empires in general. (Tariq Ali, 26 October 2022, Verso)
    -OBIT: Mike Davis: 1946–2022 (Jon Wiener, Oct. 25th, 2022, The Nation)
    -OBIT: Goodbye Pork Pie Hat: Mike Davis, 1946-2022 (Forrest Hylton, 11/04/22, CounterPunch)
    -TRIBUTE: Writing About L.A. in the Sixties with Mike Davis: Jon Wiener remembers working with the incomparable Mike Davis. (Jon Wiener, November 11, 2022, LA Review of Books)
    -OBIT: Mike Davis, prophetic writer on disaster and social unrest, dies aged 76: Writer of over a dozen books and California’s ‘prophet of doom’ told the Guardian in August: ‘Despair is useless’ (Lois Beckett, 26 Oct 2022, The Guardian)
    -TRIBUTE: Mike Davis Could See the Future: Often misread as a “prophet of doom,” the Marxist historian was actually an optimist and a dreamer. (Hua Hsu, Oct. 26th, 2022, The New Yorker)
    -TRIBUTE: Remembering Mike Davis: Tributes to a giant of L.A. letters from his colleagues and students. (David Kipen, Derrick Ortega, John Shannon, Matt Garcia, Peter Sebastian Chesney, William Deverell, October 26, 2022, LA Review of Books)
    -TRIBUTE: I Still Don’t Understand How Mike Davis Could Write Like That: A Marxist whose books did it all. (Jack Hamilton, Oct 26, 2022, Slate)
    -TRIBUTE: Remembering Mike Davis: How His Curiosity for Los Angeles Changed The Way We See Our City (Mike Sonksen, November 2, 2022, PBS So Cal)
    -TRIBUTE: Mike Davis Was the Best Socialist Writer of the Last Half Century (Owen Hatherley, October 2022, Jacobin)
    -TRIBUTE: The key to Mike Davis' brilliance: He never fit in (Jon Wiener, Oct. 26, 2022, LA Times)
    -OBIT: ‘Marxist environmentalist’ Mike Davis dies at 76 (The Associated Press, October 27, 2022)
    -
   
-
   
-AUDIO BOOK: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis
    -EXCERPT: Chapter 3: The Case for Letting Malibu Burn (Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear)
    -ESSAY: A tale of two wildfires: devastation highlights California's stark divide: Some escaped Malibu by yacht while people fled Paradise on foot. But both cities face a brutal new normal, writes the scholar and urban theorist Mike Davis (Mike Davis, 5 Dec 2018, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Why L.A. Is Synonym for Disaster (Mike Davis, Aug. 16, 1998, LA Times)
    -ESSAY: California’s Desert Ecosystems Will Never Recover (Mike Davis, Sep. 16th, 2020, The Nation)
    -ESSAY: The Great God Trump and the White Working Class:The political and social war that is now inevitable in the United States could shape the character of the rest of the century. (Mike Davis, 2/07/17, Jacobin)
    -ESSAY: The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power (Mike Davis, 27 Apr 2009, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Crash Club – what happens when three economies collide: The three pillars of McWorld are shakier than we think, with the US, EU and China heading towards synchronised depression Mike Davis for TomDispatch, ( 27 Jul 2011, The Guardian)
    -EXCERPT: Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA's black and brown resistance: In an extract from Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener look past the sun and surf to a radical fight for equality and justice (Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, 15 Apr 2020, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: With the Capitol riot the Trumpists have become a de facto third party: The mayhem showed the party is splitting up but also lifted the curse of Trump from the careers of rightwing young lions (Mike Davis, 8 Jan 2021, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Mike Davis on becoming a Marxist: After losing a coveted niche in the trucking industry, I started UCLA as an adult freshman, attracted by rumors of a high-powered seminar on Capital led by Bob Brenner in the History Department. (Mike Davis, 26 October 2022, Verso Blog)
    -ESSAY: A Week in the Death of Alfred Olongo: A chronicle from Mike Davis following the death of Alfred Olongo. (Mike Davis, October 6, 2016, LA Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: Taking the Temperature of History (Mike Davis, New Left Review)
    -ESSAY: El Diablo in Wine Country (Mike Davis, 14 October 2017, LRB)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: Exterminating Angels (Mike Davis, 11 February 2013, LRB)
    -ESSAY: The Elderly: Unworthy of Life? (Mike Davis, April 26, 2020, LA Review of Books)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: The Reds Under Romney’s Bed (Mike Davis, October 25, 2012, LA Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: Remembering Tom Hayden: Remembering Tom Hayden: Mike Davis on the late civil rights and antiwar activist. (Mike Davis, October 24, 2016, LA Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: The Undead: Mike Davis on Donald Trump and the Undead (Mike Davis, November 10, 2016, LA Review of Books)
    -EXCERPT: Set the Night on Fire: LARB presents an excerpt from Mike Davis and Jon Wiener"s "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties." (Jon Wiener, Mike Davis, April 14, 2020)
    -ESSAY: A Note from Mike Davis about the Second Amendment (Mike Davis, June 14, 2016, LARB)
    -ESSAY: LOS ANGELES AFTER THE STORM: THE DIALECTIC OF ORDINARY DISASTER (Mike Davis, July 1995, Antipode)
    -ESSAY: Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control The Ecology of Fear (Mike Davis, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, Pamphlet #23)
    -ESSAY: California’s apocalyptic ‘second nature’ (Mike Davis, September 11, 2020, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung NYC)
    -
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-READING: Conjuncture: Mike Davis on American Nationalism | S2 Ep 6 (Trinity Social Justice Institute: Conjuncture, Apr 30, 2023)
    -VIDEO: Capitalism & the Apocalypse: Mike Davis in Conversation (Haymarket Books, Apr 15, 2022
    -
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-VIDEO INTERVIEW: Mike Davis on the Politics of Coronavirus (Jacobin: Stay at Home, April 1, 2020)
    -PROFILE: The Fire Inside Mike Davis (Ciaran O'Rourke, 8/05/22, CounterPunch)
    -INTERVIEW: theLAnd Interview: Mike Davis: On the 30th anniversary of the dystopian L.A. touchstone “City of Quartz,” Jeff Weiss talks to the prophetic author and oft-misunderstood activist about political uprisings, the pandemic, and what gives him hope for the future. (Jeff Weiss, LAnd)
    -PROFILE: Mike Davis in the Age of Catastrophe ( Dana Goodyear, Apr. 24th, 2020, The New Yorker)
    -PROFILE: Mike Davis is still a damn good storyteller (Sam Dean, July 25, 2022, LA Times)
    -INTERVIEW: Letting Malibu Burn: An interview with Mike Davis (Suzi Weissman, 12/02/18, Jacobin)
    -INTERVIEW: Meeting Mike Davis (Orhan Ayyüce, Oct 12, '09, Archinect)
    -INTERVIEW: The American Earthquake: Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster (Adam Shatz, September 1997, Lingua Franca)
    -INTERVIEW: Mike Davis on the global crisis: "This moment is not a tunnel with a bright light at the end": Author and activist on Trump, the pandemic and the crisis of capitalism: "The lives of several billion are at risk" (Chauncey DeVega, July 9, 2020, Salon)
    -PROFILE: Mike Davis, California’s ‘prophet of doom’, on activism in a dying world: ‘Despair is useless’: His warnings of ecological and social breakdown have proved accurate. But with months to live, Davis is anything but defeated (Lois Beckett, 31 Aug 2022, The Guardian)
    -INTERVIEW: Mike Davis on Belfast (and getting asked to leave) (Sam Dean, 7/25/22)
    -INTERVIEW: The Left Coast: An Interview with Mike Davis (Victor Cohen, 2009, the minnesota review)
    -PROFILE: Mike Davis makes a mammoth shift (Susan Salter Reynolds, March 3, 2004, LA Times)
    -PROFILE: Recognizing Mike Davis, San Diego’s Giant of Urban Theory (Jesse Marx, Jul. 7th, 2022, Voice of San Diego)
    -INTERVIEW: “Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely” with Mike Davis (Jalal Movaghary-Pour, March 1st, 2016, LSE Blog)
    -AUDIO: Urban Historian Mike Davis Says Building In Malibu Will Never Be A Good Idea (Audie Cornish, November 20, 2018, NPR: All Things Considered
    -INTERVIEW: The Questionnaire: Mike Davis (The Quitionnaire, March 29, 2012, LARB)
    -INTERVIEW: “This is a Battlefield”: A Conversation with Mike Davis (David Kipen, Derek Mejía, October 31, 2022, LARB)
    -PROFILE: Between Utopia and Dystopia: Encountering Marshall Berman and Mike Davis (Andy Merrifield, Review 31)
    -PROFILE: The American Earthquake: Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster: Adam Shatz's classic profile of Mike Davis from 1997. Shatz touches on the writing and success of City of Quartz, Davis's time working at New Left Review, and his general refusal to uncritically follow the postmodern trends of class-skeptical left intellectual life into the late 20th century. (Mike Davis, Adam Shatz, 26 October 2022, Verso)
    -
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-ESSAY: Joan Didion and Mike Davis understood LA through its fires. Even they couldn’t predict this week: Fire is an inextricable part of the region’s identity, as the writers knew. But the way this divided city burns has been transformed (Adrian Daub, 11 Jan 2025, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: LA Asks: Was Mike Davis Right?: As Los Angeles burns, the writer Rosecrans Baldwin hears echoes of the furious, compassionate late intellectual. (Rosecrans Baldwin, January 12, 2025, GQ)
    -ESSAY: Is Mike Davis' Los Angeles all in his head?: He's been lionized as a prescient Marxist prophet of end-of-the-continent doom and gloom. But a growing number of critics charge that the author of "City of Quartz" has feet of clay. (Veronique de Turenne, December 7, 1998, Salon)
    -ESSAY: LA Story: Backlash of the Boosters: What happens to a leading Marxist writer after he gets a MacArthur genius grant, a Getty Fellowship, and his new book hits number one on the nonfiction bestseller list? (Jon Wiener, 2/04/1999, The Nation)
    -ESSAY: Mike Davis’s ‘Ecology of Fear’ Is Still a Ticking Bomb: Twenty-five years since its publication, the correlations between power, wealth and ecology depicted in Davis's book remain utterly relevant (Justin Beal, 17 JAN 23, Frieze)
    -ESSAY: Burn, Hollywood, Burn? (Joshua Frank, 1/10/25, CounterPunch)
    -ESSAY: Best-Selling Author's Gloomy Future for Los Angeles Meets Resistance (Todd S. Purdum|Jan. 27th, 1999, NY Times)
    -PROFILE: Mike Davis (Lucy Raven, July 1, 2008, BOMB)
    -ESSAY: Mike Davis' blue-collar odyssey to "City of Quartz": From trucker to legendary leftist writer: How driving delivery trucks and tour buses led the late Mike Davis to write his landmark work of L.A. history (Tyler Reeb, November 6, 2022, Salon)
    -ESSAY: Pornography of despair: d.j. waldie on mike davis, author of 'ecology of fear', and his predictions that los angeles will be destroyed by an ecological apocalypse. (D.J. Waldie, September 21, 1998, Salon)
    -ESSAY: City of self-hate: Why Los Angeles elites love being bashed by Mike Davis. (Greg Critser, December 15, 1998, Salon)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and the City (Kevin Stannard, 11 Aug 2020, Geography)
    -ESSAY: Finding Mike Davis in L.A., Part I: On the Road with Peter Chesney (Samuel McIlhagga, September 6, 2024, Protean)
    -ESSAY: Finding Mike Davis in L.A., Part II: Memories of Santa Monica with Matthew Specktor (Samuel McIlhagga, September 12, 2024, Protean)
    -ESSAY: Ecology of Fear: Mike Davis' history of LA and natural disaster is re-read whenever fire rages in California: American writer Mike Davis explored the interplay between urban development and natural disasters and the dominance of economic interests over environmental concerns in his 1998 book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. (Dr Alexander Howard, 1/14/25, The Conversation)
    -ESSAY: Mike Davis was right about L.A.'s wildfires - so what?: Returning to 1998's "Ecology of Fear" (Brendan Dentino, Jan 12, 2025, Out in Left)
    -ESSAY: Grieving Redness in the West: Reading Malcolm Harris After Mike Davis: Michael Docherty on what Malcolm Harris’s history of Palo Alto owes to Mike Davis’s histories of Los Angeles. (Michael Docherty, May 20, 2023, LARB)
    -ESSAY: Mike Davis: Prophetic Marxist Historian and Activist: From Ecology of Fear to Planet of Slums. (Verso Books, 14 January 2025)
    -ESSAY: Opinion | What Does the Palisades Disaster Mean for L.A.’s Future? (David Wallace-Wells, Jan. 15th, 2025, NY Times)
    -PODCAST: Mike Davis Saw It All Coming: The Late Author of "City of Quartz" and "Ecology of Fear" knew what was ahead for Southern California (Jeff Schechtman, Jan 15, 2025, Talk Cocktail)
    -ESSAY: 'Place Shock' and the Ecology of Fear: How to conceive of rebuilding places amid sudden change in a region known for its “ecology of fear?” As the city embarks on the arduous task of rebuilding, the question arises: how do we reconcile the imperatives of safety and sustainability with the deeply ingrained human desire for continuity, for a sense of rootedness in the familiar? (Charles R. Wolfe, 1/15/25, Planetzen)
    -ESSAY: The L.A. Apocalypse Was Entirely Predictable: Today on TAP: The hills above my hometown regularly catch fire, and developers regularly build there nonetheless. (Harold Meyerson, January 9, 2025, American Prospect)
    -ESSAY: L.A. Will Keep Having Catastrophic Fires No Matter Who You Blame (Leighton Woodhouse, Jan 09, 2025, Newsweek)
    -ESSAY: Reading Mike Davis by Firelight (DNUYZ, January 15, 2025)
    -ESSAY: Mike Davis: Planetarity and environmentalisms: the invention of new environmental histories from the Ecology of Fear to Victorian Holocausts (Susanna Hecht, Human Geography)
    -ESSAY: Read Mike Davis (Owen Hatherley, October 2022, Tribune)
    -ESSAY: Mike Davis: The Fire Boom (Anarchist Federation, January 15, 2025, Autonomies)
    -
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-
   
-STUDY GUIDE: Ecology of Fear (BooKey)
    -
   
-REVIEW ARCHIVE: Mike Davis (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis (William Finnegan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Michael Rogin, LRB)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Theodore Hamm, Journal of the Southwest)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear : Mike Davis’ history of LA and natural disaster is re-read whenever fire rages in California (Alexander Howard, The Conversation)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (David Harvey, Harvard Design Magazine)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Michael Reilly, Berkeley Planning Journal)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Jared Orsi, H-Urban)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Erik Wallenberg, WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (American Studies in Scandinavia)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Publishers Weekly)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Ronald J. Horvath, Urban Geography)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Matthew Gandy, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (John December)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (Gareth Branwyn, Wired)
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (
    -REVIEW: of Ecology of Fear (
    -REVIEW: of City of Quartz:Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis (Ian Tyrell, The Conversation)
    -REVIEW: of City of Quartz (Paul Stott, KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library)
    -REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire: A History of LA in the Sixties by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener (Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch)
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (Robin D. G. Kelley, Boston Review)
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (Jerald Podair, LARB)
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (Ben Ehrenreich, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (
    -REVIEW: of Set the Night on Fire (
    -REVIEW: of The Monster Enters by Mike Davis (Jonah Raskin, CounterPunch)
    -REVIEW: of The Monster Enters (Brian Ketchum, CounterPunch)
    -REVIEW: of The Monster (Matt Steinglass, Salon)
    -REVIEW: of The Monster Enters (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory by Mike Davis (Troy Vettese, Boston Review)
    -REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of Planet of Slums by Mike Davis (David Cunningham, Radical Philosophy)
    -REVIEW: of Planet of Slums (Two Worlds)
    -REVIEW: of Planet of Slums by Mike Davis (Ron Kassimir, Ethics and International Affairs)
    -REVIEW: of
   
-REVIEW: of Older Links:
   
-ESSAY: Recall spun out of thin air (Mike Davis, 10/19/03, SF Chronicle)
    -ESSAY: The Vietnam Atrocities an Ohio Newspaper Exposed (MIKE DAVIS, History News Network)
    -ESSAY: THE SCALPING PARTY: The Tiger Force atrocity in Vietnam was the third major war crimes revelation in the last few years to encounter apathy in the media and indifference from Washington. (Mike Davis, tomdispatch.com)
    -ESSAY: CRY CALIFORNIA: Regardless of the outcome in October, the recall battle has already clarified some of the new terrain of California politics. (Mike Davis, tomdispatch.com)
    -ESSAY: Bush's Ultimate Thule (Mike Davis, Slash)
    -INTERVIEW: Ecology of Fire: Driving the black highways with Mike Davis (Joshuah Bearman, LA Weekly)
    -REVIEW: of Dead Cities by Mike Davis (Jim Lewis, Voice Literary Supplement)
    -REVIEW: of Dead Cities (JG Ballard, The Guardian) -REVIEW: of Dead Cities (Suzannah Lessard, Washington Post)

GENERAL: -REVIEW: of FROM WEST TO EAST: California and the Making of the American Mind By Stephen Schwartz (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times)

Book-related and General Links:

    -ESSAY: What Do the Los Angeles Fires Mean for Local Wildlife? (Kylie Mohr, 1/15/25, Mother Jones)
    -AUDIO INTERVIEW: Years ago, writer Pico Iyer lost everything in a wildfire. This is what he learned (Terry Gross, 1/15/25, NPR: Fresh Air)
    -PODCAST: How the Blazes in L.A. Got Swept into the Culture War: “Nobody's defending Gavin Newsom,” the staff writer Jay Caspian Kang says. “I think he’s probably in a lot of trouble. And I do think that this might have tanked his presidential ambitions.” (Tyler Foggatt, January 15, 2025, The New Yorker)
    -ESSAY: The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned (George W. Bush, The White House)
    -PODCAST: Peter Hamby: The Politics of a Firestorm (Tim Miller, Jan 14, 2025, The Bulwark)
    -ESSAY: ‘Criminally reckless’: why LA’s urban sprawl made wildfires inevitable – and how it should rebuild: A century of foolhardy development, including public subsidies for rebuilding in the firebelt, hugely contributed to this tragedy, writes our architecture critic. LA must rethink – and build upwards not outwards (Oliver Wainwright, 15 Jan 2025, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY:Working on California’s Incarcerated Fire Crews: “It Is Kind of Like You’re a Slave”: Some 1,100 prison recruits are battling LA’s infernos, risking life and health for less than $2 an hour—yet still the jobs are coveted. (Sam Levin, 1/16/25, Mother Jones)
    -ESSAY: How Policy Helped Create California’s Insurance Crisis: Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature have focused on less pressing but more politically useful topics. (Steven Greenhut, 1/16/25, City Journal)
    -ESSAY: Los Angeles Burns (Barrett Avner, January 16, 2025, The Point)
    -ESSAY: Right-Wing Media Insist It's "DEI" -- Not Climate Change -- Behind LA Wildfires (Media Matters, 1/17/25)