Let L.A. Burn? How A Marxist Historian Tried To Warn California About Its Fire Risk
In this month’s massive Los Angeles fires, so far 27 people have died, thousands of structures have been destroyed and approximately 16,308 hectares have been burned. The fires are already among the most destructive in California’s recorded history.
And as happens when major fires erupt in Los Angeles, radical (Marxist) urban historian Mike Davis’s 1998 book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster is being shared. Specifically: its controversial third chapter, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.
Its publication sparked intense backlash. Certain journalists, a former real estate developer and a Malibu realtor masquerading as a neutral fact checker led attacks on Davis’ claims and character. Some minor errors (corrected in subsequent editions) were found in the book’s 831 footnotes.
But, as confirmed by Richard Walker (then chairman of the geography department at the University of California, Berkeley), Davis’ essential arguments were “completely accepted wisdom among scholars who work in the area of environmental hazards”.
Davis, who died in 2022, painted a vivid, if pessimistic picture of Los Angeles as both a real and imagined city perpetually on the brink of catastrophe. “No other city seems to excite such dark rapture,” he wrote. Its obliteration “is often depicted as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilisation”.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/let-l-a-burn-how-a-marxist-historian-tried-to-warn-california-about-its-fire-risk/ar-AA1xC1wZ?ocid=widgetonlockscreen&cvid=1bda0b0d594d4372aee1959fde671566&ei=62
