Notes from a Lecture at UC Berkeley, 1 February 1995.

Mike Davis

• His new book: The Ecology of Fear
• "Los Angeles is reinventing itself as the Book of Apocalypse theme park."
• Three mega-disasters have recently affected Los Angeles: the Rodney King riots; the Oct./Nov. 1993 fires; and the 1994 Northridge quake. All this has directly affected at least 250,000 Los Angelenos.
• South Orange County: The Republican version of Stalinist architecture.
• Southern California has no "first nature"--Paleoindians always affected the landscape; they were on the scene just as the Mediterranean climate was forming.
• Franciscans arriving in Southern California immediately recognized the landscape as Mediterranean and found it to be lush (especially relative to the deserts crossed to get there).
• We project the axiom of Uniformitarianism on Southern California's natural events: we perceive storms and catastrophes as abnormalities.
• Southern California as "Walden Pond on LSD."
• Averages (as in precipitation) are meaningless. They are extractions from our short record keeping.
• High energy/low frequency events are the "ordinary."
• "Organized complexity"
• Our historical memory is too short to recognize the real rhythms of nature.
• The 20th century has been an interlude from natural disasters, and it has been unusually humid.
• California's climate, advertised to the world, is a fluke.
• Cheaper disaster proofing: "hazard zoning"--don't urbanize flood plains, wildfire zones, etc.
• Frederic Law Olmstead, Jr., in 1930 proposed "hazard zoning;" but his ideas were overrun by the Souther Pacific Railroad and WPA projects.
• The question now is "what can be saved?"
• How do we let Malibu burn? Remove social subsidies.
• County supervisors are ultra pro-development.

  Follow up on these:

• Recent issue of Science, article on earthquakes.
• Stephen Jay Gould
• Roderick and Deborah Wallace
• "How Eden Lost Its Garden" (M. Davis)
• Richard Minnich - geographer - wrote on Southern California fire history.
• Peter Calthorp, architect in the Bay Area.
  

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  Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hill, 1990.