We live in the La de Mike Davis – but not the one you think

Infernal fires. Cervical boost time. Destructive winds. Debris debris. Torrential rains accentuating punishing droughts.

Welcome to Los Angeles, Mike Davis predicted.

The deceased urban planner made waves for the first time in the 1990s for having planned for that would be an ecological and artificial disaster after the other. His work quickly made him controversial among civic boosters, who rejected him as a negative Nabob who did not want the city prosperous.

Today, Davis is a face on Mount Rushmore of the prophets of Los Angeles, alongside Joan Didion, Carey McWilliams and Octavia Butler.

His words, more than those of anyone, were cited by writers and experts around the world in this horrible year where nothing seems to be well and everything seems to be getting worse.

Regarding his titanic colleagues, none of them has ever assaulted the poultry industry to boast of harvesting “the benefit of the restructuring of world chicken production”, focused on flu, “. This is exactly what Davis wrote in a 2006 book warning of the threat of avian flu, with a photo of a white rooster threatening on the cover.

Davis is the man of the moment, the person whose work Angelenos should analyze as a secular Talmud – but his premonitions of Hellfire and Brimstone should not take it most.

The rest of the nation has impatiently waited for Los Angeles to collapse in the tribal war and anarchy when a mega-catastrophe occurred. If ever there was a time for that, it would now be, after the fires of Palisades and Eaton.

While local political leaders have mainly tried or wasted the moment, it was the regular people who increased on the occasion. They collected hundreds of millions of dollars for recovery efforts via everything, concerts of donation pots in restaurants. Volunteers continue to clean the burning areas and bring together supplies, the promise to dismiss the victims that they will not be abandoned.

Welcome to Los Angeles Mike Davis wanted.

As a person who read most of Davis’s work and knew him personally, I can say that his writings were more cries of heart than the lamentations. He was less Jeremiah and more John the Baptist, preparing the path to which would finally save:

We.

“Although I am famous as a pessimistic, I was really not pessimistic,” said Davis in 2022, the last time we saw ourselves, months before his death from cancer of the Esophagus at 76 years old. “You know, (my writing was more a call to action.”

Launching it like an apocalyptic wet cover is a bad service for a writer remember friends and family like all my heart – a man who had the faith that, even if would end up embarking on the flames, it would emerge from the ashes more strong than ever.

“Mike hated being called” Doom prophet “,” said Jon Wiener, retired professor at UC Irvine History who welcomes the weekly nation podcast and was co-author of Davis’ latest book, ” Night on Fire: The 1960s. “” When he wrote on environmental disasters, he did not offer a prophecy – he reported on the last climate sciences and considering the human cost to ignore it. “

Even while he wrote “City of Quartz” and “Ecology of Fear”, Davis chose “Set The Night On Fire”, which he invited Wiener to shake towards the publication.

“He wanted to show that young people of color of Los Angeles had played a heroic role in the struggle for a more equal future for their city” as a means of teaching a new generation of activists not to be lost even in the most Disastrous times, said Wiener.

I asked Wiener what his longtime friend would say about the post-fire

“While hundreds of millions (are) raised to rebuild big houses in the Palisades and Altadena,” replied Wiener, Davis would remind people not to forget “the people who had worked there as gardeners, housekeepers , nannies and day laborers … (who) find it difficult to pay the rent and feed their children. »»

Fortunately, Davis would not have to say that. The national day’s organization network, the coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and others intensified to help people affected, even if some of their volunteers have lost jobs and housing. Social media remains filled with fundraising to buy new equipment for gardeners, frequent food sellers and find jobs for the unemployed.

Such efforts have comfort to the widow of Davis, Alessandra Moctezuma, and to their son, James Davis. During a telephone call from their home in San Diego, the two told me how they had afflicted the tragedy in Los Angeles from afar.

Moctezuma attended Palisades High and hiked above Altadena with Davis while he wrote “Ecology of Fear” in the mid-1990s. On social networks, she saw photos of her Alma Mater in Flames, messages from friends who have lost everything in palisades and hills videos burned beyond recognition.

“He loved up there,” she said, remembering that they lived in Pasadena, just seven minutes from Eaton Canyon. “I already felt all the emotions of this, and that’s when people started to share Mike’s articles.”

She and James are grateful that people cite Davis as a way to deal with calamities of last month – but the two urge readers to go beyond her most famous quotes and works.

“The problem is that many people have misinterpreted a large part of my father’s work as Schadenfreude, when this is really not the case,” said James. The 21 -year -old believes that his father was trying to warn the dangers of uncontrolled development above all in more recent writings.

In the pages of the London Review of Books and the Nation, Davis followed the way in which California had changed during its life, of a state with a season of forest fires, mainly centered on wild areas with that where The threat of the conflagers is all year round – and everywhere.

James recalled a documentary in 2021 in which Davis told an interviewer: “Could Los Angeles burn? The urban fabric itself? Absolutely ”, on plans of burning suburban leaflets that strangely resembled what happened in Altadena and the Palisades.

“He not only talks about the possibility, but also of inevitability of the way a giant fire burns the boulevard Sunset,” said James. “This is exactly what happened.”

With its love for southern California and its inhabitants, Davis would be “happy to see all the mutual help occur,” said James. “This is the kind of thing for which he defended.”

An altar with the writer Mike Davis for Día de Los Muertos 2022, created by his wife, Alessandra Moctezuma.

(Alessandra Moctezuma)

Moctezuma, an artist and conservative, accepted. His students from the Mesa College completed four large U-Hauls with supplies and went to Pasadena.

“The simple fact of seeing everyone share is one of the things that Mike has always talked about,” said Moctezuma. “The kindness of people and the importance of the organization – and the next step is to organize us to help us.”

She told one of the favorite Irish proverbs of her late husband: under the refuge from each other, people live.

“I’m sure he would have a lot to say right now,” said Moctezuma. “He would probably start to examine all kinds of things – the response of firefighters and politicians, ordinary people. Everyone Would interview it.

Then she was silent.

“He would have a broken heart to see everything burned. And if his health was good, he would be up there to help. »»