Sunshine and Smoke: The Environmental History of Los Angeles

Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles is a fascinating anthology on the relationship between the City of Angels and its often-turbulent environment. The nineteen essayists, which include scholars from a number of disciplines, set out to explore, in the words of editors William Deverell and Greg Hise, "a large set of regional environmental factors, environmental perspectives, and environmental challenges" (p. 1). Deverell and Hise have high expectations for the collection, hoping that Land of Sunshine will contribute to contemporary discussions on the sustainability of the greater Los Angeles region in particular, and urban-industrial society in general. With this goal, the editors, in a solid introduction, press the often-repeated but seldom recognized idea that history, indeed, "matters."

Contributing scholars have the difficult task of investigating the relationship between successive social, economic, and cultural regimes and the southern California ecosystem. In this regard, the "metropolitan nature" of Los Angeles comprises the primary theme of the book. Borrowing from the concepts of the effects of city building on neighboring regions advanced by William Cronon, Donald Worster, and a host of other scholars, Land of Sunshine's authors examine "how people transform nature in particular sites and . . . how what is created in particular locales is generative for local and broader culture" (p. 4).

Planning is a unifying feature of Los Angeles's environmental history, and as a result, the city begins "the twenty-first century struggling with the consequences of success," in its urban arrangements, "both hoped for an unintended" (p. 10). As Deverell and Hise point out, "functional segregation . . . which we now decry, was seen by sanitarians, social workers, progressives, and advocates for urban redevelopment as a cure-all for urban ills" (p. 6). Other reformers saw the automobile, now the bane of many Southland residents, as a critical tool for blurring the divisions between urban and rural. Well-meaning proponents of exclusionary zoning and early forms of NIMBY-ism (The "Not-in-My-Back-Yard" attitudes inherent in some residential neighborhoods) added, if unintentionally, to spatial separation and social disintegration.

The book is organized into three thematic sections divided by illustrative folios collected and analyzed by William McClung, Terry Harkness, and Michael Dawson. Part One: Analysis of Place deals with the prehistoric ecology of southern California. Archaeologist Mark Raab begins the section with an examination of the region's prehistoric environment. Building on the premise that "Hunter-gatherer Los Angeles offers a foil to social, political, and environmental theories of urban-industrial society," Raab rejects earlier models of political ecology that either held California Indian societies as unchallenged beneficiaries of abundance or the product of highly effective adaptations to environmental conditions and points to the complexities of tribal subsistence patterns in the precontact era (p. 23). "We cannot, for example, assume that Indian cultural patterns and environmental conditions observed at present, or even during initial contact with Europeans, reflect the prehistoric past" (p. 32). Alterations in the physical environment, brought on by such phenomenon as California's epic droughts, may have prompted an extended period of declining health and increased warfare among California Indians. Precontact native communities confronted a long-term loss of foraging efficiency through the virtual disappearance of such comparatively large food sources as deer and elk, quite possibly through overexploitation. The result of this deterioration of food-gathering effectiveness is supported by archaeological evidence suggesting long-term shrinkage in body size and an increase in physical trauma resulting from interpersonal violence. The celebrated use of acorns as a California staple then may have been a fairly recent adaptation, necessitated by a major decline of other protein sources.

Biologist Paula Schiffman's examination of precontact Los Angeles's lost prairie ecosystem nicely complements Raab's essay. Spanish documentation of large numbers of antelope, adapted to what they described as "well-grassed" flatlands, was indicative of a such a landscape, as was the presence of...