The Far Side of Paradise: California, Florida, and the Landscape of Catastrophe

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. By Mike Davis. Metropolitan Books, 1998

Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California. By David Wyatt. Addison-Wesley, 1997

Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Sociology of Disasters. Edited by Walter Gillis Peacock, Betty Hearn Morrow, and Hugh Gladwin. Routledge, 1997

California and Florida, more specifically the southern reaches of both states, occupy analogous places in the actual and imaginative landscape. They are literally and figuratively at the edge of the nation, alternative realms of opportunity and sunshine that have long lured newcomers from around the world and across the country. Precisely because these lands of hope have attracted so many people of such varied backgrounds, they also seem to be at the forefront of our increasingly contested national life. The populations of both consist of a comparably volatile, if hardly identical, demographic mix, in which the race card is always wild. What most captures our attention nowadays are the troubles of both states, which seem especially profound and perverse because of the high and often unrealistic, even desperate, expectations that have been loaded on them. California, Joan Didion has written, "is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent (Slouching 172). ¹

These three books explore some of the most dramatic instances of things not working, the spectacular disasters that are part of local experience in both locales. Whatever their other considerable differences, all of them are examples of a hybrid genre that cuts across the social sciences and humanities, the examination of place through the study of catastrophe. While the authors of these works acknowledge and appreciate the inherent appeal on the sensational level of the catastrophic even apart from specific geographical and cultural circumstances, they share with many perceptive observers the supposition that disorder and disruption reflect and reveal the fundamental structure and system of values that animate and distinguish the societies they beset. "Everything that can happen to a man in the way of disaster," Mary Douglas argues, "should be catalogued according to the active principles involved in the universe of his particular culture" (4). ² How a society conceives and encounters catastrophe reveals what it is.

In the last decade of the millennium, Mike Davis became famous--in some quarters, notorious--arguing that the California dream, or at least the Los Angeles component of it, is one long nightmare from which locals refuse to awake. Davis made his case most prominently in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), in which his contention is that Los Angeles's built environment is one only Darth Vader could love. Faced with breathtaking beauty and bounty, Angelenos have erected a world that, from downtown skyscraper-fortresses festooned with surveillance systems (which do, indeed, look as if they might be corporate headquarters of the Empire) to exclusive Westside enclaves where the most common lawn decoration is the "Armed Response" sign, reflects and reinforces a series of dark victories: of presentism over planning, unenlightened self-interest over community, rich over poor, racism over the melting pot. Davis's L. A., which he sees as the full incarnation of late capitalism, is not an expansive city on a hill but a monument to the diminishment of the human spirit. Those who have best learned to play Los Angeles as it lays approach it as a zero-sum game in which the highest imperative is to preserve one's safety and property. The softer underbelly of the angry beast that is Davis's critique is a lament for the rejection of finer and wiser alternatives, notably a socialist (or at least socially aware) and environmentally sensitive peaceable...