Content uploaded by Eve Oishi
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Eve Oishi on Feb 22, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
THE PAST
IN
PRINT
Nature
Lovers
Eve
Oishi
Mike Davis,
Ecology
of
Fear:
Los
Angeles and the Imagination
of
Disaster.
New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998. $38.50 (Hardcover).
Upton Sinclair,
Oil!
Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University
of California Press, 1997, originally published 1927. $14.95 (paper).
Susan
G.
Davis,
Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World
Experience.
Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University
of
Califor-
nia Press, 1997. $18.95 (paper).
In the Disney film,
Armageddon,
last year’s contribution to the apocalyp-
tic blockbuster genre, a giant meteor aimed straight at Earth threatens the
future of the planet, particularly the United States and its key national
monuments. When all of
NASA’s
sophisticated equipment and training
proves ineffectual, they are forced to recruit a ragtag group of oil drillers,
who are shot into space and charged with the task of drilling a hole
and dropping a nuclear warhead into the meteor’s core, thus exploding
the asteroid and saving the world. Like its predecessor,
Independence
Day,
Armageddon offers the Timothy McVeigh-like fantasy of watching
the spectacular destruction of urban centers and seats of government
power while at the same time putting the Earth’s salvation in the hands
of working-class heroes. But the pleasure in cheering for the proletarian
oil workers who are transformed into astronauts serves as a feeble
diversion from the fact that, according to the film, the future
of
our
planet is dependent upon the industry that is, in reality, causing wide-
spread and irreversible environmental damage. This ideological sleight
of hand is not only less surprising, it is entirely predictable if one has
RADICAL HISTORY
REVIEW
74:197-206
1999
198/RADICAL
HISTORY REVIEW
read Mike Davis’
Ecology
of
Fear:
Los
Angeles and the Imagination
of
Disas-
ter,
Upton Sinclair’s
1927
novel
Oil!
(reprinted in
1997),
or Susan
G.
Davis’
Spectacular Nature: Corporate
Culture
and the Sea
World
Experience.
These three books, individually and combined, make a compelling argu-
ment for the various ways in which corporate interests continue to
exploit both the natural resources of the planet as well as the human
resources of its laborers and inhabitants while masking their activities
in fanciful stories about what is and is not nature.
One does not immediately think of these three cultural critics as
nature writers, but their work collectively exposes the thin, often arbi-
trary distinction between ”nature” and ”culture” at the levels of urban
development, government, big business, and popular entertainment in
Southern California. Sinclair, Mike Davis, and Susan Davis investigate
the ways in which stories about the “natural world” (alternatively made
up of disastrous weather, killer whales, gang members, oil fires, and
illegal immigrants) disguise and serve decidedly human interests. This
revelation is not a new one; isolated examples such as the debate,
recently staged within the Sierra Club, about whether or not to endorse
a statement identifying immigration as a threat to the
U.S.
environment,
remind
us
of the political and social construction of ”nature.” However,
by presenting a series of detailed case studies of various Southern
California institutions and events, these three books offer an important
new perspective on this historical phenomenon. The blurring of the
nature/culture divide has been, not a side effect, but an essential and
foundational reality in the history and development of Southern Cali-
fornia.
The fact that it is often difficult to tell which of these three books is
the work of fiction and which ones are social and political analyses
similarly reveals the thin line between the two literary forms, a distinc-
tion that seems particularly relevant to the case of Southern California,
the home of Hollywood, where the lines between fact and fiction and
between man and nature are often impossible to distinguish.
The most gripping read
by
far is Mike Davis’
Ecology
of
Fear:
Los
Angeles
and the Imagination
of
Disaster.
Written like an apocalyptic thriller
novel,
Ecology
of
Fear
is full of earthquakes, floods, firestorms, tornadoes,
and plagues of snakes and child-eating rodents. Davis revels in detailed
descriptions of massive property damage, body counts, terror, and phys-
ical suffering of biblical proportion. But the real page-turner is his
incisive and relentless analysis of the ways in which these ”natural”
disasters have less to
do
with God’s wrath or Mother Nature’s indiffer-
ence to man than with Southern Californians’ greed and deliberate
blindness to the nature of the land they are exploiting.
As
in his earlier
books,
Prisoners
of
the American Dream
and
City
of
Quartz,
Davis displays
NATURE
LOVERS
/
199
a striking ability to divine the interconnected maps of
Los
Angeles-
physical, social, political and historical-and to present his analysis in
a straightforward, uncompromising writing style that does full justice
to the suspense and melodrama of its subject.
Davis‘ thesis is both simple and stunningly novel: despite Southern
California’s reputation as the land of sunshine with a climate of un-
changing temperance, a deeper view of both the region’s ancient ecologi-
cal history, as well as its more recent weather patterns reveals Southern
California as possessing a ”Mediterranean” ecosystem, a rare environ-
ment, making up
3
to
5
percent of the earth’s land surface, which
includes the Mediterranean shoreline, central Chile, West and South
Australia, and coastal regions of South Africa. These littoral regions,
though generally warm and mild, are also marked by “high-intensity,
low-frequency events,” otherwise known as “disasters,” such as earth-
quake, drought, flood and fire. Within these complex and dense ecosys-
tems, the causes of cataclysmic phenomena are multifaceted, and the
effects often last for thousands of years. ”As a result,” Davis writes,
”the landscape incorporates a decisive quotient of surprise: it packs an
eco-punch seldom easy to predict simply by extrapolating from existing
trends”
(19).
Nevertheless, Southern California weather reports perpetu-
ate the myth of the area’s tranquillity, measuring the climate and making
predictions based on meaningless “averages” and “norms.”
This wanton disregard of the real nature of its ecology has caused
Los
Angeles to ”deliberately put itself in harm’s way,”
(9)
relentlessly
overdeveloping the area in such a way as to invite the most cataclysmic
consequences. The inevitable occurrence of these consequences in turn
provokes a general terror and paranoia about the destructive, vengeful
power of nature, a fear which only masks the fact that these tragedies
were ”as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and
the ensuing explosion in the streets”
(9).
The reference to Rodney King is deliberate and telling: underneath
the harmful and unchecked expansion of urban Southern California lies
the simultaneous and interdependent exploitation and containment of
the city’s racial and class minorities. In his chapter ”Maneaters of the
Sierra Madre,” Davis describes the ways in which rapid urban encroach-
ment into the undeveloped foothills and desert regions bordering South-
ern California cities led to an increase in wild animal attacks. Ignoring
the obvious explanation that this unprecedented aggressive behavior
among mountain lions and coyotes was the result of the urban coloniza-
tion and destruction of the animals’ land and food source, the typically
paranoid and hyperbolic response in the popular press characterized
the animals in transparently anthropomorphic terms, as criminals,
“gangbangers,” and serial killers. This hysterical language perfectly
200/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
inverted the simultaneous characterization of the urban, non-white,
poor in animalistic terms, as ”predators,” ”breeders,” and ”wilding”
gangs of youths roaming an urban ”jungle.” It was, in fact, the desire
to escape this metaphorically bestialized urban culture which drove
white suburbanites further and further into
Los
Angeles’ hinterland,
thus provoking confrontations with the region’s wild occupants. As
Davis puts it, this ”politics of wildlife almost always presents a double
aspect. On the one hand, it concerns the formation of human attitudes
towards animals; on the other, it concerns class or ethnic conflict re-
fracted through the symbolic role of wildlife in distinguishing the ethical
universes of competing social groups. Los Angeles’s wild edge, in other
words, is the place where natural history and social history can some-
times be read as inverted images of each other”
(208).
Ecology
of
Fear
looks at the relationship between natural and social
history on several levels; the book contains chapters on floods, fires,
tornadoes (Southern California has had over one hundred twisters since
1950),
and, fittingly, literary representations of the apocalypse set in
Los
Angeles. In his chapter, ”The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Davis
describes the twin plights of two Los Angeles neighborhoods that rou-
tinely experience disastrous and fatal fires. The urban neighborhood
of
Westlake, populated largely by poor immigrants from Mexico and Cen-
tral America, has experienced about fourteen catastrophic tenement
fires, with over one hundred fatalities, in the past fifty years. The wealthy
beach community of Malibu has suffered a similar number of fires in
the same time, with over
1,500
homes destroyed.
Although the two regions experience an equivalent frequency of
devastating fires, the causes and the long-term results are very different.
The Westlake fires are the direct result of overcrowded tenements,
negligent landlords, and unenforced fire codes. A common feature of
the low rent tenement buildings of this area is an open central stairwell
that, in the event of fire, acts as a giant chimney, speeding the spread
of the fire throughout the building with fatal consequences.
The Malibu fires, in turn, result from developers’ blatant disregard
for the region’s particular weather patterns and ecological features.
During the fall months, hot, dry Santa Ana winds race through the
canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, propelled to hurricane velocity
by the bellows of the San Fernando Valley. These annual “fire winds”
will transform the smallest spark into a raging inferno within minutes.
The original inhabitants of the region, the Chumash and Tong-va Indi-
ans, prevented these devastating wildfires through regular, controlled
burning of the chaparral, a practice that was prohibited by the Spanish
in a move strikingly prescient of Southern California’s future social and
environmental politics. Davis describes both the architectural structure
NATURE
LOVERS/201
of the Westlake tenements and the geographical structure of the Malibu
shoreline with the same scientific detail, accentuating the interdepen-
dency of the two, seemingly unrelated, examples.
This interdependency is further underscored by Davis’ analysis of,
what he terms, ”socialized disaster relief,” a practice, established by the
Eisenhower administration, of offering low-interest loans, tax relief and
inexpensive fire insurance to rebuild Malibu homes. In addition to
rebuilding existing homes, this effort made the area more economically
and socially exclusive, increased the density of development, and low-
ered the fire safety codes. The inevitable recurrence of fire and the
increasingly expensive property damage continues to be subsidized by
the tax money of poorer residents of
Los
Angeles, including the Westlake
district, whose access to public services, like the inspection and enforce-
ment of fire codes and adequate fire fighting resources, continues to
shrink with budget cuts.
Ecology
of
Fear
is extensively researched and written with laudable
clarity, given its expansive, complex analysis of the multiple, overlap-
ping layers of social and ecological phenomena. Once he exposes the
ways in which the natural and the social worlds bleed into one another
in popular discourse and in urban space, Davis takes full advantage of
the imaginative and theoretical possibilities of this confusion. Appropri-
ating the language of suburban hysteria, which understands undesirable
human behavior in terms of natural disaster, Davis describes ”infesta-
tions” of white supremacy, hate crimes, the unchecked growth of the
prison industry, and the 1992 riots in starkly ecological terms. He ends
his book with a description
of
the 1992 uprising as seen from space,
generating enough heat to register as ”an exceptionally large thermal
anomaly”
(421)
on an orbiting satellite’s radar. According to Davis, the
fifty four deaths and billion dollars in property damage caused by the
uprising are simply the disastrous, predictable and highly preventable
results of Southern California’s dense and interdependent political land-
scape, a landscape fueled by greed and social injustice and fanned by
fear.
If
Ecology
of
Fear
is cultural criticism which reads like a novel of
urban apocalypse,
Oil!
is cultural criticism disguised as a novel. The
author of over one hundred books, Upton Sinclair is the master of this
hybrid genre of literary social commentary. Although he wrote many
nonfiction critiques of American institutions such as public education,
organized religion and journalism, his most memorable and effective
writing cloaks his socialist commentary in the easily palatable form of
the novel. His muckraking novel,
The Jungle
(1906), which exposed the
horrors of Chicago’s meatpacking industry, was passed around like
pornography among my high school friends, even though it was as-
202/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
signed reading in our history class. Similarly, his
1927
novel
Oil!,
which
includes criticism of, among other things, capitalist exploitation of labor,
political corruption, and
U.S.
involvement in World War
I,
made the
bestseller list in large part because of its small, but much publicized,
sexual content. (A Municipal Court judge in Boston banned it for ”tend-
ing to corrupt the morals of youth.”)
Seventy years later, Sinclair’s novel retains all of its political relevance,
and it makes a fitting prequel to
EcoZogy
of
Fear.
Chronicling the great
oil strikes in Huntington Beach, Signal Hill, and Long Beach,
Oil!
de-
scribes in full scientific and dramatic detail the process of drilling for oil
and the inevitable personal and social conflict it produced.
As
Sinclair’s
account makes clear, the story of oil is the story of Los Angeles; harness-
ing this most valuable of natural resources was one of the key factors
in the growth of
Los
Angeles as a major urban metropolis. Through
the unfolding of an epic narrative,
Oil!
chronicles the ways in which
the plundering of the region’s natural resources is directly dependent
on the exploitation of human labor and the inevitable corruption in-
volved in claiming and maintaining the power and wealth it brings.
Consistent with Mike Davis’ analysis, ”natural” disasters like oil fires
belong to the same family of catastrophe as the labor riots by exploited
oil workers.
The novel opens with a scene in nature-a detailed description
of
a
young boy and his father driving along the coastline of Southern Califor-
nia. The fact that the paved mountain road and the automobile they are
driving are both relatively new technologies means that the encounter
between the machine, the landscape it traverses, and the natural condi-
tions of the mountain passes-the wind, the fog, the gravel-must be
carefully and ingeniously negotiated. This opening scene sets the narra-
tive and thematic tone for the rest of the novel, which is
in
many
ways a history of the relationship between man and nature in Southern
California.
The father is an oil man, one of the many businessmen and speculators
who pulled themselves up from the working classes to amass astounding
amounts of wealth and political power during the oil boom of the
1920s.
The son, BUMY, who is also the hero and putative narrator, is being
groomed by his father to eventually take over the oil business, and as
he accompanies his father on his business trips, we see the industry
through his eyes, full of a young boy’s awe and wonder.
Sinclair’s strong command
of
the conventions of popular fiction,
including melodrama, romance, and action, transforms the novel’s long
technical passages into thrilling reading. Out of lengthy catalogues of
trade jargon, such as derricks, draw-works, rotary tables and ”spudding
in,” Sinclair creates passages, like the following, of pure melodrama:
NATURE
LOVERS/203
”There she came! There was a cheer from all hands, and the spectators
went flying to avoid the oily spray blown by the wind. They let her
shoot for a while, until the water had been ejected; higher and higher,
way up over the derrick-she made a lovely noise, hissing and splash-
ing, bouncing up and down.”
(76)
The fact that the scene is told from
BUMY’S perspective lends the scene a freshness and sense of innocent
wonder. In fact, the lessons that
BUMY
is learning at his father’s knee-a
hard-nosed technical and political savvy combined with a willful and
enduring naivete-are essential, if contradictory, elements of the Ameri-
can dream. These qualities allow Bunny’s father and his cronies to
exploit the land’s resources while maintaining a deep awe and respect
for it, to capitalize on the labor of their workers while expressing a
paternalistic concern for their welfare.
Sinclair based
Oil!
on
his
own observation of the dramatic aftermath
of
a
1920s
oil strike in Long Beach, where his wife owned some property.
After a gusher was discovered in the area, speculators swept through
the area, offering to buy individual owners’ plots and make them rich.
Sinclair describes, in full sensational detail, the consequences of a local
oil strike that literally turns the community explosive. Black oil from
the gusher sprays neighboring homes, and a lit cigarette or a spark
from a shoe-nail could blow up the whole well. Adding to the volatility,
neighbors turn against neighbors in fierce struggles to get the highest
profit for their plots from lease speculators.
The form of the novel allows Sinclair to indict local oil magnates and
politicians by making them composite characters instead of identifiable
personalities.
In
addition, he plays fast and loose with historical events,
moving the big oil strikes of the
1920s
up about ten years in order to
include an account of the Russian Revolution and World War
I.
Along
the way, his story also encompasses Hollywood, the Roaring Twenties,
the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills bribery scandals, the ideological strug-
gles within the American Left,
Los
Angeles’ open shop campaign, labor
strikes, and religious cults.
The epic scope of the novel is mediated by an intimate focus on a
family melodrama. Despite the wide range of characters that pass
through the pages-lease hounds, movie stars, evangelical preachers,
and corrupt politicians-the true focus of the story is on Bunny, his
father, and his childhood friend Paul. Under the influence of Paul, an
oil worker,
BUMY
grows up to become a dedicated Socialist despite his
loyalty to
his
father who refuses to allow him to abandon the petroleum
empire. The dramatic contradictions of a millionaire socialist serve as
both a powerful emotional pivot to the story as well as an apt metaphor
for the class struggles which have been endemic to the growth of this
area.
BUMY’S
political turmoil is rendered more urgent and compelling
204/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
by its placement within a story of blatant, old-fashioned melodrama.
Bunny’s love and desire for Paul, fraught with only thinly veiled homo-
eroticism, carries much more emotional and narrative power than his
relationships with women, particularly a movie starlet and a Jewish
socialist. But the most prominent character in the book is the oil itself,
the black gold which fuels all of the human dramas and conflicts.
Susan
G.
Davis’
Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World
Experience
cannot match the dramatic tone of the other two books, but
read together with them, it forms an appropriate final chapter in this
portrait of Southern California’s relationship to nature. The book is an
in-depth study of San Diego’s Sea World, its place within San Diego
history and geography, its corporate ideology, its inhabitants, employees
and customers, and its significance within popular discourses about
nature and the environment. Overall, it is a minutely detailed portrait
of how nature is harnessed, both literally and symbolically, to fit the
interests and the model of a corporate environment.
Spectacular Nature
was exhaustively researched over an eight-year
period, during which time the marine theme park was bought from the
publishing firm, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, by the Anheuser-Busch
corporation, which already owned amusement parks in Florida, Penn-
sylvania, and Williamsburg, Virginia. Davis charts the various transfor-
mations of Sea World’s physical landscape, public image and entertain-
ment offerings as they are remade to fit the area’s changing political
climate and the parent company’s ideology.
When it opened in
1964,
Sea World was more of a pan-Pacific amuse-
ment park, countering Disneyland’s growing popularity with Polyne-
sian huts, mermaids and Japanese pearl divers. Following again in
Disney’s footsteps, Sea World built its reputation through strategic links
with television, hosting shows like Wild Kingdom and specials for
entertainers like Perry Como and Danny Thomas. Its biggest attractions,
however, were its animal shows, particularly its collection of orcas, or
killer whales, collectively named Shamu. While the killer whale shows,
along with performing dolphins, walruses and sea lions, continue to
be Sea World’s main attraction, Davis chronicles the park’s response,
beginning in the early
1970s,
to a growing public concern with environ-
mentalism. In response to protests about the capture and captivity of
marine animals, Sea World began to market itself as both a site of
research and conservation and as an educational institution, developing
outreach and education programs with local schools and community
organizations. When Anheuser-Busch purchased the park in
1989,
it
began an intensive campaign to retool Sea World’s image into a place
of serious ecological conservation, research and public education. Draw-
ing on the fact that, in Davis’ words, ”in the late twentieth century,
NATURE
LOVERS/205
American business has worked hard to define consumption as a form
of concern, political action, and participation,”
(39)
visitors to Sea World
are transformed into environmental activists and concerned citizens
through their purchasing of tickets, junk food and souvenirs. Similarly,
animals that are forced to jump through hoops and wear gigantic sun-
glasses are transformed into ambassadors of the natural world, the link
to understanding and eventually preserving the earth’s marine life.
The popular demands of Sea World’s audience determine the ways
in which Sea World’s animals are portrayed. As Mike Davis has pointed
out, the line between humans and animals is always socially constructed
and maintained, and ”nature” in Sea World’s corporate context is a
malleable construct indeed. Shamu, the world’s most famous killer
whale, is simultaneously a corporate logo, an employer /entertainer,
and zoological exhibit. Davis describes the evolution of the killer whale
show in response to popular ideas about nature. The original shows
blatantly anthropomorphized Shamu, featuring skits like ”Shamu goes
to college,” and ”Yankee Doodle Whale.”
As
environmentalism and
animal rights activism began to occupy a larger place in popular dis-
course, visitors to Sea World began to grow increasingly uncomfortable
with the anthropomorphism and exploitation of the orca whales. In
response, Sea World revamped its shows, replacing balls and hoops
with more ”natural” seeming streams of water, and emphasizing the
dangerous, wild animal aspect of Shamu’s nature, essentially ”putting
the killer back in killer whale.”
(184)
Recent television promotions for a documentary video on wild ani-
mals’ savage behavior sums up perfectly Sea World’s construction and
marketing of the ”new” Shamu. ”See why they call them
animals!”
the
voice-over announces dramatically as we see footage
of
lions attacking
zebras and sharks baring their teeth. The very fact that the commercial
is using the term “animals” as an interpretive term to describe other
animals, underscores the ways in which the category ”animal” is itself
a fluid, human one.
Ironically, it appears that of all the marine mammals, only killer
whales possess any natural dignity. While Sea World executives satisfied
their visitors’ sensitivity to animal exploitation in their new killer whale
shows, the sea lion and walrus shows continue to feature funny cos-
tumes and slapstick antics. Davis’ comprehensive descriptions of the
killer whale shows also outline the ways in which these, fully “natural”
shows, are fraught with ideological messages about race, gender and
”family values,” right down to the sporting
of
yellow ribbons during
the
U.S.
invasion of Iraq.
Sea World’s widely publicized support for the environment, accentu-
ated by the park’s ubiquitous and highly visible recycling bins, demon-
206/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
strates the flexible and constructed quality of, not only nature itself,
but of an environmentalist response. Informational displays about the
”research” being conducted at the park reveal that the environmental
studies, which are sponsored by corporations like Arc0 and Southern
California Edison, are actually serving the larger purpose of increasing
the efficiency and productivity of these corporations.
Sea World customers are encouraged to believe that just being there
constitutes an act of caring, a delusion that disguises the fact that the
creation of Mission Bay Park, where Sea World is located, involved the
dredging of Mission Bay, the reduction of the region’s wetland area by
99
percent, ”the extinction of much marine and plant life in the bay,
pollution and sewage runoff problems, and water of doubtful safety.”
One of the most interesting aspects of Davis’ book is her positioning
of Sea World within the larger geographical and cultural context of San
Diego and Southern California. The narrative
of
the transformation and
development of the region, as in the passage quoted above, offers an
enlightening perspective on the relationships between Southern Califor-
nia’s ecological history and its particular maps of class and ethnicity.
Because of its high ticket prices and remote location from residential
centers, Sea World deliberately caters to middle- and upper middle class
white families who own cars and can afford the trip. People of color
are incorporated into the company’s educational mission as part
of
its
community outreach program. The few non-white visitors to be seen are
groups of school children who come into the park through segregated
entrances but who, nevertheless, serve the function of underscoring Sea
World’s commitment to environmental education.
While Davis supports her analysis with impressive detail, the thor-
oughness
of
this detail can become fatiguing. Dialogue and actions from
the animal shows are transcribed and reproduced in full; and, because
she depends
so
heavily on Sea World’s own publications and executives
for her sources, the book at times takes on the tone of a corporate
training manual or one of Sea World’s own exhibit markers: ”The same
forces involved in the biosphere’s exploitation have an important stake
in nature’s definition and representation. Let’s explore these unexplored
connections.’’
(18)
Nevertheless,
Spectacular
Nature
offers a remarkable
commentary on the ways in which the careful crafting, marketing and
exhibition of “nature” has become a central reality within the landstape
and economy
of
Southern California.
(45)