Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.

ECOLOGY OF FEAR: Los Angeles and the Immigration of Disaster by Mike Davis Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt $27.50

IT'S AWFULLY HARD NOT TO love a book whose best chapter is entitled "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn."

And yet, Mike Davis, Southern California's defiant, brilliant curmudgeon, has delivered in Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster a collection that is everything but lovable. It's sharp, savage, laugh-out-loud witty, thoughtful, exquisitely researched, occasionally hyperbolic, and indispensable. It delivers thunderbolts to Los Angeles' complacent, cocky, conservative core, for which he is to be appreciated and admired.

But it's still a hard book to love. This is a collection of essays, and, like most such compendia, its quality careens from one chapter to the next. Davis, who may well be our best synthesist, reaches across disciplines to deliver a powerful main thesis: Los Angeles has, stupidly and defiantly, placed itself in the crosshairs of disasters--natural and manmade; its political institutions have cavalierly dared the poor to protest their treatment, and its builders, developers and growth junkies have built a city that sits squarely across fault lines, killer bee invasion routes, mountain lion ranges, and tornado corridors, to name a few.

The results of this history are painfully obvious to virtually everyone. In 1992, the year I moved into a cozy Hollywood bungalow, Los Angeles residents protested the not guilty verdicts in the first Rodney G. King beating trial by burning their own neighborhoods--along with a goodly portion of mine--to the ground. In 1993, wildfires swept through Malibu and Calabasas. And in 1994 an earthquake centered in Northridge ripped through Los Angeles and my beleagured Hollywood home, eventually earning itself a place in history as the most costly natural disaster of all time. For a while there, the city's grim joke was that we were just waiting on locusts to round out our brush with biblical reckoning.

Suffice it to say that Davis has plenty to work with when he sets out to prove that this is no place for humankind to make itself at home. And prove it he does. His early chapters are good enough to justify his recent "genius grant" and live up to the dazzling example of his earlier book, City of Quartz. They are about earthquakes, wildfires, and the rapacious land grab that transformed a Mediterranean valley in Southern California into the second-largest city in America--a land-grab largely promoted by the owners of my newspaper (which Davis wisely and repeatedly points out) and which wrought some serious ecological and social damage.

Start with earthquakes. Davis' thesis: You ain't seen nothing yet. His evidence: Earthquakes over the past several thousand years appear to have been far more severe than those in the past several hundred; and the San Andreas fault, Californians' favorite nemesis, may not be the worst threat out there: Thrust faults under the Los Angeles area may bring the city to its knees without so much as a hiccup from the big mama of California's cracks. Moreover, earthquakes, like much of the ecology of Southern California, are poorly measured by statistical averages, as Davis shrewdly points out. They tend to the extreme.

"In Southern California, the classical uniformitarian assumption that the present is the key to the past, and therefore to the future, is likely to prove a dangerous fallacy," Davis writes cheerily. "Recent research on past climate change and seismic activity has transformed the question, `Why so many recent disasters?' into the truly unnerving question, `Why so few?'"

And then there's the attack on open space. In 1930, a distinguished group of Los Angeles civic leaders warned that open space was being eaten up so fast that, without prompt action, "the growth of the Region will tend to strangle itself." Wise counsel, but thoroughly ignored. Ruled by an ideology that Davis describes as "selfish, profit-driven presentism," Southern California paved its orchards and built along its dangerously dry hillsides.

The result: fire. One piece at a time, Davis demonstrates that rapid expansion placed housing in the way of fire and that the political determination to protect rich people from inevitable blazes undermined the righteous need to protect poor people from preventable building fires. Nowhere are his political instincts and research strengths more in evidence than here. No honest reader can conclude anything other than that Los Angeles' power structure decided to devote its fire protection efforts to the rich while blithely turning its back on tenements that erupted just as frequently and with just as much loss of life. This is the case for letting Malibu burn. Davis makes it convincingly.

But then he stretches his evidence of threat. He doesn't just want us to be anguished by fire and earthquake and political indifference. He also demands a fear of tornadoes, mountain lions, and killer bees. Here I found my capacity for despair tested. In the battle between mountain lions and people, I'm afraid for the mountain lions but not particularly for myself. In the killer bee struggle, I have to assume we'll get by.

So here's my problem with his book. I'm persuaded, if I weren't already, that I am living in an area destined to be flattened by an earthquake. I accept that I'm at the mercy of wildfire. I understand that my neighborhood has gone up in riotous flames before and may again.

But no matter how much Mike Davis insists I should be, I'm not scared of tornadoes, mountain lions, or killer bees. And what makes his book ultimately less than it could be is that he asks readers to accept each of his dour insights with the same credence. The threat of mountain lions and killer bees is offered up with the same enthusiasm as earthquakes and wildfires. This has the effect of devaluing his best points in an effort to hype the worst. It's as though he had placed an exclamation point after every sentence; eventually, it loses its force.

In his final chapter, Davis regains his footing. With "Beyond Blade Runner" he is again in top form, dissecting the dissolution of Los Angeles' downtown, penetrating the self-congratulatory rhetoric of the LAPD, and concluding chillingly with a deep-space look at the 1992 riots. This is why one reads Mike Davis.

Ecology of Fear expands Davis' place as Los Angeles' pre-eminent, if dour, analyst. It is full of wisdom and wit, and it gores all the right oxes. Just recently, I was having lunch in a Brentwood restaurant on a sunny California afternoon with a public relations expert involved in marketing Los Angeles to the world. I mentioned to her that I was reading Ecology of Fear. She grimaced: "We'd like to ban that book," she said unhappily, then ordered the chopped salad.

JIM NEWTON covers city hall for the Los Angeles Times.