The Case for Actually Reading "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn"

Mike Davis's oft-cited work has been proved half wrong—the half no one mentions

In the past two weeks, I've seen at least a dozen references to Mike Davis's 1998 essay, "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn," from his book Ecology of Fear. I once admired Davis's depth of knowledge and bold, combative style. In fact, Ecology of Fear and City of Quartz largely shaped my understanding of Los Angeles, its ecology, and its urban landscape. However, my perspective began to shift around the time I became a professional journalist, as I came across numerous articles exposing inaccuracies in his work and, in some instances, outright fabrications.

Yet the MacArthur Genius Grant winner retains his defenders. Few semi-fabulists or quasi-frauds have received the "Yeah, But Still" treatment as regularly as Mike Davis. So I sat down with the essay—54 pages in print—to evaluate whether Davis's 1998 prescription still resonates, if it ever did.

The title, at least, still works. In fact, the overwhelmingly common reason to cite "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" is exactly that—to quote the title. In this way, the essay

functions like other famous works where the title tells readers all they need to know, or perhaps comprises all the author does know of the work in question. George W.S. Trow's "Within the Context of No Context" and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" come to mind as essays of this type.

Davis writes well and is right about Malibu's geography, its propensity for fire, and the inevitability of future conflagrations. But that's not "the case" for letting Malibu burn—that's just one factor in the equation.

The essay's core argument isn't simply that Malibu will burn anyway, as it always has. Davis juxtaposes this truth with the claim that the Westlake district of Downtown Los Angeles has been burning at the same rate as Malibu. He argues that resources devoted to Malibu could and should be used to fight urban structure fires downtown. Davis, a committed Marxist, wanted to burn the rich out of their homes to help the poor live in theirs. But in the quarter-century since the essay was written, Downtown LA’s fire-vulnerability has changed, thanks to government interventions far short of Davis's radical—and in this case, literal—cry to "burn it all down."