Mike Davis: Planetarity and environmentalisms: the invention of new environmental histories from the Ecology of Fear to Victorian Holocausts

Abstract

Mike Davis transformed the understanding of southern California and dramatically reshaped thinking about the region in his books and many articles for New Left Review. Less well known locally is his significant impact of the approaches to urban environmental history and the large-scale effects of climate events at a global level. Davis can be seen as foundational for global environmental history in his methodology: analyzing the teleconnections and impacts of a particular climate event, (in Victorian Holocausts this was an El Nino) and then parsing out the social effects. The sever El Nino he describes was key in the disenfranchisement of millions in the Colonial worlds and the creation of new indentured and sub-proletariat populations that became the labor force for new forms of plantation agriculture, infrastructure labor, and rubber extraction in tropical forests. Davis’ work provided early historical analysis on the impacts of colonial capitalism in the creation of climate vulnerability. Both his creativity in urban environmental history and its imaginaries, and the foundational research on global climate history are extraordinary contributions.

Environment, justice, and place

Mike Davis's passionate involvement in the political economy of Los Angeles—City of Quartz —took a highly unexpected direction for his urbanist readers when this radical observer began to focus on environmental history. Given his sensibilities about land and its properties (and its nature as property) in Los Angeles, it was surprising at first that he would eventually turn to question of LA's luscious landscapes and seemingly agreeable climate, which he saw as a camouflage for a darker story. The commentary on “climate” for LA was usually more of an existential one, a moral climatology: the noir backbeat of its palmy boulevards, the corruption that underlay the creamy beauties, a kind of celluloid loveliness that masked what was basically a massive oil field. Early (and continuing) fortunes were made from land: from what you could suck from underneath it, place on top of it, and speculate with. And what was said usually included something about the perfect weather, the eternal spring, the honeyed light.

These atmospherics would later be contradicted by choking smog, the activated chemical residue of the fossil fuels that stoked the cars that coursed out over the most modernist dreamscape of them all: LA's gridded, gilded, as well as gritty, suburbs. But the imagery of that goldness proved durable even as one was driving through a toxic fog. The idea of the sunny paradise was writ large, even as what was wrested from the underground occluded the sky, and the “forgiving air”—as the poet Elizabeth Bishop (Bishop et al., 1969) put it—would turn wetter, drier, hotter, and meaner, as we now know (Bishop et al., 1969). Denialism, nihilism, and possibilism fused in the blinding glare of the California sun. The beach city had a choking past and an increasingly smoke-filled present, as its fall wildfires, enhanced by global warming, turned what had been soft gold air into an unbreathable apocalyptic mixture of immolated houses, cars, gardens, brush, and asphalt—and the complex biodiversity of the mountains and inland valleys into an inferno.

Ecology of Fear differed from what most historians of environment had done before: Davis took a region and peeled it back in time to see how it had changed, where it remained the same, how its representations transformed, and what remained in the environmental longue durée, as seen through a politicized lens, a lens of what would be known as political ecology and in a later idiom, environmental justice (or lack of it). While this was more or less regular environmental history practice for some scholars, there were deep innovations.

Past and place as non-prologue: New urban ecologies

Davis engaged in an urban historical ecology that at the time was not yet widely practiced, though some—like William Cronon (Cronon, 1992) in Nature's Metropolis were pointing out that the urban itself involved massive environmental footprints elsewhere and otherwise, not just abiotic commodity supply chains and not just an “urban” bounded space. Urban hinterlands were transformed in service to the city, not as a tribute but as the spoils and spoilage of capitalism. While scholars of the French historical Annales school, like Braudel (Braudel, 1992; Ladurie, 1971) had been willing to take on changes at regional and longer temporal scales, many US historians of the urban more or less ignored environments except as an infrastructure space. Critical analytics would come from feminist scholars and the disenfranchised black and Latino communities (Avila, 2014; Bullard et al., 2004; Hayden, 2004).

The LA suburbs were featured as imaginaries of the gentility of other places. Lawns, lawns everywhere. That gracious accouterment of the British estate became the defining botany of urban/suburban America and most especially for LA suburbia, where its hundreds of thousands of monocultural acres greedily sucked the waters from elsewhere in California and even water claimants in Mexico. Places like the Owens Valley were condemned to perennial thirst, as were other water sharers of the Mexican side of the Colorado river, even as the sprinklers throughout the southland hissed softly in their lush matrix between road and home, under backyard swing sets, peeing dogs, and barbeques. The lawn was an iconographic feature of a domestic landscape that was entirely alien, one that was also mediated by massive uses of toxins and GMO organisms. As political ecologist Paul Robbins (Robbins, 2012; Robbins and Sharp, 2006) has pointed out, lawns became a kind of actant, in the words of historian of Science Bruno Latour, (Latour, 1987b) a nonhuman entity shaping lives and the human habitat. Those lawns and suburbs, however, had a deeper set of stories buried beneath their monotony and prosperity. These were enormous questions of environmental justice that inhered in the myriad forms of LA's suburban urbanism.

Reyner Banham's Los Angeles, as described in The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), had been the key “eco” urbanist framing about the “Land of Sunshine.” Prior to Davis, it had placed habitation within LA's natural framework of beaches, foothills, plains, and autopias. It was after all, an architectural narrative, characterized by Banham's beautiful, passionate, almost lovesick writing about LA. But Four Ecologies had relatively little to say about the political ecologies that would unfold on the beaches, foothills, interior valleys, and in the speculator dreams of spread out autopias—roads with real estate—that mediated the new design of the American dream. It was more artistic and quite apolitical, but useful and charming in its way, and it at least responded to the scale of Los Angeles—if not the scale of its history. Enter Mike Davis and the Ecology of Fear (Davis, 1998)

He engaged polemical debates about class and power and fire regimes and those who see their worlds in smoldering ashes, swirled off in floods, or splintered by tornedo winds. In this recitation of airs, waters, and places, debates revolve around the hidden histories, deals, and political ecologies of unruly global and local climates and the dynamics of fire weather, tornadoes, and El Niño floods that surge from LA's topographies and microclimates. These increasingly reflect large-scale climate changes. In spite of the pretentions of golden calm, there is nihilism; an indifference to human works typical of active geologies and fire ecologies, and as Davis put it by reviewing the deep regional history of the climate archives, there was “bad news from the Middle Ages” when earlier mega-droughts ravaged the southwest (Seager et al., 2007). Davis filtered the “nonhuman” effects of earthquakes, biota, and climate and climate history, what Latour (Latour, 1987a) would call actants—nonhuman elements that shape human societies—through the material constructions of class, race, and vulnerability to hazards, even as the built environment boasted about its domination of nature: the California aqueduct, the tranquilized LA river, and land covered by lights and asphalt, all bathed in honeyed light.

Davis picked up from where he had left off with City of Quartz and constructed this work on what the climate, biota, and place of LA were like, which was not so benign once one peeled back. This modernist “triumph over nature” and imperviousness to nature was nowhere more manifest than in the glittering urban oasis of the City of Angels, but this, as Davis pointed out, was an illusion. Improvement, modernism's uniformity, and ideology of mastery in many ways enhanced vulnerabilities. The historian of science, Bruno Latour, had it right when he suggested that nonhuman “environment” is not a passive platform but rather a shifting element responding, shaping, and autonomous to human society, and literally “Blowing Back,” as climate change has now taught us (Latour, 2017).

Ecology of Fear also moves into the apprehensions concerning other mythologies about southern California's place: the cute, cartoon squirrels of Chip ‘n’ Dale that revealed their dark side as plague vectors; the alternative, non-Anglo present (the vampirish Chupa Cabra); and the imagined future of explosive annihilation with its dazed inhabitants searching—yearning—for a mythical “Magic Kingdom” (Butler, 1993). What Davis outlines is deep in the unconscious Los Angeles, in the foreshadowing of environmental danger—the “pre-traumatic stress syndrome.” Davis’ reading supersedes by far the dull, suburban or bureaucratic imaginaries of futurist novelists like Kim Stanley Robinson. Davis did not write from a suburban ontology but from “safety net free” Fontana, expressing the deeper radicalism of how inequality—in its Blade Runner hybridity of technology, novel climate, and restless ecologies with an unbridled nature's autonomy and humanities political madness—would actually manifest in a rubbled megacity in a ravaged nature. Nature was showing up, invited or not, all the time, and was making trouble.

Melting into air

Davis opens Ecology of Fear with an El Niño storm, or what had been called the “Pineapple Express” before the El Niño dynamics had been understood and named. The superheating of Pacific waters, destabilized by heat and a moisture-saturated atmosphere and moved by east-to-west winds, began to be understood and modeled by UCLA climatologist Jacob Bjerknes in the 1960s and 1970s (Cane, 2005; Grove et al., 2018). These storm systems slammed into California with howling winds of almost hurricane velocity and biblical deluges. Ecology of Fear begins with images of flooded streets, but these are nothing compared to the prose, as coiling rattlesnakes and drowned gophers arrive from the flash-flooded arroyos on the sodden beaches to join jewel-clutching matrons and Baywatch bodies. But water is one thing, moving mountains in a slither to the sea. Fire is another.

By 2018, as the massive Woolsey fires raged through Southern California, the idea that there was a choice about “letting Malibu burn” had receded; a conclusion that Davis had earlier been reviled for. Malibu was going to burn, and climate change assured this (Dong et al., 2022; Mann et al., 2016; Swain et al., 2018). The Kardashians would hire their own fire crew (modestly pointing out how blessed they were to afford the $10,000 a month price tag). Everyone else in the line of fire came to further love their public option firefighters.

Meanwhile, planning agencies, developer greed, and conventional construction with its vast arenas of black asphalt, hardscaped universes, and crispy lawns pushed inland summer temperatures into the 110–112° + F range—which generated urban heat islands where temperatures were kicking close to 120°F + —and the heatwaves lasted for what seemed like an eternity. This was the climate of the “future,” according to the models (Dong et al., 2022; Keeley et al., 2022; Swain et al., 2018). In fact, it was the cataclysmic climate of now; the future will be worse. The great immolations of the Santa Monica Mountains’ Woolsey fire produced a panicked, mandatory exodus. People and their livestock became climate refugees on the orange, toxic smoke-shrouded beaches of Malibu, the Dunkirk of global warming. At least in LA. But he had many other insights about the El Ninos and burning, the strife and dislocation that would unfold and trigger a historical restricting of many populations in the tropical and colonial worlds. Perhaps less well known in the US, his next volume on climate change took in the global dynamics in ways that determined future histories. The volume, Victorian holocausts, was really about what we might now call “climate Justice”—which was in fact the lack of it.

In times of chaos…history is your discipline of choice

This dramatic unfolding of fires and floods in a rich neighborhood, rich city, and rich country was nothing like the more complex and devastating story of what really brutal environmental and climate impacts can look like. Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts narrative filtered strong climate events playing out on the world stage by showing how climate events, injustice, and inequality were inflicted on enormous regions: Brazil, North Africa, India, and China—basically the entire tropical world. While dramatic climate events can be seen as they play out in the adrenaline-drenched fire time in urban Southern California, the deeper, slower onset, more attenuated natural cum colonial catastrophes remain fairly hidden, especially in the past. In times of chaos, history is the discipline of choice. It can help tell, like Cassandra, the future. Although like Cassandra, the prophesies are largely ignored.

Davis opened his analysis of the realm of climate catastrophe at a historical and physical distance—in the golden age of imperialism—in order to understand global inequalities of the age in their particular environmental idiom. Historian David Arnold, in his studies of the tropics and disease, has pointed out that famines are “engines of historical transformation” (Arnold, 1999). Indeed, strong environmental events can greatly intervene and amplify—something that human violence on its own could only achieve with difficulty—and “naturalizes” human catastrophe through ideas of risk and hazard rather than through power relations and structure. And the active role of nature herself.

The deep history of climate vulnerabilities and colonial reserve labor armies

As significant as the Ecology of Fear has become, the greater intellectual leap is Late Victorian Holocaust: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World ( Davis, 2002 ). This book prefigured the more general rise of global environmental history integrated into world systems and global history, catapulting political ecology and climate history into the mainstream, or at least a strong analytic category, of colonial and post-colonial histories. If Ecology of Fear was a story of time and one place, Late Victorian Holocausts was the combination of political economies of globalizations and histories of colonialisms all over the place—with global climate processes integrated into understandings of lethal planetary teleconnections and human vulnerabilities.

As Davis points out, there is a great deal of environmental instability at the core of modern history (a reality that especially geographers have made their métier). As social historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (Chakrabarty, 2009) admonishes us, environmental dynamics should now be understood as elements of historical categories, just like gender, race, ethnicity, or class and economic formations. It is no longer an “add-on.” Increasingly, history cannot be understood outside strong and fast climate events or incremental and slow environmental harms. This arena has seen an explosion in methods, analytics, and sites (Nixon, 2011; Steffen et al., 2015). Certainly, the headlines of 2023 as the hottest year on record so far, Midwestern floods, deluged cities, French metropoles that vie with Death Valley for the hottest place on the planet, the waterless Rhine and Po rivers, arctic and boreal forest fires, Amazonian Arson and the end of glaciers give a sense of the real-time severity of what climate shift—and its increasingly intense storms can do, even as the silent violence of slow-onset environmental troubles grows more lethal due to expanding inequalities. But climate comes for everyone, as choking New Yorkers and Chicagoans were to discover as they breathed smoke of distant Canadian forest immolations. It was yet another an early sign of what the Pyrocene might look like in addition to migration streams, failed harvests, the tedious overuse of the term “unprecedented,” increased social conflict from urban rage, domestic violence to wars (Buhaug and von Uexkull, 2021; Dehm, 2020; Raleigh, 2011). These catastrophes are translated by the US military as “an accelerant,” while climate refugees drown in the Mediterranean and the Rio Grande or walk through the scorching US border landscapes of open graves.

Apocalypse then

The path outlined by Davis, and in earlier works by environmental historian Richard Grove (Grove, 1995; Grove and Adamson, 2018), uses the “natural archive”: data from scientific sources and models, information about planetary history incarnated in ice cores, tree rings, sediment patterns, pollen signatures, and climate modeling and other methods of paleoclimatology. One might argue that historian LeRoy Ladurie outlined the strategy a bit earlier in describing climate impacts at a millennial scale through archival and agricultural production data (Ladurie, 1971) but the sciences for his arguments did not really align when Ladurie was writing. Key elements of this kind of global environmental history involved climatic teleconnections: climate events in one place expanding into climate catastrophes elsewhere, unfolding and modified by their own local particularities in each place. This attention to teleconnections and their comparative social outcomes is, in many ways, the defining methodology in the “cultural turn” of modern socioclimatology research (Hulme, 2009; White, 2007; White et al., 2018; Wood, 2015). Imperial studies, colonial history, and the interest in globalization had certainly cleared the way for understanding political and economic power spread widely through politics, practices, economics, ideologies, and armies as they manifested through and were reflected in environments and places.

The distance effects of natural forces in shaping social dynamics and the means through which complex strands interwove to unmake previous worlds while building the new global economic structures of late nineteenth-century capitalisms—including the workings of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO—were not understood until well into the 1980s (Cane, 2005; Grove et al., 2018). While Wood's brilliant work on the “global Tambora” (Wood, 2015) took one event drastic volcanic event globally in the earlier global/colonial moment with crushing outcomes, what was clear, from Davis however, that this recurring cycle of events tracked ENSO processes all over the globe. As disastrous as Davis’ world tour on ENSOs was in the Victorian age, we have many more to look forward to, since ENSO events track historically quite well because they are so traumatic that people write about them and there are strong residues on the geomorphological, biogeographic, and climatic records (Foley et al., 2002; Hecht, 2013; Latif and Keenlyside, 2009; Ortlieb and Machare, 1993; Quinn et al., 1987). The task that Mike Davis set for himself, which was an important one, was how to “detoxify” climate and the long history of environmental determinism associated with it.

Talking about climate and history without sounding like a Nazi

For social scientists in the post-World War II period, pointing to climate as a shaping force of civilizations and social outcomes was tremendously suspect because of its association with colonial and Nazi racial ideologies of the impact of climate on culture and human characteristics and capacities (Livingstone, 2012; Schwarcz, 1999; Stepan, 1982). In the 1970s and much of the 1980s, and of course still today, scholars concentrated on the reverse: on human impacts on the environment in specific localities: pollution, deforestation, erosion, and smog became far more prominent in the analysis of human–environmental literatures with “nature” as a platform to modernity, and damage to it as an “externality” of modern capitalism.

Climate's role in human societies joined functionalist ecological explanations of environmental limits on culture and human characteristics, that sought to explain social hierarchies and brushed dangerously close to the Nazi, colonial, and modernist eugenics of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century and promulgated as part of national ideologies (Huntington, 1915; Stocking, 1987; Vieler, 1999). For this reason, the environmentally determinist tone was avoided wherever possible, even though these forms of explanation had been the norm for much of the prewar and colonial world (Flitner, 2003; Schwarcz, 1999; Stepan, 1991; Stocking, 1982).

What was becoming clearer from colonial, post-colonial, and development studies scholarship was that distant events and processes had strong, and often transformative, effects on foreign localities. For social science scholars, distance effects were human-centered: world dynamics of politics, economics, and cultures, and for planners especially, climate and environment acted as either the scenery on history's stage or the cautionary elements of a Malthusian morality play. This critique of neo-Malthusians was revealed in much of the political ecology of the Sahelian drought or the “Soccer Wars” of El Salvador and Honduras, or the Marxist analytics of the NeoMathulsians of the 1970s (Peet, 1985; Peluso and Watts, 2001; Watts, 1983) even as the “natural disasters” were deeply interwoven with human actions and structural processes.

Systems thinking and large-scale modeling still remained highly bounded in its social assumptions during the 1970s and 1980s, even as social and especially economic modeling were expanding. Meanwhile, environmental modeling was becoming far more prevalent but its social framing was largely limited to population parameters (Peet, 1985). The active planet was not really part of the models of this time, but more a mute recipient of insults, a kind of ecological machine and the planet, in spite of emerging studies of paleo climate, was configured or at least generally imagined as largely homeostatic (Edwards, 2013; Morgan, 2012). By the mid-1980s, climate models were moving ahead, but the understanding of human dynamics by climate scientists was not what it would later become (Demeritt, 2001). It is in this context that we must view the arrival of Late Victorian Holocausts.

Bad weather: Social thought and history

Scholars have continued to review the impact of large-scale climate events on the unraveling of imperial regimes, as subsistence crises moved into play at moments of significant structural change. In many ways, this “collapsology” has become fashionable, with more social theory through the French writers on Collapsology, such as Servigne and Stevens and the more general writings of apocalyptic climatologists and climate observers (Malm, 2017, 2018; Servigne and Stevens, 2020; Wallace-Wells, 2019). The work of Grove and Davis, with their deep historical and political sensibilities, created a more complex genre of global environmental histories, interested less in environmental collapse per se but in social outcomes, responses, and systems reorganizations, a methodology that prefigured a highly interesting array of social scientists and historians using socioenvironmental analytics and the ideas of Panarchy (Gunderson et al., 2022; Holling and Gunderson, 2002). The point was not that there is climate catastrophe per se, but how it works in societies.

An El Niño Odyssey

The hapless Ulysses Grant family is the device on which Davis hangs his narrative. Meant to be a pleasant and informative global trip, their extended world tour rivals the unpleasantness of the travels of Ulysses’ classical namesake. The family are baffled tourists moving from place to place as the corpses piled up by the millions. There were riots, banditry, migration, millenarianism, hardly the genteel experience they might have been hoping for. And while the colonial narrative is mostly one about the assertion and reassertion of colonial sovereignty, what also becomes clear is the vast diversity of dynamics that attends the reshuffling of labor out of its subsistence and community livelihoods, new property regimes, and the implications of the changing global industrial capitalist economies and empires. The imperial and climate impacts and the casual indifference to massive suffering during exceedingly serious famines and subsistence crises are analytically dispositive as far as they go, but like concussions, these periodic events are additive, recurrent, and slower acting, undermining resilience strategies, destroying assets and the ability to recoup past losses. They also imply displacement. These climate events also fueled lengthier narratives about deficient places and people and the more general descriptions of underdevelopment and problems of Primitivity in what were increasingly social Darwinist framings, as lethally brutal economies became ubiquitous in the tropical world during Davis's holocaust periods (De Rooy et al., 1990; Hofstadter, 1992; Otamendi, 2009).

There are three main droughts that Davis concentrates on: the mega-drought of 1876–1878; the drought of 1888–1991, and the protracted desiccations of 1896–1902 and their global unfoldings. European analytics of processes of dispossession concentrated on the histories and impacts of enclosure, through labor markets, industrialization and technical change, the deeper understandings of economic change and rural marginalization. In periodically desiccating El Nino realms, adaptive shifts in the response to drought were (periodic migration etc.) confronted, captured, and undergirded by new demands for labor to produce new global commodities, new colonial interventions on tenurial regimes, corvées and accumulative taxes, and new legal systems and ideas of who could be a claimant. In places like Brazil, the end of slavery (1888) morphed into a kind of pseudo- slavery of indentured labor in the rubber forests of Amazonia, with large-scale erosion of rights for Afrodescendent and enslavement for indigenous people (Hecht, 2013). In other sites as in India, El Nino triggered simply death or migration for sharecroppers, and small farmers and new forms of indenturement in plantation economies. The strategies of community and livelihoods safety nets were dissolved under colonial regimes.

In the El Niño of 1877–1878 was one of the worst of the nineteenth century and perhaps one of the worst of the last 1000 years, killed more than twenty million globally, according to the grim statistics presented by Davis. Davis concentrates on the massive human dying, a forgotten Victorian genocide (his words), on the contradictions that inhered in the immense suffering that attended the droughts. The disjuncture of extractive state policy and badly stressed environments produced migrations into novel forms of economic subjection and the extension of extractive economic regimes of accumulation built on both new crops, technologies, and the inexpensive labor of the desperate. This was because the ecological/climate disruptions also occurred in tandem with the development of (i) monocropped plantations, (ii) commodity booms in traditional crops (sugar, coffee, tea) and (iii) new extractive regimes for newer international global commodities (rubber and cacao), as well as (iv) the demand for labor for infrastructure construction (US, South America, and India), and new forms of transport (rail). These systems coupled to climate catastrophe helped create a distressed reserve labor army that could be pressed into the new mainly tropical forms of ecological/economic reorganization under the emergent forms of Victorian tropical capitalisms and colonial states (Hecht, 2013; Ross, 2017).

Millions were shunted into new places, new forms of informal enslavement, or global forest collection. Not much on peoples radar, given the ubiquity of rubber in modern life, latex extraction's singularly important, dynamic, and lethally brutal tropical forest economies became pervasive in the tropical world during Davis's holocaust period as industrial, medical, transportation, and communications technologies increasingly demanded this malleable, waterproof substance. The tropical forests were the site of large relocations even if the language of relocations was draped in “savior” economies and “humanitarian” response to interwoven socio-ecological instabilities (Barham and Coomes, 1994; de Mello and Van Melkebeke, 2019; Dean, 1987; Dove, 1996; Edelman, 1998; Hecht, 2013). Other commodities were also hungry for more labor: coffee, cacao, henequen, and cotton all needed more workers, and changes in access regimes coupled with climate events and their ecological desolations left few options.

The Equatorial tropical forests were the site of large relocations, not to mention geopolitical conflict (Hecht, 2013). In the case of Amazonia, one of Davis’ most dramatic case studies, over a million workers were pushed into the rubber economy at its height (1880–1912) a period, involving several ENSO events that regurgitated northeastern Brazilians from the ENSO “Drought Polygon” of desiccating lands, and shunting them into Amazonia, via state as well as entrepreneurial labor contractors. The industrial world was frantically searching for rubber, for which there was no substitute until the 1930s (when the I.G. Farben laboratories in Nazi Germany developed the first synthetic version). In the meantime new imperial and colonial regimes radically restructured economic access, political rights and enhanced monocultural production systems, but mostly triggered overexploitation of natural systems (such as the latexes of Gutta Percha (Palaquium Gutta in India, Langdorfia in Africa, and Hevea and Castilla in Amazonia), enhancing local vulnerabilities of the socioecologies to vaguaries of weather, global markets, biopiracy, and geopolitics. The theft of Hevea (the rubber tree) and its reconfiguration as plantation monocultures in Dutch and British colonies (where the tree was immune to the disease that limited its spatial intensification in Amazonian biomes) collapsed the Amazonian biome economies, stranding its workers, who would, in the end, play an interesting role in the emergent democracy movements of the 1980s. They invoked harkening the climate catastrophes, and the subsequent “unfreedoming” that attended their translocations—still vivid living memory and central to their insurgent demands for citizenship (Hecht, 2011). As ENSO's make the world hotter and its storms more intense, we can expect to see new configurations of desperation and enslavement under intensified climates, as more unbridled forms of precarity and exploitation as “displacement capitalism” and its human and planetary predations, evolves.

What Davis’ environmental histories do, is both look back into the shaping processes and forward into modernity's imaginaries, seeing “the environment” in the case of Ecologies of Fear as an outcome of unforgiving and at the time, little-known processes of geography coupled to an obscuring speculative vampirism in the construction of place and economies. In Victorian Holocausts, Davis was instrumental in forging a planetary form of environmental history and actively binding it to socio-economic processes of imperialism at a global scale. While Davis’ City of Quartz remains a touchstone for Angelenos, his efforts on environmental history may prove more consequential because climate change, with its fires, floods, pandemics, and droughts are changing how we understand the lands we stand on and the futures can have.

Victorian Holocausts at the end of the day may be more significant because prescient. Right now, the climate is poised to create some kind of Third World as “Other world” where melting glaciers meet rising seas, as with the 2022 Pakistani floods that displaced 33 millions with not much help from a famously kleptocratic state, international humanitarian aid or back up from a ruined nature. Or the drying Parana river, formerly fed by Amazonian “flying Rivers”—now disabled by deforestation—with incapacitated shipping, irrigation failures, lost fisheries, hydropower dams, fetid rivers, and megacities like Sao Paulo without water. At this writing, we begin in the hottest year for which we have human records, and it is a Nino year with more heat on the way. New Yorkers are choking on Canadian smoke from uncontrollable fires, while a ditzy immobile jet stream fixes a heat dome over much of the US southeast for weeks on end. Beijing continues to melt in an ongoing heat wave, and the Middle East will soon move out of what used to be called, “The human niche”(Xu et al., 2020).

Mike Davis showed how human and ecosystem damages were produced and reproduced as the impacts spread unevenly over a globalizing world and generated staggering inequalities and precarity as they did so in the confluence of an actant nature and flailing states with failing institutions. It's a useful exercise to think what our increase in average global heating and the dislocations ruled by displacement capital. The Victorian Holocausts was a cautionary tale.