December 20, 2005
Environmental History of L.A.
A recent book review from H-NET:
William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds. Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles
"Any edited volume treads a fine metaphorical line between tapestry and crazy quilt. In the case of Los Angeles itself--its histories, topographies, cultures, micro-climates, and the profound pastiche of its urban form--the crazy quilt _is_ the tapestry. So it is also with the current volume, an enlightening mix of research and writing about the historical relationship between people and their environment in Los Angeles."
William Deverell and Greg Hise have deliberately lined up a wide array of perspectives on and interests in the natural environment of the L.A. region. The book contributes to the scholarly discussion of urban sustainability, teasing out its patterned challenges and nascent potentials from a highly localized and predominantly historical viewpoint.
The editors wholeheartedly orient themselves toward the burgeoning study of metropolitan nature: "how people transform nature in particular sites and how what is created in particular locales is generative for local and broader culture" (p. 4). They do this by enlisting the disciplinary contributions of geography, landscape architecture, biology, economics, anthropology, public policy, and literary non-fiction, as well as multiple branches of history: the social ecology of L.A. is getting the royal treatment.
The upshot of such a catholic approach is the opportunity to burrow beneath what are quickly becoming cliches in the canon of Southern California environmentalism. For instance, anthropologist L. Mark Raab calls into question the notion that native Californians lived in docile, spiritual harmony with the natural world until the arrival of Spanish settlers. He instead suggests that coastal natives faced their own crisis of resource intensification about a thousand years ago, and were long engaged in a dynamic struggle to balance food supplies with population demands. Similarly, when biologist Paula M. Schiffman details the destruction of the prairie ecosystem that accompanied European settlement, she also points out that the native Tongva people actively manipulated the environment through burning and selective seeding. This characterization of the native population as early resource managers trades an outdated romanticism for a historical realism that is both rehabilitative and instructive.
Other examples come through the examination of regional governance arrangements, from the adjudication of nineteenth-century land claims to the creation of twentieth-century flood control systems. While the annexation of California to the United States in 1846 clearly left Mexican rancho dons in a somewhat compromised position, economists Karen Clay and Werner Troesken make the strong case that the vast majority of land claims were legitimized under the Land Act of 1851, in a process that was lengthy and expensive for the federal government as much as anyone. Geographer Blake Gumprecht and historian Jared Orsi take up separate threads of the story of how the region's rivers came to be manipulated and channelized, but both take on the basic fallacy of flood control engineers as omniscient, omnipotent technocrats who singularly changed the face of the region's hydrology. Gumprecht details the thin historical memory and rapacious appetite for real estate returns that drove riverfront development patterns and subsequent demands for fail-safe flood control. Orsi finds primary fault with the engineers, but suggests that their comprehensive systems were every bit as chaotic and vulnerable as the set of environmental issues they supposedly solved.
Read the rest of this book review at:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=134011128702032
Or visit http://www.h-net.org/reviews/ for other H-Net published book reviews.
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