Ecology of Fear Quotes

“Despite the wishful thinking of evangelicals impatient for the Rapture or deep ecologists who believe that Gaia would be happiest with a thin sprinkling of hunter-gatherers, megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region’s high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents.”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

“Although it costs taxpayers more than twice as much to send an 18-year-old to prison as to university, politicians reap greater rewards from lobbyists and conservative voters for building cells than for building classrooms.”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

“South Central Los Angeles, for example, is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing-and-jobs ghetto in the postwar period, it is now evolving into an off-net electronic ghetto.”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

“A recent Chicago study, for example, has shown that it costs $60,000 to hook up a new house in an outer suburb to the utility infrastructure as against $5,000 for the same house in an existing suburb. “Who foots the bill? Taxpayers in the established suburbs.”72”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster