What Environmentalism Could Learn from L.A.

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The cliché has it that there is no environment in Los Angeles, but as a mythical city facing hordes of environmental, economic and social challenges, there are a multitude of lessons there that we can use in developing and sustaining the environmental movement.

Apologies to James Lowell, but books praising Los Angeles are about that rare -- actually, rarer. That's one reason Rayner Banham's book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, is so thought provoking.

He applauds L.A., arguing at the end that "This sense of possibilities still ahead is part of the basic life-style of Los Angeles . . . [which] by comparison with the general body of official Western culture at the moment, increasingly given over to facile, evasive and self-regarding pessimism, can be a very refreshing attitude to encounter." He was writing in 1971, but if anything his point is more valid today. Moreover, although the irony is palpable, environmentalism could learn from L.A.

One must begin by understanding that L.A., more than any other city, is mythic. It is mythic because it is at the end of Route 66, where the (also mojo mythic) American West met the Pacific -- "California, Here I Come"; because Hollywood is there, and the reality of the movies keeps seeping into the postmodern fantasies of the city (is L.A. a movie pretending to be a city, or a city pretending to be a movie?); because it is film noir, rocker noir, and now gamer noir; because no city, no culture anywhere combines the world's prime iconology of psychological freedom -- the automobile -- with the infrastructure, the youth, the 'tude, the Valley gurl culture with such verve and insouciance. Las Vegas doesn't come close: it's an all too plastic stage set, but L.A.'s primal postmodernism perturbs reality itself.

And, of course, it's also the nightmare myth of environmentalists: A vampire city that sucks water from not just Northern California (which by being in the same state is asking for insult), but from the entire Southwest, and is now eyeing the Midwest. A culture that idolizes automobiles and freeways in a world that must be weaned off fossil fuels and cars, and on to mass transit. (A historical note: contrary to popular belief, the transport system in L.A. was framed not by freeways, but by the tracks of the Pacific Electric Railway; see their route map at www.erha.org/pe_system_map.jpg).

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