Did Mike Davis get it right in making “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”?

The wildfires in Los Angeles county have brought a multitude of difficult and prevailing questions to the forefront of the region as well as the system of capitalism. Joining host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast is Jacobin Magazine columnist Ben Burgis to discuss writer Mike Davis and how his book, “The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster,” (February 1998) serves as a kind of prognosis for everything going wrong in Los Angeles today.

The two dissect the multitude of issues at play in the wildfire disasters: the conceit of real estate developers testing the limits of nature, the passive and active exploitation of the working class to make and now handle the disaster, the greed of for-profit insurance companies cancelling policies, and the decisions by a major county like Los Angeles in foregoing budgets to handle these inevitable disasters.

Burgis asks, “If the public is just frankly going to be on the hook for it, do we, in fact, need to be building this densely in areas this prone to fire? I think at the very least, that's something that should be a question for public discussion in a way that it's just not.”