Sunshine and Smoke: The Environmental History of Los Angeles

Abstract

Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles is fascinating anthology on relationship between City of Angels and its often-turbulent environment. The nineteen essayists, which include scholars from number of disciplines, set out to explore, in words of editors William Deverell and Greg Hise, a large set of regional environmental factors, environmental perspectives, and environmental challenges (p. 1). Deverell and Hise have high expectations for collection, hoping that Land of Sunshine will contribute to contemporary discussions on sustainability of greater Los Angeles region in particular, and urban-industrial society in general. With this goal, editors, in solid introduction, press often-repeated but seldom recognized idea that history, indeed, matters. Contributing scholars have difficult task of investigating relationship between successive social, economic, and cultural regimes and southern California ecosystem. In this regard, metropolitan of Los Angeles comprises primary theme of book. Borrowing from concepts of effects of city building on neighboring regions advanced by William Cronon, Donald Worster, and host of other scholars, Land of Sunshine's authors examine people transform nature in particular sites and ... how what is created in particular locales is generative for local and broader culture (p. 4). Planning is unifying feature of Los Angeles's environmental history, and as result, city begins the twenty-first century struggling with consequences of success, in its urban arrangements, both hoped for an unintended (p. 10). As Deverell and Hise point out, functional segregation ... which we now decry, was seen by sanitarians, social workers, progressives, and advocates for urban redevelopment as cure-all for urban ills (p. 6). Other reformers saw automobile, now bane of many Southland residents, as critical tool for blurring divisions between urban and rural. Well-meaning proponents of exclusionary zoning and early forms of NIMBY-ism (The