Shaking us out of complacency

“Cadillac Desert” by the late Marc Reisner is one of a handful of books that are essential to understanding California and the American West. Along with Carey McWilliams’ “California: The Great Exception,” Mike Davis’ “City of Quartz” and Kevin Starr’s magisterial series of California histories that started with “Americans and the California Dream,” Reisner’s work is both challenging and consciousness-raising. Critics who regard him as an alarmist and a doomsayer may argue with him, but they cannot ignore him.

Now, remarkably, we have a new and important book from Reisner, who died of colon cancer three years ago at 51. “A Dangerous Place” is a slender and tightly constructed book, far less ambitious than “Cadillac Desert,” but it is not merely cobbled together out of a dead writer’s unpublished scraps -- rather, it is the work of a critic, historian and stylist at the height of his powers, an environmental prophet in full and commanding voice.

Reisner’s posthumously published book begins with two simple but alarming facts, one demographic and the other geologic. First, he points out that one of every two Americans living west of the 100th meridian lives in California, and most of California’s huge and ever-growing population is crammed into the Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay area. And second, he points out that these two megalopolises -- “chaotic, crawling hives,” as he puts it -- sit astride “one of the most violently active seismic zones in the world.”

“In an American West distinguished by its emptiness, they are gargantuan anomalies,” warns Reisner. “[M]ost of its inhabitants have settled, and will continue to settle, where they shouldn’t.”

Revisiting some of the same turf that he covered in “Cadillac Desert,” Reisner reminds us that the American West exists as it does today only because of the ambitious and expensive system of dams, pumps and aqueducts that draws water from far-distant rivers and sends it to urban centers, San Francisco and Los Angeles alike. California, he reminds us, must be likened to Babylon and Rome in the grandiosity of its public works. But there is a distinction to be made, a dark and dire one, between ancient civilizations and our own.

“So California snubs nature -- what else is new?” he muses. “But among civilizations that have overextended themselves, California, rather than settle its human hordes where its water is and earthquake zones aren’t, has done the opposite.”

The scarcity of water and the likelihood of earthquakes, according to Reisner, combine to create a particularly unusual danger. Reisner, in fact, confesses that he was unaware of the peculiar interplay between water and earthquakes when he wrote “Cadillac Desert,” and it was an admonishing letter from a geologist with the California Department of Water Resources named Michael Finch who alerted him to his oversight. An earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area, warned Finch, could result in a massive collapse of the levee system in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, cutting off the supply of water for much of Southern California.

“I remember being stunned by Finch’s scenario,” writes Reisner. “Then I forgot all about it. Daily life does this to you in California.”

Reisner proceeds to conjure up the “Delta Doomsday” scenario in heart-shaking detail, imagining an earthquake along the Hayward fault that takes place in his imagination on Feb. 28, 2005. “The noise emanates from the basement of time, a Cyclopean orchestra tuning instruments,” he writes. “An epiphany dawns: This is It!” Roads buckle, high-rise buildings implode, hillside homes slough their foundations, airport runways liquefy into mudflats, bridges collapse into San Francisco Bay. “In a single minute, downtown Oakland has become Sarajevo, or Chechnya.” And the levees that divide up the delta into farms and fields disappear into a “giant newborn sea.”

The failure of the levees, Reisner points out, is what poses a threat to the rest of California. “A vacuum has been created here,” he explains, “a vacuum that water, obeying gravity, must fill.” Salt water from San Francisco Bay is sucked into the delta, and the fresh water that was once pumped southward to the farms of the San Joaquin Valley and the suburbs of Southern California must now be used to flush out the delta.

“Fate, whimsy, ignorance, sheer will -- any number of things conspire to put a city where it is,” muses Reisner. “Will Los Angeles relocate, now that it’s lost half its water? Where?”

Harrowing though it may be, “A Dangerous Place” is not without its light and lively moments. Reisner, for example, is roused to a display of rhetorical fireworks when he contemplates Harrison Gray Otis, founder of the Los Angeles Times and “the avatar of Southern California’s growth,” whose appearance he describes as “big and blubbery, with a perpetual scowl and an Otto von Bismarck mustache and goatee,” and whose politics he characterizes as “reactionary even by the standard of the Robber Baron era.”

“He was worse than an archetype,” cracks Reisner. “[H]e was a caricature of an archetype.”

Then, too, Reisner loves to tweak our sensibilities and challenge our comfortable assumptions. He points out that San Francisco, not Los Angeles, “was the first American city to build itself a Roman aqueduct.” He suggests that Los Angeles enjoys a sustainable water supply that would have permitted it to “grow, in an orderly manner, into a medium-sized city -- like Dayton or Topeka.” And he argues that architects and civil engineers were slow to understand the seismic forces that are building up beneath the cities and dams of California.

“When the Beatles made their appearance on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ ” he quips, “plate tectonics theory still qualified as heresy.”

But above all, “A Dangerous Place” is a deadly earnest effort to call our attention to the peril that lies, quite literally, directly beneath our feet. He complains, for example, that environmentalists, advocates of mass transit and even “the bicycling community” were all “seriously concerned” about various aspects of the Bay Area bridge replacements that were discussed after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, but “the earthquake clock kept on ticking” as the haggling dragged on for more than a decade.

Reisner is no longer here to raise the alarm, but there could be no more fitting reminder of his role in the debate over the future of California, and no greater tribute to the vision and intelligence that he brought to bear on that debate, than the book he left behind.