“This other Eden, demi-paradise,this precious stone set in the sil-ver sea, this earth, this realm, thisLos Angeles.”

—Steve Martin (and Shake-speare), L.A. Story

“The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angelesto slide into the Pacific or be swallowed by the SanAndreas Fault.” —Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear

“Experience the beauty… of another culture whilelearning more about wastewater treatment and reuse.”

—Brochure for the combination water reclamationplant and Japanese garden in the San Fernando Valley

PROLOGUE: FROMWALDEN TO L.A.

T here are manyplaces in L.A. youcan go to thinkabout the city, andmy own favorite

has become the Los Angeles River, which looks like anoutsize concrete sewer and is most famous for beingforgotten.The L.A. River flows fifty-one miles throughthe heart of L.A. County. It is enjoying herculean effortsto revitalize it, and yet commuters who have driven overit five days a week for ten years cannot tell you where itis. Along the river, the midpoint lies roughly at the con-

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J E N N Y P R I C E

THIRTEEN WAYS OF SEEING NATURE IN L.A.

WE NEED TO REWRITE ENTIRELY THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT NATURE, AND LOS ANGELES

IS THE BEST PLACE TO DO IT.

PART ONE: The First Six Ways and a Trip to the River

DISCUSSED: Nathanael West, Mike Davis, Raymond Chandler,Temescal Canyon,Dolphins, Hawks, Ducks, Mango Body Whips, Coyotes as Urban Terrorists,

Seismic Retrofitting, Feral Peacocks,Aaron Spelling,The Concrete Straight-Jacket

Robert Adams, Redlands, Looking Toward Los Angeles, 1983. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

fluence with the Arroyo Seco, nearDodger Stadium downtown. L.A.was founded near here in 1781: thisarea offers the most reliable above-ground supply of freshwater in theL.A. basin. It’s a miserable spot now,a trash-strewn wasteland of emptylots, steel fences, and railroad tracksbeneath a tangle of freeway over-passes: it looks like a Blade Runnerset that a crew disassembled andthen put back together wrong. It’s

not the most scenic spot to visit theriver but may be the finest place onthe river to think about L.A.

Like so many writers whocome to Los Angeles—and I movedhere seven years ago—I have suc-cumbed inevitably to the siren callto write about the city. The long-established procedure has been toexplore why one loves it or hates it,or both, and to proclaim loudly inthe process that L.A. is the Ameri-

can dream or the American night-mare. The tradition tempts writerswith a combination of navel-gazingand arm-waving that proves impos-sible to resist for too long.

Of course, I am a naturewriter—a unique brand of writerthat has felt no compulsion what-soever to write about L.A. andeven less to live here. Though youcould toss an apple core into thebushes in Missoula, Montana, and

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Steven B. Smith, San Fernando Road, Los Angeles River [the confluence area], Los Angeles, California, 1995.

hit a nature writer, I have foundfour practitioners so far among theten million people in L.A. County,and one, my friend Bill Fox, fled toPortland for a couple of years. “Isthere nature in L.A.?” people typi-cally respond when I say I writeabout nature in this town. But Ihave ended up here happily, andBill has just returned, exactlybecause L.A. has become the finestplace in America to think andwrite about nature.

More urgently, L.A. is the idealplace to tackle the problem of howto write about nature. In the pasttwenty-five years, the venerableAmerican literature of nature writ-ing has become distressingly mar-ginal. Even my nature-loving andenvironmentalist friends tell methey never read it. Earnest, pious,and quite allergic to irony: none ofthese trademark qualities plays wellin 2006. But to me, the core trou-ble is that nature writers have givenus endless paeans to the wonders ofwildness since Thoreau fled toWalden Pond, but need to tell usfar more about our everyday livesin the places we actually live. Per-haps you’re not worrying about thefailures of this literary genre as aserious problem. But in my ownarm-waving manifesto about L.A.and America, I will proclaim thatthe crisis in nature writing is one ofour most pressing national culturalcatastrophes.

I love L.A. more than I hate it.I wasn’t supposed to. A nature loverfrom suburban St. Louis, I haveenjoyed a fierce and enduringattachment to the wilds of the

Southern Rockies. I was supposedto love Boulder, Colorado, where Isettled after graduate school in thehope that it might be the perfectplace—and it’s a town that everyday adores itself in the mirror andconfirms its perfection. But bypondering all the ways of seeingnature in L.A., I can explain why Ihave decided that I love L.A.instead—and why the L.A. River(site of the famous chase scenes inGrease and Terminator 2) hasbecome my favorite place in L.A.,and “Enjoy the beauty of anotherculture while learning more aboutwastewater treatment and reuse”my working motto as a naturewriter. Also why so many of thebest-known interpreters of L.A. asthe American dream and night-mare, from Nathanael West toRaymond Chandler to Joan Did-ion to Mike Davis, have writtenobsessively about nature.Why per-haps the most quoted lines in allthe fabled L.A. literature are Chan-dler’s passage on the gale-forceautumn winds:

It was one of those hot dry SantaAnas…. On nights like that everybooze party ends in a fight. Meeklittle wives feel the edge of thecarving knife and study theirhusbands’ necks. Anything canhappen.

And why we need to rewriteentirely the stories we tell aboutnature, and why L.A. is the bestplace to do it.

ONE WAY OF SEEINGNATURE IN L.A. :

AS NONEXISTENT

“I s there nature in L.A.?”The question some-times betrays sarcasm,

but sometimes not. L.A., after all,has long been decried as the Anti-Nature: it’s the American mega-lopolis with brown air, fouledbeaches, pavement to the horizon,and a concrete river. It’s sort of theDeath Star to American naturelovers—the place from where thedestruction of nature emanates—which is why woodsy towns likeMissoula and Boulder hail them-selves as the anti-L.A.

And this is the reigning naturestory we tell about L.A.: There isno nature here.

A SECOND WAY: AS THE WILD THINGS

B ut this story hews to ahistorically powerful def-inition of nature as only

the wild things, which we destroyand banish when we build cities.This way to define nature—thegreat American nature story, andthe heart and soul of nature writ-ing—has become so firmly en-trenched that seeing nature inother ways has been next to im-possible.

Still, even by this inadequatedefinition, L.A. sports a great dealof nature: the extensive beaches,mountains, and canyons that havealways brought people here.A fewnature-writing anthologies

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include a single rogue piece aboutfinding wildness inside a city. IfL.A. symbolizes “the end of nature”(to use Bill McKibben’s danger-ously catchy phrase), it actually hasmore than enough real fodder forsuch tales, if you want to writeabout the sunset on Broad Beachin Malibu or the hawks soaring inTemescal Canyon or the dolphinsleaping just offshore or how yourheart soars like a hawk or leapslike a dolphin as you watch thesun set offshore from atop the trailin Temescal Canyon.

But there are so many morekinds of nature stories to tell here.I head for L.A.’s wild spots when Ican, and delight in hawks, dolphins,and sunsets as much as the nextnature lover. I have a special softspot for ducks. But the anthologiesignore about 90 percent of thenature in L.A. and all the otherplaces we live, as well as most ofpeople’s encounters with nature onEarth. What the crisis of naturewriting amounts to, in a few words,is that Thoreau really, really needsto Get on the Bus.

And my own list of favoriterepresentative topics for a morecomprehensive, on the bus naturewriting in Los Angeles would haveto include mango body whips, thesocial geography of air, Zu-Zu themurdered Chihuahua, and Maple-ton Drive near Bel Air. And, ofcourse, the L.A. River, where allthe possible kinds of nature storiesin L.A. converge.

A THIRD WAY: AS THERESOURCES WE USE

T he mango body whipstory begins like this: soonafter I moved to L.A., a

woman who ran into my car whileit was parked on the USC campusleft a note on the back of a receiptfor a mango body whip, whichshe’d purchased at SkinMarket atthe Beverly Center mall. What’s amango body whip? I didn’t know.Skin product? More perverse? Imade a trip to the Center, andfound out that it’s a mango-infusedthick and buttery skin cream.

Nature stories abound in suchan encounter. Begin with the man-goes. Follow them, and you can tellan intricate set of stories as farmworkers harvest mangoes in ruralMexico, and drivers truck them intothe L.A. area and into the SkinMar-ket factory in Simi Valley—just overthe L.A. County line—whereworkers use industrial technologiesto turn them into skin butter, anddistributors transport them toupscale malls like the Beverly Cen-ter, and shoppers cart them away tobathrooms in adjacent Beverly Hillsand West Hollywood and to otherplaces throughout the country.

Mango body whip stories, inother words, look for and followthe nature we use, and watch itmove in and out of the city, to trackspecifically how we transform natu-ral resources into the mountains ofstuff with which we literally buildcities and sustain our urban lives.These tales might track naturethrough cars. They could be about

soap or magazines. They can lookfor the nature in refrigerators, sushi,dog food, TVs, linguine, baseballcaps, closet organizers, digital cam-eras, bracelets, concert halls, laptopcomputers, bicycles. If you tell sto-ries that follow nature through ourmaterial lives, you will see a lot ofL.A.—the city’s warehouses, facto-ries, commercial strips, and culturalcenters, and its residential neighbor-hoods, some of which have a greatdeal more stuff than others.

A FOURTH WAY: AS DIFFERENT

TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE

W hich brings me to thesocial geography of air.The air in L.A., if pol-

luted, is not equally polluted every-where. The coastal and mountainareas, which tend to be the wealthi-est, enjoy the cleanest air on average.On the inland flats, the poorest, leastwhite, and most industrial neigh-borhoods in L.A. suffer the worstair, along with alarming asthmarates. Another way to put it is thatthe Angelenos who work in and livenear the factories that manufacturemango body whips breathe far morepolluted air than the residents whoare most likely to be the body whipdevotees. I live on Venice Beach,near Ozone Avenue—named with-out irony in the clean-air early1900s, but still one of the safestplaces to breathe in L.A. County.Twenty miles inland, the SoutheastL.A. area—the most industrializedurban area in the U.S.,with many ofL.A.’s lowest-income and most

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heavily Latino neighborhoods—oc-cupies 1 percent of the county byacreage but generates 18 percent ofthe toxic air emissions.

While mango body whip storiesfollow nature as resources throughL.A., geography of air tales narratewho encounters what nature where.These tales begin with “who.”Theyask, importantly, who benefits mostand who suffers the worst conse-

quences as who uses and transformsnature. But they also ask who eatswhat foods and who doesn’t, andwho plants what in their gardens,and who lives nearest and farthestaway from a city’s parks, and whohunts and fishes or watches birds,and who chooses parrots or pit bullsor rabbits or goldfish as pets. Thisbrand of tale asks how different peo-ple encounter nature differently.

Nature writing has ignoredthese third and fourth ways of see-ing. It has been a literary universe inwhich we visit and contemplatewild nature, but seldom use andtransform nature: when the mangobecomes a mango body whip, itceases to be nature, as does the oil ina laptop computer or a maple treethat becomes a table.And the genredescribes nature as a unitary force or

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Robert Adams, Redlands. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

kind of place that Man encounters,and where we’ll find universalmeanings—but seldom somethingyou encounter from a specific socialposition and point of view.

But such a way of seeing canfully explain exactly no encounterwith nature in 2006, whether in awilderness area, on a farm, or at theBeverly Center mall. I love to gohiking on the vast trail network herein the Santa Monica Mountains.Sure, that’s a typical nature story inwhich I seek refuge and simplicityand quiet in L.A.’s wilds as antidoteto the stress and noise of my dailylife. But to narrate all the encounterswith nature that define my hike, Ialso have to ask where the naturalresources in my Gore-tex shell andhiking boots come from—the oil,stone, metals, and animal skins in mytwenty-first-century hiker gear,which keeps me warm and dry andmakes my closet look like an REIoutlet. How do they connect me tothe global transformation of nature?And how do they shape my experi-ence of hiking? The Simple Life outin nature is complex as hell. I’d alsohave to narrate how wealthier Ange-lenos are more likely to live nearL.A.’s mountain parks—and to owncars to get to them. And how doesthe particular work I do at a desk allweek make a strenuous weekendhike sound like a good idea in thefirst place? The hike has to be a storyabout how our connections to oneanother define our encounters withnature. And it’s about how theNational Park Service in the SantaMonica Mountains has chosen myfavorite trail routes, and how they

manage fire suppression, and howthey draw up hundreds of rules andpolicies to keep both the visitors andthe parklands happy.

A FIFTH WAY: AS LANDSCAPE

AND ECOLOGY WEBUILD IN AND MANAGE

W hich brings me toZu-Zu the murderedChihuahua. As the

Los Angeles Times reported, Zu-Zu’s story begins, or ends, like this:In summer 2002, a coyote enteredthe yard of a casting director in theSilver Lake area west of Down-town and ate her Chihuahua, Zu-Zu. Coyotes, her husband warnedbitterly, are “urban terrorists”: thebereft owner said,“I have no liber-ty in my front yard.” A letter tothe Times, though, lionized thecoyote as the real victim, an in-digenous animal encroached on byevil yippy Chihuahuas (if, like me,you tend to agree, then try substi-tuting a Labrador retriever puppyfor Zu-Zu).

When you bring domestic dogsinto a landscape of native animals,then the resident carnivores are like-ly to see the pets as prey. When youuse and change a landscape, then theplace will respond. Nature is neverpassive. Every place has an active,very particular ecology, climate,topography, geology, flora, fauna.Zu-Zu stories narrate how wechange places and how they re-spond and how we respond backand so on and so on. They’re aboutpaving, building, planting, bulldoz-

ing, fires and fire suppression,pollut-ing and cleaning up,pet keeping andcoyote predations, earthquakes andseismic retrofitting,water supply andflood management, and sewers andgas lines and lawns and gardens androads and trails and parks.

Nature writers have in fact toldthis kind of story—usually, how-ever, with an evil Chihuahua moral,in which Man stomps into natureprimeval and ravages and desacral-izes it. But as guidance for how wecan inhabit places, seeing peopleinevitably as invaders in these sto-ries works about as well as brandingcoyotes as terrorists. An “evil Chi-huahua” moral demands that weleave the nature we live in as it is (inwhich case we’ll die), but a “terror-ist coyote” moral urges us to er-adicate nature (in which case we’lldie). Neither approach helps usnavigate how to keep pet animals ina landscape with native predators—or how to make a road or build ahouse or ensure a water supply orfigure out how to keep the air andwater clean. Ideally, Zu-Zu storiesshould help us ask how we cancreate livable and sustainable cities.They should be deeply informed byknowledge of the ecology, geology,and natural history of the place.They should help us walk theessential line between doing no-thing in nature and doing whateverwe want. Like mango body whiptales, they should seek to under-stand what our connections tonature actually are so that we canthink about what our connectionsshould look like.

These are a few topics the Los

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Angeles Times has reported on inrecent months: water deals in theWest, discarded American com-puters shipped to China, dog parks,an L.A. landfill in the Mojave desert,the hybrid Toyota Priuses, dieselpollution in industrial south L.A.,battles against new developments inthe outer suburbs, new parks on theL.A. River, high silicosis ratesamong Chinese trinket-factory

workers, oil refineries in Venezuela,farmer’s markets, the best restaurantsfor peach dishes, sustainable water-use practices in Santa Monica, toxicplastics residues in polar bears in theArctic, neighborhood lawn regula-tions, the fight over removing theferal peacocks who scream everymorning in the Palos Verdes neigh-borhoods, pesticides buildup in frogpopulations, battles for public beach

access in Malibu.These are nature topics all, about

how we live in and fight aboutnature, and about how we use itmore and less fairly and sustainably,and about the enormous conse-quences for our lives in L.A., as wellas for places and people and wildlifeeverywhere.And such topics beg fora literature—for a poetry, for an aes-thetics—because to clearly ponder

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Steven B. Smith, Catch Basin, Sprinklers, Santa Clarita, California, 2000.

our lives in and out of cities,we haveto be able to imagine and reimaginethese connections to nature.

A SIXTH WAY: AS A PREMIER SOURCE

OF HUMAN MEANING

I magine the site of Los AngelesCounty four thousand yearsago. The people who lived

here—the ancestors of the Tongva,the Chumash, the Tataviam—usedbirds and deer to make food andclothes, and turned trees into shel-ter, and turned water, rocks, and dirtinto energy, tools, boats, medicine,religious objects, art. (And in 2006B.C.E., connections to nature werenot all that simple either.) The peo-ple used and changed nature inorder to live.They told stories aboutnature to explain the world and toguide their actions within it.

What do we do in Los Angelesnow? Essentially the same thing.We use nature and tell stories aboutit to live and explain our lives. Touse nature is to be human: that’s apretty fair working definition. Totell stories is to be a human ex-plaining how things work.The sto-ries that any people tell about na-ture are some of the most basicstories they tell. Is there nature inL.A.? The fact that the majornature story we tell in L.A., as in allcities, is that there is no nature heredoes not make this tale any lessbasic, powerful, or telling.

How do we make nature mean-ingful? “What nature means” talesare one last category of story I’llsuggest, and nature writing has

shown great interest in this kind ofstory—in fact the quest for mean-ing has defined the genre’s verysoul. Of course, nature writers haveattached various meanings to agreat range of places, animals, andplants. Yosemite? Majesty. A sacredplace.The desert? Peace. Harshness.Clarity. Songbirds? Beauty. Delica-cy. Earthquakes? Fury andvengeance. Water? A metaphor forlife. But nature? The ur-meaningthat frames all others? Wildness.Not-us-ness. The anti-modern. Aplace apart. Salvation. Refuge. Andthis ur-meaning historically hasreigned as an exceptionally power-ful American cultural assumption.Nature writing has preached it ten-aciously, but hardly invented thisway of seeing and of refusing to see.The vision of wild nature as coun-terpoint to a corrupted moderncivilization has always played a cen-tral role in American national mythsand identity. (Think City on a Hill,the mythic frontier, a hundred yearsof Westerns, and landscape photog-raphy.) To define nature as the wildthings apart from cities is one of thegreat fantastic American stories.

And it’s one of the great fantas-tic American denials. On MapletonDrive in Holmby Hills in the BelAir area, in the Santa MonicaMountain foothills, the TV produc-er Aaron Spelling has built what’swidely publicized as the starship ofHollywood homes—a 56,550-square-foot French limestone man-sion with 123 rooms, with tworooms for wrapping gifts and a rosegarden on top of one of fourgarages. Here are two generally

ignored facts about Spelling’sfamous homestead. First, it is ahouse of nature: Spelling built it, hasmaintained it, and stocks it withfantastic quantities of oil, stone,metals, dirt,water, and wood (a like-ly forest’s worth of wrapping paper,to begin with). And second, thereare very few maples on MapletonDrive. Maybe maples grew here inabundance once, and maybe not.Either way, the street enjoys the ideaof maple trees, which conjures abucolic refuge above the smog,noise, and torrential activity of themegalopolis below. Call it maplemojo. Smaller manses of nature linethe rest of Mapleton Drive as wellas the neighboring streets Park-wood, Greendale, Brooklawn, Bev-erly Glen. No parks, no woods, nodales, no brooks, no glens. Just themojo of wild nature.

Mapleton Drive showcases thedenial intrinsic to the great Ameri-can nature story. To say there’s nonature in cities is a convenient wayof seeing if I like being a naturelover and environmentalist but don’twant to give up any of my stuff. Wecherish nature as an idea of wildnesswhile losing track of the real naturein our very houses.We flee to wildnature as a haven from high-techindustrial urban life, but refuse tosee that we madly use and transformwild nature to sustain the exact lifefrom which we seek retreat. Wemake sacred our encounters withwild nature but thereby desacralizeall other encounters. Or in otherwords, if we cannot clearly under-stand cities and our lives withinthem unless we keep track of our

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connections to nature, still theremay be some basic things we prefernot to see and understand.

Ideally, if there’s any one argu-ment I could persuade you of, it’sthat our foundational nature storiesshould see and cherish our mun-dane, economic, utilitarian, dailyencounters with nature—so thatwhat car you drive and how youget your water and how you build

a house should be transparent actsthat are as sacred as hiking to thetop of Point Mugu in the northernSanta Monica Mountains and gaz-ing out over the Pacific Ocean towatch the dolphins leap, the ducksfloat, and the sun set. True, there’s alovely yearning in the Americanvision of nature as a wild placeapart—for simplicity, for a slowerlife.There’s great wonder about the

natural world, and terrific love forwild places and things. There’slegitimate bewilderment, inresponse to the mind-bogglingcomplexity of modern connected-ness (how could I possibly keeptrack of where the nature in myToyota wagon comes from?).There’s a large dose of real regret,for the wanton destructiveness oftoxic industrialism and excessive

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Robert Adams, San Bernardino County, Santa Ana River. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

consumerism. And there’s power-ful, overriding denial, in the serviceof powerful self-indulgence andmaterial desire, that pushes us toimagine nature out of rather thaninto our lives.

RIVER TRIP #1

J ust how powerful? Well, inL.A., enough to let us losetrack of an entire river—

not just the nature in the stuff inour houses. We can’t find L.A.’smajor waterway, which sustainedL.A. for 150 years and now runsunder ten gridlocked freewaysthrough the heart of L.A. County.A fifty-one-mile river in plainsight: lost.

The L.A. River is one of thecity’s central natural facts. L.A. in-habits a river basin, and the majorriver drains large portions of threemountain ranges out to the Pacific.The L.A. Basin, while large enoughfor a megalopolis, is small for thatmuch drainage, and the L.A. Riverconsequently poses a greater flooddanger than most urban U.S. rivers.(Mark Twain wrote that he’d falleninto a Southern California riverand “come out all dusty”—butapparently hadn’t seen one of theraging flash floods.) In the 1930s,when a last-straw series of floodsmade half of L.A. canoeable, thecity signed up the U.S. ArmyCorps of Engineers, who heroicallyproceeded to dig a concrete strait-jacket for the river and all its tribu-taries—a twenty-five-year projectthat required 3.5 million barrels ofconcrete and remains the Corps’

largest public works project west ofthe Mississippi. The Corps andCounty Public Works rechristenedthe river the “flood control chan-nel.”They recategorized it as infra-structure, with the freeways andelectrical grid. To the public, in anycase, the channel no longer lookedwild enough to be a river or tocount as nature at all. And this ishow L.A. lost its river—not lost asin no longer had one, since L.A.actually still had it, but lost as incould no longer see or find it.

If a city is built and sustainedthrough using, managing, and im-agining nature, then however yousee and manage your central natu-ral facts should have massive city-wide consequences. What happenswhen you deny that your river is ariver?

The saga of the concrete L.A.River plays out as every brand ofnature story. First, a “what naturemeans” tale: Angelenos reimaginedthe river as nonexistent, and ban-ished it from their collective imag-ination of history and place. Also, atale of wild things. Many birds andfrogs continued to use the river(they apparently hadn’t receivedthe memo that it was no longer ariver), but other birds and most fishspecies did disappear, along withextensive wetlands and riparianhabitat.

Also, a Zu-Zu story.As Los An-geles altered the Southern Califor-nia landscape to control the river’sfloods, we largely ignored the basichydrological processes. The jack-eted river could no longer flow outinto its basin, and therefore no

longer replenished the aquifer withwater, the soils with nutrients, andthe beaches with sand.The countydesigned the storm sewers, how-ever, to empty into the channel,which promptly turned the riverinto L.A.’s Grand Sewer, whichgathers pesticides, motor oil, trash,dog feces, and many hundredsmore pollutants from driveways,lawns, roads, and parking lots acrossthe 834-square-mile watershed andrushes the toxins downstream intothe Pacific Ocean. And yes, flood-waters have stayed safely within theconcrete walls, but the extra waterfrom the storm sewers has actuallydramatically increased the volumeof the river’s floods.

The cement channel also con-stitutes L.A.’s strategy to movestormwater, that life-giving naturalresource, through the city. Here isthe river’s mango body whip story:a city that inhabits a place on Earthwith a semi-arid Mediterraneanclimate pours as much of the rain-water as possible, which we getfrom the sky for free, into thestorm sewers, through the river,and into the Pacific—and then paysdearly to import water by aqueductfrom up to four hundred milesaway. Call it watering the ocean, bydraining watersheds across theWest. And finally, a social geo-graphy of air story. L.A. may havewild places, but as the Americancity that has so consistently privi-leged private property over publicspaces, it also historically has setaside remarkably little public parkspace per capita—and L.A.’s poor-est areas suffer the worst shortages

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of neighborhood park space, enjoythe least private green space, and liefarthest from the mountain parks.In this infamously fragmented city,the poorest neighborhoods alsoinvariably have been the most cutup by freeways and industry. Theconcrete channel turned the basin’smost logical site for green space,and the city’s major natural con-nector, into an outsize open sewerthat carved a no-man’s-land

through many of the city’s mostfragmented and park-starved areas.

In sum, L.A.’s errant treatmentof a major natural feature has pro-foundly exacerbated nearly all ofL.A.’s notorious troubles—envi-ronmental chaos, social inequities,community fragmentation, watershortages, water imperialism, anderasure of civic memory. The goodnews, on the other hand—and I’llget to the restoration efforts on the

river presently—is that if you useand manage this nature more sus-tainably and fairly, you can makethe city a healthier, more equitable,and all-around lovelier place to livein. First, though, you have to seethe nature in the place.You have tofind it.

I s there nature in L.A.? Far morethan our philosophies dreamof, and much more than in

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Steven B. Smith, Garbage Day, Castaic, California, 2000.

Portland or Boulder—more, possi-bly, on Mapleton Drive alone thanin some small towns in Iowa. Onemay as well ask if there is water inthe ocean. To get on the bus—toimagine a more vital and compre-hensive nature writing—is to deemthe question plain dumb silly, alongwith “Where is nature?” and maybeeven “What is nature?” and espe-cially that nonsense about the end

of nature, which makes only asmuch sense as declaring an end torocks or air or water and bespeaksexactly the way of thinking bywhich L.A. lost its river.The pow-ering question of this literatureshould become, rather, What natureis it?—and then, How do we usenature? How do we change nature?How does nature react? How dowe react back? How do we imagine

nature? Who uses and changes andimagines nature? And often themost vital questions of all:How sus-tainably? How fairly? How well? !

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Robert Adams, Century Plant, near Ontario, California, 1983. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

The second part of this essay will appear in theMay 2006 issue. This essay appeared in anearlier form in Land of Sunshine:An Envi-ronmental History of Metropolitan Los Ange-les. (William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds.University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.)

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A SEVENTH WAY: ASNEARLY INFINITELY

ABUNDANT

The place is rapidly… sinking into aBlade Runner dystopian futurism…. The air is unbreath-able, the water undrinkable, the transit system impenetrable…

—Time Out Los Angeles Guide (the guide I pur-chased upon moving here in 1998)

L. A. County spreads out over4,084 square miles. It is the sec-ond largest U.S. metropolis(after New York) by size andpopulation: more people live in

the entire four-county greater LosAngeles area than in each of the leastpopulous forty-two states. L.A. ranksas the largest U.S. industrial centerand hosts the nation’s busiest port.

I live in a world Valhalla for wealth and consumerism.The nearly incomprehensible quantity of people’s con-nections to nature in L.A. could mobilize a lightinfantry of nature writers.And all this nature is of suchcritical importance because these connections—howwe use and move and transform nature here—entail en-ormous consequences for places in the U.S. andthroughout the world.

There has been Walden Pond, and there have beenJohn Muir’s Yosemite and Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek

J E N N Y P R I C E

THIRTEEN WAYS OF SEEING NATURE IN L.A.

A FEW NEW METHODS FOR THE OLD PRACTICE OF USING LOS ANGELES TO THINK

PART TWO: Another seven ways and an arrival at the confluence

DISCUSSED: Urban Demographics, Consumerist Valhallas, Nature Writing,The American Eden, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Muggings, Suntan Lotion, Hydrology,

The L.A. River Greenway, Clean Air Legislation, Nature’s Revenge,

Michael Light, from Los Angeles O2.12.04. I-5 Looking Southeast Over San Fernando Pass.Image courtesy the artist and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco/New York.

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and Barry Lopez’s Arctic. And onthe reimagined map of nature writ-ing, there should be Los Angeles—and not just because nature is sowildly abundant here, and whathappens to it so globally consequen-tial. L.A. is also the place where thefailures of our stories have playedout in such exaggerated form, andwhere the usefulness of really seeingnature is perhaps most urgent. Be-cause L.A. has always enjoyed anespecially dramatic relationship tonature, to stories, and above all, tonature stories.

AN EIGHTH WAY: AS EXCEPTIONALLY

ICONIC

Since the start of the ’90s… many of us[were left] with the distinct impressionthat… maybe the Four Horsemen wereusing the L.A. basin to warm up beforeriding on to the actual Apocalypse.

—Time Out Los Angeles Guide

H as any city engenderedmore enthusiastic myth-mongering? In L.A.’s

special, unstoppable, even psychotictradition of storytelling, we’vetended to state the powerful visionof nature as a place apart, like mostgrand American tales, in especiallydramatic style. After all, who asks,“Is there nature in New York?” or“Is there nature in Chicago?” Onemight say that New York andChicago and Pittsburgh have littlenature, but L.A., we like to say, hasnone at all. Not one whit: L.A. haslong symbolized all other cities asplaces where nature is not.

Rain… usually [leaves] people strand-ed atop their vehicles or entombed insinking homes.

—The National GeographicTraveler: Los Angeles

H ow have nature writers,alone in literary circles,been able to resist L.A.?

It’s actually quite a lot of fun to writeabout, even if (maybe especially if )you hate it.The glee in the excoria-tions is as palpable as the rapture inthe paeans. New Eden, ParadiseLost, Utopia, Dystopia, City of theSecond Chance, the Great WrongPlace. Since the late nineteenth cen-tury boosters marketed L.A. as theAmerican Eden, L.A.’s interpretershave tended to declare that the Cityof Angels (also the City of FallenAngels) spells the success or failureof the American dream. It’s the landof economic opportunity or classwarfare, ethnic diversity or racialhatred, the democracy of homeown-ership or the evils of suburbansprawl. Whether describing sexualliberation, environmental ruin, orsoaring homicide rates, L.A. storiestend to wax dramatic about whathappens here to proclaim that life inAmerica has gone fantastically rightor wrong.“It is raining in Los Ange-les,” the New York Times reported onthe first fall rains in 2002: “Peopleare dying on the highways. Planesare falling out of the sky.” Can youimagine such a Times report aboutthe rains in San Diego or Houston?“There’s a certain kind of white,piercing empty light to the LosAngeles sky,” wrote a film reviewerin Entertainment Weekly shortly after-

ward,“that can make a person wantto commit suicide.” And for whatother city would the informationalguidebooks—not just the fiction,op-eds, news coverage, and academ-ic scholarship, as well as the weathercoverage and traffic reports—de-scribe the place as a staging groundfor the apocalypse?

Near the [Santa Monica] Pier, thepotential for getting mugged [is] almostas good as that for getting a tan.

—Fodor’s upCLOSE Los Angeles

T he oft cited refrains “Am-erican dream” and “Amer-ican nightmare” can set

eyes rolling in Los Angeles itself. Inreality, planes do not tumble fromthe sky and people do not head fortheir car roofs when it rains here,and you could spend years and asmall fortune on sunscreen waitingto be mugged near the Santa Mon-ica pier. L.A. is not inordinatelydangerous: this is not a Gotham indire need of a bat signal.The sprawlcity does boast a plethora of greatwalking neighborhoods. It can befrustrating to live in such a relent-lessly iconic city. But proclaimingthe meaning of L.A. will not likelyfade any day soon as a national pas-time. You could say—to borrow acoinage from the anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss—that Ameri-cans have used L.A. to think.

All of which makes L.A. an ide-ally resonant place to challenge theestablished American nature story,which imagines nature in opposi-tion to cities—and we eye-rollers in

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L.A. have long been calling for newstories with which to imagine thiscity. If Los Angeles is really a city ofnature, then all other cities must benature too.

A NINTH WAY: AS A CASUALTY OF

A BROADER REFUSAL TO SEE CONNECTIONS

Imagination is all that finally definesL.A.

—Michael Ventura, Los AngelesTimes op-ed, 2000

R eally? Nothing but imagi-nation? Of course, if thereal L.A. doesn’t always

match up to the dramatic parables,these stories have tended to exagger-ate more than to make things up.Asthe city with measurably moresprawl,pollution,ethnic diversity,ec-onomic inequality, and homicidethan most other cities, L.A. has al-ways tended to push all things Am-erican—our trends, ideals, and nar-ratives—to the outer edge, and haspushed few things farther than anideal of personal freedom. I en-counter a salute to this ideal ap-proximately weekly: in the weeksbefore I wrote this, an L.A. architec-tural historian told the Los AngelesTimes that “you have a sense of free-dom here that you don’t have any-where else in the United States,” anda TV reviewer wrote in the NewYork–based Entertainment Weekly thatL.A. is “the land of reinventing your-self, of discovering new possibilities,new realities, new fantasies.” L.A. hasshone as the fabled city where you

can start over, cut loose from socialconstraints, and escape your past. Asthe astute L.A.writer David Ulin re-marked in the Times about a com-memoration of the 1994 earth-quake: “[It is] expected to be thekind of event that doesn’t usuallyhappen in Los Angeles, a consciouseffort to link the present to the past.”In the city that so often exaggeratesAmerican trends and narratives, youcan most clearly watch the associa-tion of the American dream withprivate desire and a willful blindnessto connections.

You have an inalienable right to makeyour real life conform to your dream life.

—CityTripping Los Angeles

L. A. is notoriously shorton parks and otherpublic spaces. It is a

stronghold of the gated neighbor-hood. L.A. ranks first among U.S.cities for the number of millionairesand forty-first in philanthropy. Forty-first. Here, you can so clearly observethe tendency—magnified in myadopted town but hardly unique toit—to confuse ideals of personal lib-erty with an ideal of being free toaccumulate capital and use it to dowhatever you want. You can watchthe failure to ballast the quest forindividual freedom with other, long-standing American-dream ideals ofequality and community. This is theland of Prop. 13 and Prop. 187,where affluent Angelenos want thecheapest labor but no social servicesfor the illegal immigrants who do it;and want the economic as well ascultural benefits of an ethnically and

racially diverse city, but don’t wantthe diversity in their own neighbor-hoods; and want private canyons andbeaches but expect the public to payfor the inevitable fires and mud-slides; and want to commute in fab-ulously fuel-inefficient cars fromenormous houses with forty-three-inch TVs and five bathrooms in re-mote canyons, but object to smogand traffic and pollution and, aboveall, to living anywhere near theindustry and manufacture that bath-room fixtures, SUVs, and forty-three-inch TVs require.The point isthat here, you can watch the denialso intrinsic to the great Americannature story play out as part of thelarger desire to benefit from theinnumerable ties to people andnature that sustain one’s life in thecity, and yet refuse to make good onthose connections.

L.A. is the city in me, the city I weavetogether for myself.

—Leo Braudy, Los AngelesTimes op-ed, 2002

O f course, this enchant-ment with freedom is allvery beguiling, and for at

least some reasons that are less igno-ble than admirable. I live on VeniceBeach, after all, and in defense ofL.A., I love living in a place whereyou can rollerblade in a thong at the beach (whether male or female)while strumming a guitar. You canorder a hot dog topped with pastra-mi, chili, and American cheese andwrapped in a tortilla.And I love thatL.A. is the sort of place where afriend once began a story,“I went to

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Terry’s house, and there was Terry,and Terry’s baby, and the baby’sdoula, and the doula’s chimp in adress.” I appreciate the greater eth-nic integration,diversity of lifestyles,and flourishing of experimental arts.I have found social and career circlesto be gratifyingly more porous thanin other places I have lived.

[L.A.’s]… best feature is… [that] itdoes not oppress its citizens with a civicidentity.

—Robert Lloyd, L.A.Weekly,2001

B ut “individual freedom,”like all grand ideals, is per-ilously malleable and can

serve a range of agendas. And theconviction that it should mean youcan do whatever the hell you wantcannot possibly have found moreextreme expression than in the tra-ditional refrain here that L.A. is, inreality, exactly whatever you want itto be. It’s “all imagination,”“the cityin me,” and “your dream life.” Evenwell-respected critics and writersrepeat this shibboleth with aston-ishing frequency. L.A., so this pop-ular L.A. story goes, is not just aplace where we’ve liked to tell sto-ries. It is a story. Literally. And it’syour story, no less, your own homemovie. And this pushes the ideal ofindividual liberty well beyond theouter edge. It’s the American dreamon a shooting rampage. If one couldexpressly design a way of seeing acity to bless people who don’t wantto be accountable, this would be it:to say a place is yours to design anddefine authorizes you to deny all

your connections to people, nature,and the past. It palpates with thatsame potent amalgam of yearningand self-indulgence as the Ameri-can nature story, which seeks salva-tion in nature Out There but refus-es to see how we use and transformnature in the city.

In L.A., you can most clearlywatch the established Americannature tale plug into a family of sinscommitted in the name of theAmerican dream.

A TENTH WAY: AS ESPECIALLY

DANGEROUS TO LOSE TRACK OF

O n the other hand, you canalso see the consequencesso clearly. Whether or

not you acknowledge your con-nections to people and nature, theyof course remain operable. Goahead and ignore your topography,your climate, your hydrology. Theair will darken, the mountains willslough mud into your houses, andthe lost river will gather toxics andtrash. L.A. is not “all imagination.” Ithas never been “your dream life,” sowatch out for the blowback—forsmog, mud, freeway gridlock, racialviolence, poverty, homelessness,beach erosion, sewage spills, severewater pollution, and the fact thatthe rest of the West hates you forhoarding their water supplies. Ofcourse, most of these problems willcreate by far the most havoc for thecity’s poorer residents.Wealthy An-gelenos, who benefit the most fromignoring our vital connections, also

can use their wealth to evade orcompensate for the consequences.

This city’s most infamous prob-lems themselves constitute an argu-ment, as large as Los Angeles itself,that our basic stories about natureshould refuse to lose track.

AN ELEVENTH WAY: AS A TERRIFIC BOON

TO BOULDER AND MISSOULA

N one of which is to letBoulder off the hook. Infact, very much the op-

posite. We may wish away connec-tions in L.A., but we can hardlywish away culpability for the ensu-ing troubles (and even affluent An-gelenos encounter serious daily ha-voc). Boulder bills itself as theanti-L.A.: it’s the green place, thesocially just haven, the great righttown. But how much easier is it tokeep your air clean when the facto-ries that manufacture your SUVsand Gore-Tex jackets lie in other,distant towns? And you can mini-mize racial and class confrontationswhen your own population is whiteand affluent, while the poor andnonwhite labor force that sustainsyour city’s material life resides safelyfar away. Nature writers have docu-mented how cities mine the hinter-lands ruthlessly for raw naturalresources. But they’ve declined totell us almost anything about howthe largest urban regions, and espe-cially the poorer areas within them,disproportionately shoulder theburden of transforming nature tocreate all our lovely wondrous stuff.

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Boulder couldn’t begin to bethe town that Boulder adores with-out L.A. (and an abundance of otherplaces globally like L.A.)—just asBel Air and Malibu couldn’t be BelAir and Malibu in their undeniableglory without their essential con-nections to the nature and laborthroughout L.A. County.Think of adefining difference between Boul-

der and L.A. as the differencebetween Malibu and Southeast L.A.but writ nationally.Boulderites ben-efit proportionately more and sufferfar less from how they use nature—which I suspect is one reason whyBoulder never claimed my head orheart. L.A. may be a land of trou-bles, but also gets so unfairly ma-ligned, because being the great right

place is much too easy when youdon’t have to live with a lot of theproblems you create.

Which is oddly heartening, be-cause the City of Angels feels like adistinctly honest place to seek andwrite about nature.And it’s a thun-derously consequential place to dosomething about the troubles.

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Michael Light, from Los Angeles O2.12.04. Hollywood Hills From Griffith Park. Image courtesy the artist and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco/New York.

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A TWELFTH WAY: AS A FOCUS OF GREAT

GOOD WORK

A nd so many people aredoing exactly that. Theexorbitant social and en-

vironmental costs of losing track ofnature have consistently confrontedthis megalopolis with the desperateneed to pay attention. As a St.Louis friend who’s an environmen-tal lawyer has said enviously, Cali-fornia generally is “light yearsahead of the curve on environmen-tal regulation”—due in no smallpart to tackling L.A.’s problems.And L.A. itself has emerged in thelast decade as a hotbed for the con-viction that to make cities morelivable and more equitable, we haveto move nature through them moreequitably and sustainably.

The American city with theworst air pollution enforces thestrictest air-quality regulations,which include pioneering emis-sions standards for vehicles, outdoorappliances, and household products.Southern California also suffers theworst coastal pollution from stormwater runoff, with one-third of allbeach closures in the U.S. SoNRDC, Heal the Bay, and SantaMonica Baykeeper sued the EPA,and in 1999 won a landmark legalvictory that, for the first time, re-quires a metropolitan area to adhereto clean-up schedules mandated bythe 1972 Clean Water Act.

Public agencies, environmentalnonprofits, and universities havebeen pioneering strategies to reclaim

phased-out industrial lands in thecity that’s long held the national titlefor least park space per capita. In themetropolis that suffers both extremeenvironmental ruin and polar socialand economic inequities, environ-mental justice activists includingCommunities for a Better Environ-ment and Mothers of East L.A. havewon nationally recognized battles inthe poorer areas of east and southL.A. to shut down polluters. Thesegroups have also waged successful,groundbreaking campaigns to forcestate and county regulatory agenciesto recognize that air pollution andpark-space shortages bedevil poorerand nonwhite neighborhoods dis-proportionately.And there can be nomore cutting-edge place to work forurban transformation than on thebanks of the country’s most degrad-ed urban river.

L.A. may not be the greenest,cleanest place to be a nature writer,but it is exciting. As L.A. Weeklywriter Judith Lewis has put it: “LosAngeles has… [given] me a world tobattle as much as I revel in it. It hasgiven me a life in interesting times.”

RIVER TRIP NO. 2

Y ou almost need specialglasses to see the L.A.River as the healthy, ver-

dant river that the hundreds of peo-ple who are revitalizing it are aim-ing for.The project will take at leastseveral decades to realize entirely—you also need great reserves of faithand patience—but it will happen ifthe political will and economic re-sources continue to flow.

In the mid-1980s, the first callsto revitalize the river, by the artistand writer Lewis MacAdams andhis fledgling Friends of the L.A.River, were met with “River? Whatriver?” FoLAR made Willy Wonka’sschemes and hopes for his chocolatefactory sound practical.At the time,proposals to paint the concrete blueand to use the channel as a dry-sea-son freeway for trucks received farmore serious consideration thanFoLAR’s ideas. After a decade ofpersuasion, their vision would proveto have been superb common sensebefore its time. And in the last fiveyears, the river’s revival has emergedas a major policy priority, as everyimaginably relevant public and pri-vate interest—from Heal the Bay,neighborhood associations, andLatino social activists to the mayor’soffice, L.A. City Council, and theL.A. County Department of PublicWorks (our quondam Sun Gods ofthe river as infrastructure)—hasconcluded that revitalizing L.A.’smajor river will help them amelio-rate the city’s worst troubles.

How do you resurrect the river?You have to green the banks.Youhave to clean the water. And youhave to dynamite out some of theconcrete. And each of these goals,it turns out, quickly becomes an actof thinking big.

To green the banks, this loosecoalition of players has set out toturn the cement scar through theheart of this fragmented, park-starved metropolis into a fifty-one-mile greenway and bikeway, whichideally would serve as the backbonefor a countywide greenway net-

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work. The Los Angeles RiverGreenway now consists of twodozen new parks on the groundand many more on paper, and willgreen and connect many of L.A.’spoorest, and most park-poor,neighborhoods.

To clean up this outsizesewer—which by law (after theNRDC lawsuit) the EPA mustnow ensure happens by 2013—youcan’t just extract the kilotons ofpollutants after they enter the river.You have to think about where allthe pollutants come from: the weedkillers, insecticides, fertilizers,paints, detergents, gasoline, motoroil, car waxes, and countless moretoxic everyday products in thebasic city-America-2006 streetstew that washes into our soil, ourwater, and eventually our bodies.Alas, the city has spent more timefighting the legal ruling than thepollutants. But to clean the river,L.A. will absolutely have to man-date cleaner industrial processes, tomanufacture products that arethemselves less toxic, more re-cyclable, more biodegradable.

You have to blow up some ofthe concrete, if not every last ton:the Seine, after all, runs throughParis in a cement channel. Blast ittoday, however, and the next heavywinter rains could submerge theStaples Center and Union Station.Rather, before you enjoy thethought of dynamite, you have todramatically reduce the amount ofwater that flows down the river dur-ing storms.To do that, the river revi-talizers propose to divert floodwa-ters into large basins that can double

as parks and wetlands. Even moreimportant, though, they aim to cap-ture as much rain as possible whereit falls, rather than rush it into theriver to water the Pacific. To do that,Public Works has launched pilotprojects to use porous paving, tounpave schoolyards, and to retrofitgutters, freeway medians, and park-ing lots to pitch water into theground instead of the storm sewers.You can store the water in under-ground cisterns and use it on-site—say, to water your lawn—or you canlet it drain into the ground and re-plenish the aquifer (where it’ll cleanitself up as minerals in the soil bindup toxic chemicals).

Altogether, restoring the riverto health would improve waterquality, control flooding, and re-store wildlife habitat. Neighbor-hoods throughout L.A. would ac-quire much-needed park and greenspace. It would enhance local watersupplies dramatically, and so wouldpotentially change how watermoves through the West. All thenew greenery would help clean theair.The project has pushed L.A. tothe national forefront of urbanwatershed management. It’s madethe river a meeting ground forAngelenos’ broader efforts toenhance the equity and environ-mental quality of life in Los Ange-les.And by reviving a premier sym-bol of urban destruction, it could

make just about anything imagina-ble in urban transformation. Ahealthy L.A. River wouldn’t bequite as wondrous as the chocolatefactory, but it would be close.

A THIRTEENTH WAY: AS THE FOUNDATION

OF L.A. STORIES

This is a happy land for children andall young animals… They live in thepure air and sunshine.

—Health Seekers’ [and] Tourists’…Guide to the… Pacific Coast, 1884

The palm trees were high with scrawnyfronds like broken pinwheels… and adroopy ice plant could never quite holdthe earth… in place… and an oil der-rick [looked] like a rusty praying man-tis, trying to suck the last few barrelsout of the dying crabgrass.

—Robert Towne, on research-ing his 1974 Chinatown script

And waiting in the wings are theplague squirrels and killer bees.

—Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear,1998

T he river’s revival, just likeits ruin, plays out as everycategory of nature story.

But the stories are beginning tosound better. The wild-things talesare about trying to create healthyrivers and wetlands, and themango-body-whip tales describethe wise use of basic naturalresources. In these social-geogra-phy-of-air tales, poorer Angelenosdo not get shafted. In the new Zu-Zu tales, we aim to use a wealth of

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1 For definitions of these terms, see Part 1.Mango-body-whip tales are about using natureas resources, social-geography-of-air tales areabout who benefits and who doesn’t from howwe use nature, and Zu-Zu tales are about howwe transform particular landscapes and hownature acts back.

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knowledge about the landscape toguide how we transform it.1

And the “what it means” talesshould be about how we’re imagin-ing nature into the city and ourdaily lives. Except that we’re not,mostly.Amidst all the new publicityabout the river, so many Angelenosstill declare that the L.A. River isn’twild enough to be “natural.”Amidst all the cutting-edge envi-

ronmental work in this city gener-ally, so many people in and out ofL.A. still ask, “Is there nature inL.A.?” Consider, too, that everyconceivable brand of environmentaladvocate, from ecologists and envi-ronmentalists to urban planners andlandscape architects to policywonks and politicians and environ-mental historians, have all been pay-ing a great deal of attention to

urban nature—and yet nature writ-ers continue to shun cities asGomorrahs of iniquitous conspira-cies against the natural world (tooverstate the case, but only a bit).And as every other literary genre inthe last 150 years has exploded withevery wild experiment and philos-ophy imaginable, nature writingalone has remained comparativelyunchanged.Unfortunately, the great

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Steven B. Smith, Footings, former house, Los Angeles, California, 1995. Reprinted from The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West © 2005 published by Duke University Press and the Centerfor Documentary Studies at Duke University.

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fantastic American nature story mayprove more resistant to any calls toblow it up than the concrete in theL.A. River.

To watch the front-page news out of LosAngeles during a Santa Ana is to getvery close to what it is about the place.

—Joan Didion,Slouching Toward Bethlehem, 1968

A nd nowhere has thispowerful tale been root-ed more tenaciously than

in Los Angeles.And here is the last,and perhaps the ultimate, reasonthat nature writers should flock toL.A. as the logical headquarters torewrite this tale: L.A., like no othercity, has woven this story so thor-oughly into stories about the cityitself. From the nineteenth-centuryboosters to the popular Land ofSunshine magazine in the early1900s to Raymond Chandler andNathanael West in the 1930s and’40s to Didion to Mike Davis tothe current coverage in the LosAngeles Times and New York Times,L.A.’s interpreters have beenobsessed with sea, sun, winds, sky,and palm trees, as well as fire, mud,earthquakes, plague squirrels, andkiller bees. And even Davis—fromwhom I have learned so muchabout how to see Los Angeles—imagines nature in opposition tocities.

Consider the American dreamand nightmare stories. To simplifyegregiously, these dominant L.A.narratives really parse into threekinds of tales—dream, nightmare,and apocalypse—that have coexist-

ed since at least the 1930s but haveprogressed roughly in dominancein that order. In the beginning,L.A. was the American Eden: it wasthe land of eternal sunshine,healthful sea breezes, and amazing-ly fertile soils.The late-nineteenth-century boosters lauded the virtuesof wild nature to market L.A. as asort of noncity city. L.A. was sup-posed to be an Anglo refuge whereyou could escape the industrialpollution, ethnic and racial con-flicts, and financial disappointmentsin cities to the east—and the ensu-ing dream stories would continueto use fabulous paeans to sun andsea and air to frame idyllic visionsof urban escape, from thepost–World War II garden suburbsto today’s canyon living in Malibuand the Hollywood Hills.

And then, the nightmare: theblack sky, the fouled sea, the endlesspavement, the dying palm trees, theconcrete river. By the 1960s, as L.A.defaults on its promises of escapeand pushes the problems of Ameri-can cities to extremes, the ParadiseLost tales invariably invoke theutter destruction of nature todescribe a city in which everythinghas gone wrong. And after thenightmare, the millennium: “Is theCity of Angels Going to Hell?”Time asks in a 1993 cover story. Inthe early 1990s, L.A. reels from theNorthridge earthquake, Malibufires, mudslides, race riots, El Niño,and the O. J. Simpson trial.And thecity that destroyed nature andeverything else becomes the citywhere nature roared back forrevenge. Apocalypse stories make

the opposition of nature to citiesdecidedly literal.

The history of L.A. story-telling, if more complicated, stillbasically boils down to a trilogy.Nature blesses L.A. Nature fleesL.A.And nature returns armed.

In other words, no wonder Ilove L.A.This city has been hostingan obsessive conversation aboutnature for 150 years—or about asfar back as when Thoreau campedout on Walden Pond. Nature sto-ries have been more than key L.A.stories. They’ve been the L.A. sto-ries. They’re the driving stories inthe city we use to think. It’s ironic,isn’t it? Los Angeles, which sym-bolizes the city as antinature, reallyhas long flourished as a mecca forthinking and writing about nature,and for telling this powerful storyin particular that nature writing hasso dedicatedly perpetuated.

Which makes perfect sense, ifyou think about it. In the modernUnited States, as in any human soci-ety, the stories we tell about natureare the most basic stories we cantell. L.A. has long been a placewhere we articulate grand Ameri-can narratives. So it should not sur-prise us either that the foundationalL.A. story is, what?—a naturestory—or that we’ve told a wildlyevasive nature tale to describe a citythat’s pushed the evasion ofaccountability to people and natureto an extreme.The dream tales haveassured us that L.A. is a city ofnature where you can escape thesocial and environmental troubles ofcities. The destruction of nature inthe nightmare tales—how can you

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fix something that no longerexists?—laments the city’s troubleswhile assuring us that we don’t haveto do anything because the prob-lems are beyond repair. And howmuch further past salvation could acity be that awaits imminent millen-nial annihilation by nature? Here isa city where we’ve dreamt brilliant-ly of virtue while doing spectacular-ly unvirtuous things. It practically

vibrates with brilliant denial in theservice of spectacular yearning, self-interest, and material indulgence.And the city’s definitive story is away of seeing nature that allows forand encourages these exact evasions.

What we need in L.A., as else-where, is a foundational literaturethat imagines nature not as the op-posite of the city but as the basicstuff of modern everyday life. Less

apocalypse, more mango bodywhips. Less maple mojo, moreactual maple trees. We could use agreat deal less “It is raining in LosAngeles. Planes are falling out ofthe sky,” and a lot more tales thatexplore our daily, intertwined con-nections to nature and to eachother—such as “Enjoy the beautyof another culture while learningmore about wastewater treatment

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Robert Adams, Overlooking Long Beach. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

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and reuse.”I love that L.A. has been a

uniquely powerful place to tellAmerican nature stories. But aslong as L.A. has been a mecca forAmerican stories, writers havebeen calling for new stories withwhich to see the city. And naturestories have to be the logical placeto start.

POSTSCRIPT: THE CONFLUENCE

A fter I found the L.A.River, a year after Imoved to L.A., I went

searching for the confluence withthe Arroyo Seco: the area whereL.A. was founded, and the roughcenter of the river and the L.A.basin watershed. You cannot besurprised to hear that this spot canprove almost impossibly difficult tofind. Even in the Thomas Guide, thebible of maps for finding one’s wayaround Los Angeles, the blue lineof the Arroyo peters out about amile above where the two concretechannels do actually meet.

The day I found the river re-mains one of my finest days in L.A.I was looking for birds, so I visitedthree short stretches where theCorps had left a soft riverbed: aflood control basin near the head-waters; an eight-mile piece in themiddle, where the water table risesso close to the surface that itwould punch through concrete;and the three miles of tidal estuaryat the mouth. I started upstream inthe San Fernando Valley, on thesole half mile that doesn’t have any

concrete at all. I continued down-stream to the middle stretch aboveDowntown, which boasts aninspired new string of pocket parkswith native vegetation and out-door sculptures. Both stretchesteemed with herons, ducks, coots,and other birds. Far downstream,in Southeast L.A., the channelwidens to the girth of a freeway,and I ended the day looking outover the river from atop a thirty-foot wall. Scores of black-neckedstilts picked their way aroundupturned shopping carts.A mallardshot down the swift current, andswallows sliced the air.The sun setspectacularly to the southwestthrough power lines, billboards,and the smokestacks of the L.A.Harbor.A man on a horse rode by,wearing a cowboy hat, a Mexicanblanket, and a cell phone. “This isL.A.,” I thought. I was steeped socontentedly in the Complex Life.All day I had been marveling,“There’s a river in L.A., a realriver, what do you know,” and itseemed, after a year of loving L.A.but not knowing why, and ofwanting to write about L.A. butnot knowing what, that I was nowlooking at the place (duck-filled,no less) that held the key to both.

With urban designer and L.A.River aficionado Alan Loomis, Ilead informal tours of the river—forfriends, and their friends too, wholike to think about L.A. and whohave heard L.A. has a river and wantto see it. We walk around the newparks, but we also insist on a stop atthe Confluence, which I located atlast on my own third try.We wander

among the trash and muck, and skirtthe homeless tents, and lean againstthe massive pylons of the freewayoverpasses. Here, we say, lies at oncethe most hopeless and the mosthopeful spot on the L.A. River.Thegeographic, historic, and ecologicalcenter of the river, the Confluenceis perhaps the most extreme testa-ment to L.A.’s erasure of nature,community, and the past.This spot isat once the logical nexus for theproposed fifty-one-mile Los Ange-les River Greenway. Indeed, the cityhas broken ground on the first halfacre of what should, eventually,become a grand central-city park.Here, we say, is one of the finestplaces to think about the river,which has to be one of the bestplaces to think about L.A.—andL.A. historically has been one of themost powerful places to tell storiesabout America.You are standing, weallow, at an American narrative vor-tex. This spot ideally should beswarming with Angelenos, withwriters, with nature writers.And toour delight, the people on the tourssay,“What a cool place.”They take agreat many photographs—more,usually, than at any other stop—andthen we continue downstream toimagine the future of L.A. and theLos Angeles River Greenway at aplace where you can drive into theriver downtown. !

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This essay appeared in an earlier form in Land ofSunshine: An Environmental History ofMetropolitan Los Angeles (William Deverelland Greg Hise, eds. University of PittsburghPress, 2005), used by permission of the publisher.

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