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.
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