Mike Davis, California’s ‘prophet of doom’, on activism in a dying world: ‘Despair is useless’

His warnings of ecological and social breakdown have proved accurate. But with months to live, Davis is anything but defeated

For decades, the southern California writer Mike Davis has obsessively documented the dark side of the Golden state - its wildfires, earthquakes, megalomaniac real estate developers and violent police departments.

In essays like The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, Davis has argued that California's natural disasters are not really natural at all, but the result of greed, racism, and lack of foresight from the region's power brokers. In City of Quartz - published in 1990, two years before the Rodney King uprising - he depicted Los Angeles as a white supremacist police state that had successfully marketed itself as paradise.