Mike Davis’s ‘Ecology of Fear’ Is Still a Ticking Bomb

Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2002, journalist Fred Siegel dubbed Davis a ‘prophet of doom’ for forecasting in his 1990 masterpiece City of Quartz, the social unrest that followed the acquittal of the police officers responsible for the racially motivated attack on Rodney King. That reputation was solidified by The Monster at Our Door, which predicted, in 2005, that the unregulated expansion of a globalized economy could lead to a devastating pandemic of avian influenza.