| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. Edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. viii + 350 pp. Tables, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.
During the last fifteen years, a number of environmental historians have deconstructed the long-held view that wilderness is natural and cities are artificial. Culture is widely recognized as an important component of American wilderness; at the same time, nature is now central to any understanding of American urban development. But then there is Los Angeles. For most Americans, no city (with the possible exception of Las Vegas) is so unnatural, so divorced from the real, so plastic. In Land of Sunshine, a number of talented scholars tell the environmental history of this apparent simulacrum.	1
Three essays address the city's early natural and human history. Prairie covered the plains of Southern California (including Los Angeles), and the almost complete destruction of this ecosystem is the topic of Paula Schiffman's essay. L. Mark Raab argues that pre-Columbian California was neither paradise by default nor by design. Southern California Indians existed in a dynamic and sometimes punishing relationship to food supplies and a changing climate. Karen Clay and Werner Troesken identify drought as an important factor in Mexican land loss during the early American period.	. . .

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