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Los Angeles is an unlikely city. Built over a major seismic fault, on the edge of one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts, the city has developed like the extension of a Hollywood movie set, a sprawling urban fantasy which many people feel should not really exist. Scientists have estimated that the land and water in the area could naturally support 200,000 people, not the 15 million that live there. DJ Waldie, a city official and environmental spokesman, refers to the “persistent mythology of Los Angeles that doubts its reality, its legitimacy and authenticity as a place.”

Since the 1880s, the Los Angeles basin has been transformed from desert chaparral, surrounding a sleepy cattle town with a population of 4,000, to a seething metropolis that now accounts for nearly one per cent of global greenhouse emission. It is the car culture par excellence, with over 30 per cent of the landmass devoted to streets, freeways and parking, while nine million cars contribute to the ubiquitous smog and air pollution. It is somewhat ironic that, in a city where smoking cigarettes is almost illegal, 40 per cent of the population suffer from respiratory problems due to vehicle emission. Surprisingly, LA is now becoming the forum for some of the most progressive environmental thought in the USA.

The city is full of contradictions. Often regarded as the pinnacle of the American dream, the apotheosis of consumerism and material extravagance, it is seen as the essence of anti-nature. Paradoxically, people often move to Los Angeles because of nature; attracted by the climate, the snow-capped mountains, the ocean and the beaches. The movie industry came here because of the clarity of the light, the 270 days of sunshine per year and the diversity of locations close by. The fantasy that took shape in the early years, with the introduction of palm trees and orange groves, continues today in Hollywood gardens and the city’s few green spaces; native trees are usurped in favour of exotic imports as nature is moulded to conform to an ideal.

The irony continues in the fact that no city in the world in more prone to natural disasters; the earthquakes, floods and mudslides are often interpreted as nature’s vengeance against “the plastic society”. In Ecology of Fear, prominent LA writer Mike Davis portrays a sort of modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, drawing attention to the 49 nuclear strikes, 28 earthquakes, ten plagues, six floods, and 35 other forms of destruction that the city has been subjected to by Hollywood’s writers and film-makers.

The fantasy has always depended on one fundamental resource - water. No metropolis on the planet has looked farther afield for its supply and the fact that there are “no more rivers to bring to the desert” is a cause of much concern. The natural water table was exhausted after four decades and, when the wells ran dry in the 1890s, watermelons were smashed at the base of trees in desperate attempts at emergency irrigation. In 1913, when the controversial Los Angeles Aqueduct was first opened, diverting water over 350 kilometres from Owens Valley, chief engineer William Mulholland proclaimed that it would supply Hollywood’s lawns and swimming pools forever.

Within ten years the city needed more. In 1940 the aqueduct was extended 168 kilometres north to Mono Lake, while the completion of the Hoover Dam the following year allowed southern California to tap into Arizona, reducing the Colorado river to a sad, salty trickle. This was thwarted in the 50s, when the US Supreme Court settled in favour of Arizona’s claim to supply. Now the city is dependent on the above, together with the State Water project, which brings more than a trillion gallons of water per year along the 720-kilometre Californian aqueduct. This effectively removes half the water that would otherwise flow into the San Francisco Bay area, altering the flow of fresh and saltwater in the Sacramento Delta but supplying irrigation systems for the vast agricultural base of the San Joaquim valley, a desert with less than 13 centimetres of rain per year.

Almost a third of the water feeding Los Angeles us now pumped from underground aquifers. However, a combination of illegal dumping, run-off from commercial fertilisers and leakage from garbage landfills, has left some 40 per cent of the wells in southern California contaminated above federal limits. To compound the problem, half of the considerable winter rainfall, which would permeate the soil and recharge the aquifers, is swallowed by concrete drainage systems and diverted into the Pacific. Since intensive farming methods require around 20,000 litres of water to produce what an average Californian eats in a day, the issue of water supply is never far away. Desperation has led to some ambitious proposals, ranging from a plastic pipeline from Alaska to towing icebergs from Antarctica.

What few Los Angelinos are aware of today, is that the city is actually built on a river. The basin that surrounds the city itself was originally created by four tectonic plates; and the so-called LA river, which stretches for 92 kilometres from The Valley down to Long Beach, passing through the Hollywood studios and Chinatown, is the central natural feature of the city. At one time it was shaded with sycamores, oaks and willows. However, as the city was paved over, the winter floods created a threat to economic expansion, and, in the 1930s, work began to erase the river altogether.

“The Army Corps of Engineers built a concrete trough, put the river inside it and fenced it off with barbed wire,” explains Jennifer Price, an environmental writer working on a book about humans and nature in Los Angeles. “The river became the ultimate symbol of LA’s destruction of nature.”

Inevitably, the concrete flood control system had disastrous ecological consequences, destroying wetland areas which provided an important staging area for migratory birds on the Great Pacific Flyway. The empty concrete channel is now used as an area for training municipal bus drivers to turn around and it has been suggested that it be used as a freeway during the dry season. Fittingly, it is best known today as the location for Hollywood car chases.

However, plans are now underway to restore the river, recreate wetland areas to attract birds, and establish nature walks, cycle paths and equestrian trails. In true Hollywood style there has even been talk about whitewater rafting through the Sepulveda Basin. Led by the Friends of LA River, a pressure group formed by poet and filmmaker Lewis McAdams, the project has pulled people together from government agencies, environmental groups and neighbourhood associations, all working together in what is being seen as a symbolic attempt to heal the split between the population and the landscape of the city.

“We’re beginning to wake up to the fact the nature is not something ‘out there’ but ‘in here’,” says Price. “The population of LA had forgotten that it lives on a river.”

The resulting hybrid river, part concrete and part natural, again seems indicative of the ‘fantasy’ city and its intrinsic irony.

“The LA River is a social construct in the purest terms, “says DJ Waldie, a prominent campaigner for the project. “It was designed as a real estate protection device and flood control system. It is a quintessentially LA product, a synthesis of reality and artifice. Consequently, its rehabilitation will be an interplay between these two factors, partly real and largely artificial.”

Waldie maintains that Los Angeles was always conceived in these terms, as a “unique inter-penetration of nature and urban city development.” The early planners assumed that this wold be “the perfect Arcadian place to build the ideal house and the ideal garden.” Of course, this dream of a Californian utopia has constantly clashed with the realities of the landscape over the last hundred years, creating what has been cited as the epitome of a dystopia.

Perhaps the most prominent feature of this modern landscape is ‘the grid,’ first introduced during Spanish colonisation. Colonel Philippe de Nove, the governor of Upper California in 1791, laid out plans for the town in strict accordance with regulations derived from Roman models, believed to be part of a divine plan for imposing moral order on the natural world. With the advent of cartography, which coincided with the exploration of the continent, US President Thomas Jefferson divided the country up into a giant grid. However, when the early Anglo-American settlers arrived in California, they found that the Spanish grid was at 45 degrees to the compass points which determined the direction of the Jefferson grid. Consequently, one can still find pockets of LA where the Spanish grid remains, slicing across the modern streets at an angle.

Waldie views Los Angeles as “a place where people have always come to fundamentally reinvent their lives.” It therefore seems appropriate that they city has become the forum for redefining American environmental thought. The mainstream US environmental movement has been predominantly concerned with wilderness preservation, “the green divinity of John Muir and Henry Thoreaus,” as Waldie puts it. Interestingly, now that we have become a predominantly urban species for the first time in our history, there seems to be a shift towards issues of urban sustainability.

“The idea that nature can save your soul has always been the underpinning of American environmentalism,” says Jennifer Price. “However, people increasingly realise that it’s not possible to preserve wilderness without thinking about the areas where we use nature the most.”

Being a prime example of nature’s confluence with human culture, Los Angeles, clearly provides the perfect platform to examine this interaction and make progress towards a sustainable urban environment. “If we actually rethought how to retain the water that falls from the sky, we wouldn’t be so dependent on water sources hundreds of miles away,” says Price. Various initiatives have now been implemented in this vein: a huge waste water recycling plant has been built in Santa Monica while environmental groups like The Tree People, are redesigning drainage systems to collect run-off from buildings and re-direct it into underground aquifiers.”

There is a feeling of optimism about the future of nature in a city that has always been regarded as being in fundamental opposition to it, leading to a more integrated vision of environmentalism in the 21st century.

“The idea that LA shouldn’t be here is rather like the belief that either you have nature or you don’t,” says Price. “We stand to gain a lot more by thinking of ourselves as part of nature.” Therefore, those involved with the restoration of LA river see it as not only important for ecological sustainability and a way of linking disparate communities, but also as being of tremendous significance symbolically.

“There is a feeling that if you can fix the LA River, you can fix the city,” believes Price. “And if you can fix this city, it seems possible that you can fix any city.”

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