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No one realizes Los Angeles better than D.J. Waldie, the prose-poet laureate of the land and the air and the light. - Lawrence Weschler, author of A Wanderer in the Perfect City

Los Angeles’ elegant observer - Jim Newton, LMU magazine

No more keen observer of life in Los Angeles - Ken Bernstein, The Planning Report

Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire by D.J. Waldie offers a thoughtful and often poetic exploration of Los Angeles through the lens of the four classical elements. He uses these as a framework to delve into the complex and often contradictory nature of the city, examining its foundations, history, and cultural fabric with his trademark elegance and incisiveness.

Los Angeles as a place of contradictions: Waldie portrays Los Angeles as a place of dreams and disillusionment, civic memory and strategic forgetting, natural beauty and environmental fragility.

The classical elements as lenses: Each element provides a distinct way of exploring the city's multifaceted identity. Earth focuses on the city's physical and historical grounding. Water examines the critical role of water in the city's development. Air considers the city's atmosphere, culture, and shared experiences. Fire addresses the destructive and transformative power of fire in the Los Angeles landscape, particularly relevant in light of recent wildfires.

An interweaving history, memory, and observation: Waldie blends historical facts, personal reflections, and deeply felt observations to create an evocative portrait of Los Angeles. He explores moments like the forgotten legacy of the Hass avocado, the devastation of the St. Francis Dam collapse, and the peculiar endurance contest that left a woman buried alive.

A guide to seeing the city anew: For those who have lived in Los Angeles or simply wondered about its underlying essence, the book offers a fresh perspective and deeper understanding of the city beyond its glittering surface.

D.J. Waldie is an essayist and cultural historian known for his insightful explorations of Southern California life. His other works include Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place. Called “one of the most respected contemporary voices on life in Southern California,” by the New Yorker and “one of the most artful authors writing about Los Angeles today” by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Waldie elegantly blends history, memoir, and contemplative observation, providing a portrait of the elements that illuminates the city as a whole.

Part of “Fast-forward 25 years: Sharing hopes and dreams for a future Los Angeles” published in the Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2025

We could have the city we deserve

We need to have by 2050 a shared image of who we are as residents of this place called Los Angeles. As hard as that will be to achieve — a common shared trajectory for the region — it is possible.

We need to imagine a different Los Angeles, one that doesn't look like the city that was on the cover of Time magazine in 1949. We need to imagine a Los Angeles that understands our failures over the past 70, 80 years. What we carried from the mid-20th century is the idea that we can do whatever we want simply because we can, and we could say that our past was meaningless. We have lived on the momentum of the boom years after 1945.

The power of the growth machine of Los Angeles has made it difficult to make wise choices. We built fast, we built cheaply, we built for the view and not for the fire-prone chaparral ecology we were building into.

But we can no longer expect momentum to move us forward. We need to slow down, turn around, look to the past and become fully aware how we have acted poorly in the past. We have to become better builders, wiser custodians and smarter assemblers of resilient, resistant communities if we intend to live here in the numbers that we are.

This means asking hard questions of ourselves and our political leaders. They have, in many ways, failed us for decades. Our leadership must be willing to face up to the growth machine and developer interests and say to them: We will build this way now and not that way anymore.

I would hope that forces — both governmental and communal, both in Los Angeles and outside the city — could reimagine how we live on the land, so that there would be a new way, a different way, of intersecting the built environment of Los Angeles with the natural environment. We could share a vision of what this place has been and what it is now and what it might be. We could get from our political leaders and civic institutions what we need to make a city that is resilient, sustainable and resistant to catastrophe. We could have the city we deserve.