‘Marxist environmentalist’ and author Mike Davis dies at 76

Mike Davis, an author, activist and self-defined “Marxist environmentalist” whose greatest fears drove him to anticipate riots, fires and disease in such bestsellers as “City of Quartz” and “The Ecology of Fear,” has died at age 76.

Davis died Tuesday after a long battle with esophageal cancer, his friend Jon Wiener announced this week in an online posting for The Nation, a progressive magazine. Wiener, a historian who with Davis wrote “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties,” told The Associated Press that Davis died in San Diego.

Davis, dubbed by the Los Angeles Times as the prophet Jeremiah of Southern California, had announced over the summer that he was terminally ill.

“Although I’m famous as a pessimist, I really haven’t been pessimistic,” he told the Times in July. “You know,(my writing has) more been a call to action. An attempt to elicit righteous anger against those whom