Sixty-five years of spinelessness. That’s what the authors of the new book Smogtown, The Long-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles told me the other day in a radio interview. (The podcast will be available this weekend in the KPFK archives.) Bill Kelly and Chip Jacobs argue that L.A. air quality today can be attributed to more than half a century of political cowardice.
When the haze first settled on L.A.in summer 1943, L.A. was one of the country's leading manufacturing centers. Few wanted to stifle the region’s growth. Never mind that planes had trouble landing at local airports or that thousands of lives were being lost. America’s sunny boomtown would not be sunk.
At first, no one understood what the cause of L.A.’s toxic soup was, and when in the mid-50s it became clear that cars were the principal culprit, efforts to reverse course ran up against savvy oil and car companies that could outspend whole states with their research budgets. California’s Wild West libertarian values didn’t help either. In the West, Jacobs and Kelly told me, you don’t mess with a person's gun or their car.
Finally reform got off the ground, beginning in the 1960s. A group of well-heeled women launched S.O.S. - Stamp Out Smog. They were lampooned and ridiculed as “female warriors” but they fearlessly took on the refineries and forced regulators’ hands. I was reminded of that great line of Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Forty years later, the environmental leaders that are part of Liberty Hill’s work show the same courage. Their work is minimized or invisible in most press accounts. The headlines are invariably about how the Cal EPA has taken this new measure or AQMD voted in such and such a way. A few of us around here know the press has, once again, completely missed the boat. Because behind each of those announcements stand a small group of thoughtful, committed people – community organizers -- who have been organizing and prodding and kicking, and without them, nothing would change.
