One of the most significant-if widely under-reported aspects of the Bush/Obama transition is the wide range of actions being taken to entrench Bush's legacy in the form of last-minute "midnight regulations" and political appointees transformed into career officials. Although under-reported in the media, these have gained a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere.
I want to write about one such story that's not getting a lot of attention. It's one I know well, as it is the latest chapter in a long, drawn out struggle to try to clean up the air at the ports of Los Angeles (POLA) and Long Beach (POLB), in surrounding communities, and along the "goods movement" transportation corridors that emanate outward from them. It's now estimated that goods movement-generated pollution kills about 3,900 Californians each year-more than the number of homicides in the state (in the 2400 range). The total cost in terms of lost lives, health and quality of life-plus time lost due to traffic congestion and other sundry costs-is roughly $30 billion. While all this cost in money and lives doesn't come from the ports a large percentage does, directly or indirectly, particularly since the trucks serving the ports are the dirtiest on the road, the ships serving the ports use the dirtiest fuel there is, and the trains serving the ports pass through some of the most densely-populated areas in the state. By the way, all three (ships, trucks and trains) are exempt from state and local regulation under the Clean Air Act, with only relative narrow exceptions. So, Bush Administration. Eight years. You do the math.
Intense community activism finally got this issue onto the political map back in 2001, but it took a very long time to get a serious commitment to a pollution-reduction plan. POLA and POLB finally agreed to a cooperative Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP) back in November, 2006, The commitment was only the beginning. Progress on developing and implementing various aspects of the plan has been slow and contentious, particularly around port trucking, which revolves around a very low-wage system based on the fiction that truck drivers are "independent owner-operators" (IOOs) and thus cannot organize for any purpose without violating anti-trust laws, even though the vast majority only work for one company at a time. Thus, labor and environmental issues are inextricably joined, even above and beyond the fact that those working in the industry suffer far and away the highest rates of exposure to pollution.
Together, the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles account for roughly 45% of America's container imports--which is the way that the vast majority of consumer goods enter the country. The ports are also incredibly polluted, with cancer risks hundreds of times over the federal standard.
After years of intense activism--and a stunning lawsuit victory by lawyers for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) on behalf of local residents and environmentalist--the ports have dramatically changed directions. They now want to kill a whole lot less people, provided that their clients can keep making money hand over fist. They claim much, much more than that, rheotically, though. And, of course, the folks who started all the trouble in the first place remain a tad upset that after all is said and done, we will still have incredibly dirty air, with thousands of people dying every year as a result.
In short, it's an interesting microcosm of how a corrupt system does major policy change. On the flip is a brief story I wrote for the last issue of Random Lengths News, reporting on a public comment hearing for the combined state and federal environmental reviews required for a new terminal project at the Port of Long Beach.
The rhetoric/reality gap is depressingly familiar, but the activists involved, far from giving up, and only getting increasingly powerful. If we can pull this sort of dynamic off on the national level, then an Obama presidency really can start moving us in a more progressive direction, regardless of what his real intentions are. So I offer this snapshot as a ray of hope, ironically, despite the grim reality of the fight involved.
Yesterday, January 4, 2008, the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) released a landmark study of air pollution and cancer risk, four years in the making, showing significant improvements over an earlier study in the late 1990s, but an overall level of risk that is hundreds to thousands of times higher than what's normally considered acceptable, with the highest levels at the ports, and along goods movement corridors. The AQMD is the regional air quality enforcement agency for the Los Angeles/Orange County/Inland Empire area, home to the worst air pollution in the country. The study, known as MATES III (Multiple Air Toxics Exposure Study), tracked 33 substances, with over 18,000 samples taken at 15 sites over a two-year period.
The vast majority of cancer risk--85%--came from diesel particulate matter, which is primarily regulated by the federal government. The role of the executive branch in promoting, preventing or delaying effective action is but one more life-or-death decision affecting millions of people in the upcoing November election.
AQMD found the average cancer risk to be 1,200 per million--two to three orders of magnitude above the the level of just 1 to 10 per million that most health experts would consider acceptable, according to AQMD Executive Officer Barry Wallerstein. But the cancer risk at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are more than double that--up to 2,900 per million, and the next highest levels of risk are found along the goods movement corridors moving inland from the ports:
Murders are reported on the news every day. "If it bleeds, it leads." But those killed by trade? Even the doctors and nurses who attend their deaths don't know who they are. How can you tell that this particular victim of cancer or heart atack died because of goods movement air pollution? You can't. But they're out there. Invisible victims. Dying, every day.
I'm not going to be able to comment today until late afternoon, West Coast time. I'll be at day two of this conference...
"Birth of a movement" is probably overstating it. Movements don't really work like that. They come into being gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, and then go through succession of defining moments, not just one. But sometimes there comes a moment when those who have been acting separately in far-flung corners of the country come together, and know that from that point onward, they will never be that separate again. And that is not the birth a movement, it is, at least, the birth of a movement's national identity. And that is what is happening in Carson, California, this Friday and Saturday: the joining together of activists from across the country fighting to defend their communities against the destructive side of global trade in perhaps its most concrete form-the destruction due to the physical movement of goods.
There were also some world-class health and environmental scientists on hand. You know. Reality-based community types. The usual suspects.
Modestly billed as "a conference on healthy solutions for communities impacted by trade, ports and goods movement," the "Moving Forward" conference brought people from communities as far away as Maine-and even Barcelona-to the shadow of the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex, which claims more than a thousand lives a year due to premature deaths from the pollution generated by the flow of goods pouring through it. Although the vast majority of participants came from different parts of California, others came not only from Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico ports, but also from "inland ports" in places as unlikely as rural Kansas, where Eric Kirkendall found himself threatened with being surrounded by a massive, multi-acre, diesel-pollution-belching warehouse complex. And they came not so much for raw information-readily available in today's online age-but for the chance to simply gather together, share their stories, gain inspiration, make connections, and forge the framework for a movement that still does not even have a simple name.
Two weekends ago I wrote a couple of diaries about the free market as a failed policy and failed idea, as well as Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine. My point was not simply to attack the notion of the free market, but to point out the necessity of doing so as part of a larger struggle for political realignment. Such a struggle requires more than discrediting old ideas, however. It requires replacing them--either with new ideas, with the rehabilitation of old ideas, or with some combination of the two.
At my day job, I write a lot about the Port of Los Angeles and its impact on the surrounding communities. It's an excellent example for what I'm talking about. The port facilitates the massive importation of consumer goods into the US, which not only involves significant exploitation of workers and the environment abroad, it also takes a terrible toll on the local communities surrounding the ports (Los Angeles and Long Beach) and the regions inland that are heavily impacted by port-related traffic. Indeed, more people in California die from the pollution generated by goods movement than die from homicides each year. These aren't industrial accidents I'm talking about. They are simply the "normal" cost of doing business. Except, of course, the businesses involved do not pay the costs of doing business. The public does.
The story on the jump is one I wrote for Random Lengths News that ended up getting supplanted by another. But it's well suited as an example of a phenomena that is all-pervasive in todays global economy, and it points to how we can start reframing that economy in terms that show what's really going on, and who's really paying the costs of someone else's fabulous wealth.
