Striving for Truly Green Growth

Sometimes you can't win for trying.

The environmental and labor movements have often been criticized for being at odds with one another, for concentrating on issues narrowly to the exclusion of a broader picture. For nearly a decade now, environmental activists dealing with the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have sought opportunities to ally with labor over problems caused by the shipping, trucking and rail companies that move goods in and out of the ports.

At times, we have been at odds with certain labor groups, but on reaching out, we began to find that we had objectives in common with a number of groups, centered around the principle of building livable and sustainable cities.

Photo courtesy Tom Politeo After California passed an anti-idling bill for trucks, shipping companies simply moved idling trucks off public streets and onto their terminals, following the letter of the law but ignoring its spirit. Here trucks queue up below a residential neighborhood in San Pedro. At night, honking horns and truck noise punctuates the night. Day or night, emissions are a problem and drivers lose time waiting in long lines.

Our first substantial cooperative efforts occurred in 2002, as we joined with labor groups to support a ban to keep diesel trucks from idling on public roadways surrounding the ports. Trucks had been queuing up for many hours, spewing toxic diesel exhaust, emitting noise, wasting fuel and squandering the time of drives. Our joint efforts led to successful legislation at the state level. These early efforts were covered in the June 2002 Southern Sierran.

Since then, we have managed to establish a fair amount of mutual trust and understanding with labor, and for the past year we've been working with labor, faith and other environmental groups in a coalition to address problems posed to livable cities by our ports and shipping industries.

At the height our this cooperation, the Los Angeles Times recently opined in a Sunday editorial, that environmentalists and labor had joined in an 'unholy alliance' with labor. The editorial was in want for a core appreciation of the issues both groups face and why we have drawn us together. The editorial focused on denouncing the NRDC and Teamsters almost exclusively, as if the Times was unaware of the large number of groups involved and the organic origin of our cooperation in the San Pedro Bay area.

Through this process, the City of Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilwoman Janice Hahn, and leading staff and the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners have been very responsive to our alliance. At times, it seems that some of the politicians have been surprised at just how cohesive our alliance has been, fearing that labor and environmental activists may have split up and gone their own way. Yet, in a world where no one can win for trying, the City and Port of Los Angeles have both been under fire from our same coalition for some of the details in a recent EIR and the apparent priorities set in of moving forward with green growth. As simple as the concept sounds, there is still some difference as to just what green growth comprises.

In the ports, both Los Angeles and Long Beach are focused on air quality almost to the exclusion of other environmental concerns. Los Angeles Harbor Commission President S. David Freeman, refers to air quality as a 'bullet to the heart' and diminishes other concerns as 'a cut on the finger.'

One of the concerns port activists have had with the Clean Air Action Plan adopted by both ports in cooperation with three more agencies, is that it is just that, a 'clean air' and not a 'clean environment' plan. As an important milestone plan, it potentially creates a vehicle to greenwash other concerns by the very weight of attention it puts on air quality alone.

One of our other concerns, with which we have not made any headway for more than 30 years, is the restoration of some wetlands and wetland-like habitat in the San Pedro Bay area. Since the ports were established, we have drained and destroyed more than 99% of the wetlands in San Pedro Bay.

Some 3000 to 3500 acres are now almost entirely gone, replaced by about 5000 acres of industry. Much of this built with massive public works projects, involving extensive dredging and island building.

To reach an average level of destruction, the ports will need to restore about 10% of the wetlands once here, about 300 or 350 acres. As long as they continue to get failing marks on this restoration, they cannot claim to be champions of green growth.

This sort of restoration is particularly important for Wilmington, a California Coastal Community with no true access to the coastline. Once the heart of San Pedro Bay's wetland system. It is now the heart of an industrial port, where local residents can't get any closer to the water than a dock. This nature deficit disorder needs prompt attention.

When it comes to another key ask, Los Angeles gets top marks and Long Beach has much room for improvement.

Los Angeles has been supportive of our efforts to restore an employment classification to port truck drivers, a status that was lost under deregulation in the Reagan era. We both believe that this will help open the doors to improve driver compensation. Long Beach remains focused on air quality alone, as if there were no other legitimate environmental concerns.

Demographic charts show that both Los Angeles and Long Beach have largely lost their middle class. If we are to have the income base we need to support livable city programs, from parks to police, from youth programs to local business, unless we must reestablish the lost income base. Until we do, we'll continue to see more urban flight and sprawl and more transportation pressure with workers driving unreasonably long commutes.

The Los Angeles Times editorial characterized our efforts to do this as likely to result in a court battle, which is exactly the argument that the city and port have made in Long Beach. It may well, since the industry we are fighting, starting with retail giants like Wal-Mart at the top of the food chain, is determined to externalize any cost it can, regardless of the consequences.

This is similar to when California fought the auto industry in the 1960s and took its battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court so that we could protect our health and quality of life. Had we given up that battle before we started, as the Times and Long Beach seem to suggest, our air quality would no doubt be far worse than it is today.

When Richard Riordan was L.A. Mayor, Sierra Club member Noel Park was probably the first to ask one of the ports to adopt a concession model to put its unruly tenants in line. In this arrangement, the ports would exercise their rights as landlords in the business relationships they form with their tenants. This is like a rental agreement, in which an apartment owner asks tenants to clean up after their dogs and to keep noise down at night. A landlord can impose requirements on a tenant above and beyond those which may be required by law.

If successful, the model would help us deal with a wide variety of problems that the federal government has been dragging its feet on. So far, other approaches have been too hampered by federal red tape to make any headway against the rapid growth of our ports. There are many of us who recognize, that if there is to be sufficient progress to have truly green growth, we need to find a mechanism to do better than we have been able to do so far.

This will certainly hurtle us straight in to the fight of our lives, since an irresponsible shipping and retail cartel will do everything they can to hang on to their 'right' to spoil the environment.

For more information or to help out, please visit the Harbor Vision Task Force web site: http://angeles.sierraclub.org/hvtf.