Author: Claire Diggins
Urban and Environmental Policy (UEP) professor Martha Matsuoka and professor of Environmental Science James Sadd have joined forces with the “Clean Up Green Up” organization, a grassroots movement that aims to transform the most polluted neighborhoods in Los Angeles into healthier residential spaces. The campaign focuses on helping to clean up the local air supply through on-the-ground research as well as collaboration with community members and city council members. There is currently an effort to bring this campaign to Eagle Rock.
Members of the campaign patrol L.A. with handheld pollution sensors verifying the accuracy of government pollution data. This process is called “ground truthing.”
Sadd, who is a GIS mapping expert, help teach others how to operate the equipment and analyze the collected data.
Over 60 L.A. citizens partook in the “ground truthing.” The facilities that community members identified included small-scale enterprises, such as local auto shops and gas stations.
“We were able to get the bigger picture, grounded in community knowledge and community experience … This is cutting edge research that has begun to be recognized nationally,” Matsuoka said.
Urban and Environmental Policy professor Mark Vallianatos wrote an article on this topic for his column Eco Soul in an online magazine called Eagle Rock Patch. In his article “How Clean is the Air We Breath?” Vallianatos noted that Occidental is the only state-registered emitter in Eagle Rock. While this is due to the fact that the size of the institution requires the college to be registered, whereas smaller scale operations are not required, it still generates a notion of campus-wide responsibility.
“Students should be conducting this kind of air-testing research and collaborating with local environmental justice organizations. We also need to take a closer look at our emissions across campus and try to reduce them,” Vallianatos said.
According to the “Clean up to Green Up” report, “Hidden Hazards,” the result of the”ground truthings,” was the discovery that many more hazardous facilities exist in residential areas than are recorded in state and federal government regulatory inventories, and that levels of hazardous material in their air samples regularly exceed the health protective standards established by the California Environmental Protection Agency. Additionally, the research concluded that there were various violations of “buffer zones” created to protect the health of sensitive populations, such as children, the elderly and people with respiratory disease, from air pollution.
Using this research, which was partially funded by the California Air Resources Board, the “Clean up to Green Up” campaign will present its findings the Los Angeles government and ask them to change their policies.
“What is so interesting about this campaign is that it is a land use campaign, so you can run it through your local city council members, who are much more accessible,” Matsuoka said. So far, the campaign has partnered with Councilman Jose Huizar (District 14) to introduce legislation into city council, establishing “green zones” in several low-income communities. These green zones will ensure that new businesses intending to build in these neighborhoods are clean and environmentally sustainable. The legislation also seeks to increase the current toxic burden in these neighborhoods by improving enforcement and monitoring mechanisms and issuing fines to heavy polluters.
Finally, the Clean Up Green Up legislation involves economic investment and remodeling strategies to help existing businesses “green up” and become cleaner, safer members of their community.
“This is the really innovative part of the forum. We want mom and pop places to stay in place, but we want them to clean up. We have labor unions involved and second generation small business owners who want to clean up their businesses but may not know how,” Matsuoka said.
The legislation was just introduced on Jan. 21 and, according to professor Matsuoka, the city has 90 days to make a decision. Janice Hahn, Tony Cárdenas and Richard Alárcon are co-sponsors of the legislation.
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