Smell-A

Anyone who has spent much time in Los Angeles through the years can tell you that it didn’t take long for the smog to get bad. All it took was for the morning commute to get started, and very quickly the two million automobiles on the roads would do their dirty work of turning the sky into a “flat canvas of smog haze” as Helena Maria Viramontes, author of Their Dogs Came with Them would say.

For years everyone thought that air pollution was seen as thought to be an inevitable part of industrialization. If we wanted progress, cars, factories, and refineries, then we would just have to deal with the air pollution that came with it. In 1943, Los Angeles, which we all know as LA, was hit with some of the worst air pollution in history. The first big “smog scare” sent residents running from what they assumed was a Japanese gas attack. Soon, what was once a clear, beautiful city, with wonderful coastal air, became a tear-inducing haze. No one knew what was causing it. Some even thought that it might be an anomaly of geography. That wasn’t it, of course. The real cause of the problem, while actually attached to the industrial revolution, was directly caused by the fact that the number of cars in LA had doubled from one to two million in a relatively short time.

At the time, scientists were just beginning to understand the impact of industry and development on the environment, so the smog was initially misattributed to chemical plants and backyard trash fires. These days, we would have laughed at the idea of “backyard trash burning” being the cause of the massive amount of smog in LA, but they just didn’t know. Then, in 1948, a Caltech biochemist named Arie Haagen-Smit finally made the connection with car exhaust. Even after his discovery, Haagen-Smit had to fight the oil-industry backed researchers who attempted to disprove his ideas. I’m sure the oil industry could see dollar signs flying out the window.

The reality is that while we all want the economic engine that produces smog, no one wants to live with the consequences of that engine. Finally, after much research, the study resulted in an understanding of the correlation between pollution and income levels. Now, more than fifty years since Angelenos began demanding better protection from bad air, the heaviest levels of pollution still seem to concentrate in low-income communities. Eventually change began, but it was slow progress. Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1963. Still progress was slow. It took a little more than a decade before national laws began to require catalytic converters for new automobiles. Eventually, the new laws helped roll back the LA haze. Unfortunately, the legislation came too late for the millions of people who had grown up under that dangerous smog. By 1987, an estimated 27 percent of Angelenos were living with “severely damaged” lungs. Across California, almost 10,000 people continue to die each year from sickness resulting from air-pollution. We don’t always think of air pollution as being so deadly. Today, ozone levels in LA are 40% of what they were in 1970, and that’s with double the cars. But on a bad day the air in LA is still pretty rough, which is most likely what brought LA its nickname…Smell-A.