Protecting California’s Coast

This chapter begins by exploring the conflicts over Southern California's beaches and coastal areas and then turns to efforts to protect the San Francisco Bay and the entire Pacific coast. In addition to its aesthetic value and opportunities for recreation, the coast is a major economic resource. It enhances the value of property located on or near it, and the coastal area also contains substantial deposits of oil. Precisely because the coast is a scarce and valuable resource with so many competing uses, protecting it, like the coastal redwoods, has been highly contentious. On one important dimension, the dynamics of two of the important cases described in this chapter depart from the book's explanatory framework. The campaigns to establish the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the world's first coastal protection agency, as well as the more sweeping California Coastal Commission, received no business support. In both cases, the interests of business were not divided. Rather, their creation was made possible by extensive citizen mobilization, an outcome that reveals the important role played by public support for environmental protection in California beginning in the middle of the twentieth century.

Protecting the Land

This chapter discusses the efforts to protect Yosemite and the sequoias in the Sierras in the nineteenth century and then turns to the more heated conflicts over the fate of the coastal redwoods. The roots of California's tradition of civic mobilization lie in nature protection. This tradition began with the efforts of a few prominent individuals—including John Muir, Horace Greeley, and Frederick Olmsted—and then became institutionalized in the upper-middle-class Sierra and Sempervirens clubs and the predominantly upper-class Save-the-Redwoods League. Broader grassroots citizen mobilization played a critical role in campaigns to return control of Yosemite to the federal government, expand the size of and increase the funding for state parks, and protect endangered sequoias in the Sierras. The state's administrative capacity to protect California's scenic environment was initially limited, paralleling its inability to regulate hydraulic mining during the mid-nineteenth century. However, this capacity subsequently expanded through the establishment of institutions such as the State Board of Agriculture, the State Forestry Commission, and the State Parks Commission.

Gold Mining

This chapter, which begins by exploring California's early history, demonstrates the critical role played by both geography and public policy in shaping the state's early economic development, the environmental impacts of that development, and the state's efforts to address those impacts. The discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills in 1848 literally created the state of California. However, the geography of those foothills and the valley into which their rivers flowed also made gold mining one of the most environmentally destructive natural resource activities in nineteenth-century America. It sharply divided the business interests of northern California, leading to a prolonged and bitter battle between mining companies and farmers in the Sacramento Valley. This conflict was finally resolved by a federal court decision in 1884 that banned hydraulic mining—the first important environmental ruling issued by a federal court. This decision was issued in San Francisco by a California judge, illustrating the important role played by the state in the history of pollution control in the United States.

California’s Regulatory Leadership: Broader Implications

This concluding chapter reviews the key themes of the book and explores some of the broader implications of this analysis of California's regulatory leadership. Three points are particularly critical: the importance of the local dimension of environmental policies, the role of business in environmental politics, and the limits of environmental regulation. The chapter then discusses the increasingly important role states are playing in environmental protection in the United States and shows how California has economically benefited from its environmental policy leadership. One important reason why California has been able to consistently adopt more stringent regulations than those of the federal government and other states is that many of its improvements in local and state environmental quality have been a source of competitive advantage. The improvements it has made in air quality—most notably in Los Angeles—its protection of the trees in the Sierras and along the Pacific, and its land use controls along the coast and around the San Francisco Bay have all made California a more attractive place to move to, invest in, and visit.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a background of California's geography. California's nickname “The Golden State” evokes a distinctive and unusually beautiful natural environment. Throughout its history, California's natural resources have been an important economic asset, with the state benefiting from its mountains of gold and silver, rapidly flowing rivers, thick forests, deposits of oil, and fertile agricultural lands. While its economy has since diversified, California remains the nation's largest agricultural producer and its third-largest oil producer. Compared to all other states as well as the federal government, California has been a national leader in regulatory policymaking on issues ranging from forestry management, scenic land protection, air pollution, and coastal zone management to energy efficiency and global climate change. Its distinctive geography, high degree of citizen mobilization, business support for many environmental measures, and steadily growing administrative capacity have produced a continuous stream of environmental policy innovations in multiple areas over a long period of time. This book draws upon these policies to explain why this particular state has consistently led the United States in adopting new environmental regulations and why being “greener” has become a central part of California's political identity.

Energy Efficiency and Climate Change

This chapter describes how, for four decades, California has been at the forefront of national efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These initiatives began with policies to reduce energy use in order to avoid the construction of additional power plants and went on to include progressively more stringent energy efficiency standards and renewable energy mandates, additional curbs on automotive emissions, and a cap-and-trade program designed to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions. The emergence and expansion of these efforts demonstrates the importance of the factors that have shaped environmental policy innovations in other areas. At the same time, these policies are also distinct from those described in the previous chapters. First, they developed more incrementally, with some backsliding, much conflict, and frequent compromises. Second, some of their policy triggers—most notably, the 1973 energy crisis and California's 2000–2001 energy deregulation fiasco—were unrelated to environmental risks or threats. Third, their scope, diversity, and economic impact have been more substantial than those of the state's regulations protecting land use, coastal areas, and automotive emissions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in marked contrast to the state's other environmental policy threats, California cannot protect itself from the risks of global climate change. This means that the state has a critical stake in promoting a “California effect” that will encourage other political jurisdictions both in and outside the United States to also restrict their greenhouse gas emissions.

Protecting Air Quality

This chapter looks at the efforts to protect California's air quality. Public and business demands for automobile control in the United States originated in Los Angeles, and pollution controls for motor vehicles were essentially initiated by the state of California. Following a successful national political campaign that pitted the interests of California against the nation's automotive manufacturers, in 1967, Congress allowed California—and initially only California—to issue its own vehicle emissions standards. Thanks to the unique pollution problems of Los Angeles, the United States became and remains the only country to have two distinctive mobile-source pollution control standards. Many of the themes described throughout this book are illustrated in this chapter. These include the importance of both citizen mobilization and business support for stronger environmental regulations and the progressive development of the state's regulatory capacity, from the creation of the Smoke and Fumes Commission in Los Angeles in 1945 to the organization of air pollution control districts in 1947 and finally the establishment in 1968 of the California Air Resources Board.

Managing Water Resources

This chapter examines California's water management projects, which represent an important exception to its leadership in the area of environmental protection. California's approach to water management is distinctive from its other environmental policies in three important respects. First, the threats to the state's aquatic environment came from government, not business. Second, with the notable exception of the battle over the damming and flooding of Hetch Hetchy around the turn of the century, until recently neither conservationists nor environmentalists challenged California's wide-ranging water management initiatives, despite the fact that many had deleterious environmental consequences. Third, historically, business interests were not divided with regard to what to do (or not do) with California's water. Both agricultural and urban commercial interests were united in their strong support for the continued expansion of the state's hydraulic infrastructure. Thus, in this case, the public and business were on the same side. As was the case with the protection of forests and scenic areas, the federal government has also played an important role in shaping California's approach to water management. The federal government's initial legal backing of and subsequent financial support for the state's water management system has been critical in promoting the exploitation of not only the state's but the region's water resources.