The Message Is Finally Clear

Southern California is at an environmental crossroads, as a team of Times writers and editors declared in a 14-page special section earlier this week. The region has come to turning points before, but they often reflected more a wave of nostalgia for earlier, quieter times and fewer neon signs than real concern that lives are at stake.

But a Times public opinion poll seems to say that an environmental ethic is rising in the region now that smog is no longer the only visible evidence that growing numbers of people are carelessly imposing burdens that are too heavy for California’s land, rivers, air and sea to bear.

Doctors blame dirty air for a 23% increase in deaths related to asthma between 1980 and 1985. Filthy as Southern California’s air is--worse than anywhere else in the nation--it is cleaner than it used to be, because the region has spent billions of dollars over more than a generation on pollution controls for industry and automobiles. But with population expected to grow by more than one-third over the next 20 years, more controls are needed to prevent its getting dirtier again.

The same relentless growth also threatens to overwhelm efforts to clean up underground water supplies, polluted by chemicals that seep into wells; protect the coastline, battered less by waves than by developers catering to the instinct that draws humans to the ocean’s edge, and dispose of mountains of trash--some of it toxic--when there is a steadily declining supply of places to put them.

The Times poll finds that these messages are sinking in and that Southern Californians are prepared to make significant changes in the way they live and pay a price to protect the human habitat.

They rate public indifference high on the list of causes of pollution, and vast majorities said they would give up drive-through banking (a problem because idling auto engines pollute more than cruising engines) and pay higher taxes to treat water supplies. There is a big difference between telling a poll-taker what would be tolerable and actually tolerating it. But the region’s politicians would do well to take the emergence of an environmental ethic seriously. Actions start with thought, and the thought that Southern California’s environment is in trouble is clearly there.