Helping the Poor Fight Pollution : Urban life: Activists wage door-to-door campaign against ‘environmental racism’ of putting industry in low-income areas. Residents voice interest, but progress is slow.

The label on the map says “East Wilmington Park,” conjuring up images of leafy trees and grassy fields. Reality is a sandy patch studded with bits of broken bottles. A lone, rusting sculpture with a slide attached sits unused in the middle. Graffiti sprawl over a cinder-block wall.

In the distance are refinery flares, sulfur piles and freeways--all indicators to the practiced eyes of Chris Mathis, Lisa Duran and Kikanza Ramsey that this neighborhood is fertile ground for their door-to-door campaign to get the working class, the poor and minorities involved in fighting air pollution.

They were targeting a low-income community laced with industry and vehicle exhaust. The people breathing these fumes know very well that the air in Los Angeles is bad. What they don’t know, apparently, is what they can do about it.

Mathis, Duran, and Ramsey hoped to persuade them, house by house by house, to unite to force a cleanup by those who have polluted their neighborhoods. Organizers for the Van Nuys-based Labor Community Strategy Center, the three believe that low-income people are being asked to bear a disproportionate share of the burden.

The center’s door-to-door campaign is part of an emerging national movement against “environmental racism,” which encourages minorities to organize against concentrations of polluting industry, toxic landfills and incinerators in their neighborhoods. Going a step further, the group also says large-scale efforts to reduce pollution need to take matters of class and race into account.

Proposals to cut automobile pollution by raising the cost of driving--through parking fees, more frequent smog checks and higher registration payments for old, high-polluting cars--hit the poor the hardest, said Eric Mann, the center’s director.

If solo drivers are to be discouraged, he said, businesses should buy more vans to shuttle their employees and provide on-site child care to reduce daily car trips. His reasoning: Companies are to blame for smog and toxic contaminants, not only because of factory emissions but because of what they choose to make and market--gasoline-powered cars, for example, or solvent-based paints. Therefore, corporations should be forced to shoulder most of the responsibility for the cleanup and that means more than installing filters and controls. It means manufacturing low-emissions products. It means helping their workers pollute less as well.

So the center has embarked upon the daunting task of building a grass-roots organization to counter the influence of business on regulators like the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the state Air Resources Board, and upon companies.

“I think that this group fills a very valuable role,” AQMD board member Larry Berg said. “Too often we’ve been very insensitive.”

Mann, a 49-year-old veteran of the civil rights, anti-war and labor movements, charges that mainstream environmental organizations, with a mostly white, relatively affluent constituency, put the AQMD “between a rock and a soft place.”

“They’ve had 20 years to construct a mass movement,” Mann said. “They don’t speak for the majority of people in California.”

Industry is watching with interest. “They have an appealing message,” said Doug Henderson, executive director of the Western States Petroleum Assn. “I don’t know if it’s viable, though. Low-income people need jobs too. You can’t drive companies away.”

Mann was searching for a cause to advance his social theories when he found air pollution. After stints with the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society, he worked for 12 years in factories. He was involved in the ultimately unsuccessful fight to keep General Motors from closing its Van Nuys plant.

A union official challenged him to take up an environmental issue. “I knew it had to be a matter of life and death,” Mann said.

He gathered a group of like-minded activists to spend a year investigating the health effects, the causes and the politics of smog and toxic air contaminants. They wrote and recently published a book, “L.A.’s Lethal Air.” They hope to print a Spanish translation in the spring, Mann said.

More traditional environmental groups say the center’s work has influenced their thinking. The Coalition for Clean Air, for example, has backed a call by the center and local unions to revamp the AQMD’s “rideshare” program, which requires large employers to adopt incentives for car pooling or use of mass transit. The AQMD approved a rideshare plan submitted by Los Angeles County to charge employee parking fees, even though its labor contract specified free parking.

The AQMD board on Friday will consider changing that policy with a “social equity” clause, designed to prevent employers from violating union agreements or taking action that discriminates against those on the low end of the pay scales.

“In some ways, (proposed changes) make the rule weaker,” said Tim Little, executive director for the clean-air coalition. “On the other hand, if it’s something that employee groups are more willing to support, then that makes it stronger.”

Little and coalition President Tom Soto don’t always agree with Mann and resent his rhetoric about their role. Soto, who pointedly notes that he is a longtime Latino activist, said traditional environmentalists have fought for public health for everyone and are trying to get more minorities involved.

But both applaud the center’s mobilizing effort.

“It’s a great thing that he’s going door to door and trying to stir people up,” Little said. “They’re going out and talking with real people and collecting real stories. It’s definitely a threat to the established power structure.”

“It helps to close the gap between policy-makers and the people they affect,” Soto added.

Whether the masses will respond, though, is anybody’s guess.

Mann’s troops--Mathis, Duran, Ramsey and a small cadre of volunteers--have knocked on about 1,200 doors in Wilmington, Carson and South-Central Los Angeles since June, slowly spreading their gospel.

On a recent afternoon, the residents of O Street near East Wilmington Park were more than willing to engage the three staff members in conversation.

“I feel like I want to go live somewhere in the country,” said one mother who is employed in a factory that makes thermostat controls. She recited a litany of colds, headaches, nausea and cancers on the block.

“We shouldn’t feel like we need to pull up and leave here,” Ramsey responded. “We need companies to make safer and better products so they’re not polluting.”

In an apartment building driveway, a young cannery worker was eager to display his knowledge. “ Los carros y muchas fabricas “--cars and many factories--are to blame for the region’s smog, he said.

Ramsey switched to Spanish. She asked him: “Who is making the cars? The same factories that pollute our air.”

At the end of each exchange, the organizers urged their prospects to attend a community meeting the following week in Banning Park.

When the big night arrived, however, only one person showed up, a 64-year-old housewife named Lily Camarillo. She turned out to be someone who knew everyone, and was full of helpful hints: Talk to the pastor of this church, go to the monthly get-together at that restaurant’s back room.

“Have another meeting. I can talk to the people,” Camarillo told Duran and Ramsey. “The people, you got to push and push and push. They are busy, they work, they are parents with children. But I’m gonna push ‘em. I’ll push ‘em.”

Duran sighed as she locked up. “What we want to do is start a countywide organization,” she said. “We can’t do that if we just have one neighbor. I tell myself I shouldn’t get frustrated, and she’s just the kind of person we need, but times like this are hard.”

She’s had her better moments too. There was the meeting in west Wilmington, near the Carson border, where 15 people excitedly interrupted one another. Bill and Gertrude Schwab, longtime Wilmington activists, noted that most of the local causes celebre seemed to have something to do with the air: the junior high students who were getting sick from fumes, the parade of diesel trucks on the main streets, the odors from stored mounds of sulfur.

“When you go out, you always have to carry a Kleenex,” Gertrude Schwab said later. “Your nose is always running. It’s not just me at 65, it’s young people too.”

Weeks afterward, the Schwabs remain intrigued. “(The organizers have) their hearts in the right place. They did all their homework,” Bill Schwab said. “I’ll probably go to another meeting or two and see if it gets bigger and bigger.”