The Strategy Center's public health and environmental justice struggle began in Wilmington when it built a coalition of low-income workers, community residents, and clergy against the toxic dangers of stationary sources, specifically the Texaco refinery, becoming a major force at the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Fighting Texaco to Bus Riders Union

The Wilmington work evolved into what is now a 15-year project, the Bus Riders Union and its Billions for Buses Campaign for environmental justice and civil rights. The BRU focuses on the racially discriminatory and air polluting policies of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). In 1996 we won a historic Civil Rights Consent Decree, the product of a mass action lawsuit filed by the LCSC and the BRU with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in federal court under Title VI of the Civil Right Act.

The last 15 years of Bus Riders Union’s victories has led to a significant increase in transit use and reduction in air pollution including lower cost transit, replacement of MTA’s diesel fleet with 2,100 new clean fuel CNG buses, fleet expansion by more than 300 buses, generating the first Rapid Bus lines that dramatically reduce transit times on major surface streets.

BRU goes to South Africa and launches Global Warming and Public Health Campaign in LA

Launched in 2005 at the Future of Transportation Conference, the Clean Air, Clean Lungs, Clean Buses Campaign was born out of the third world's call "what are we going to do about the United States?" at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002. We learned that even after the historic 1992 summit in Rio, untrammeled corporate plunder and governments that failed to regulate it led to more poverty, more pollution, more global warming, more third world debt. George Bush Sr. told delegates in Rio, "The U.S. does not intend to change its lifestyle because of threats from other nations." Representatives from the small island states have angrily replied, "for you, autos and SUVs are a question of lifestyle; for us stopping global warming is a matter of life and death."

We heard first hand from nations like Samoa talk about how the warming of the oceans by only a few degrees over the past few decades has had profoundly disruptive impacts on the viability of their entire society. The warmer water is deteriorating coral reefs that have protected the coastlines for centuries, leading to massive flooding and growing coastal inundation. Friends from Guyana in South American told us that their seacoast is more than 1 meter under water and again the floods are devastating peoples homes and livestock-the country of less than 1 million people is threatened by massive out migration.  

The Clean Air, Clean Lungs, Clean Buses Campaign is our challenge since coming back from the WSSD to hold polluting cities like Los Angeles accountable to Third world nations, Indigenous peoples, poor people of color, and the next generation who’s futures are being devastated by Global Warming and Climate Change.