Launched in 2005, the Clean Air, Clean Lungs, Clean Buses Campaign is built on almost two decades of the Strategy Center's work taking on large scale toxic polluters in the region, beginning by organizing L/C Watchdog in Wilmington to fight Texaco refineries , and then the BRU to take on the toxic auto in a landmark Civil Rights fight to build first-class public transportation in Los Angeles.

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. Mention an link LA Lethal Air

The Wilmington work evolved into what is now a 14-year project, the Bus Riders Union and its Billions for Buses Campaign for environmental justice and civil rights. The BRU is taking on one of L.A.'s largest sources of air pollution-the auto-by winning a massive infusion of clean fuel bus service onto the streets of L.A. Initiated in 1993, the BRU focused on the racially discriminatory and air polluting policies of the Los Angeles 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 Consent Decree, voluntarily signed by MTA, legally bound the $3 billion a year agency to make significant improvements in the bus system to benefit the mostly low income and minority bus ridership. Trained by LDF, the BRU created its own bus overcrowding monitoring team to monitor MTA compliance with the Consent Decree. We met almost every month for a decade with MTA bus operations officials and became a grassroots urban planning center forcing MTA to redistribute $2.7 billion in resources back into the bus system. Today, the BRU is the Strategy Center's main flagship campaign and the largest grassroots mass transit organization in the U.S., with 150 active members, 3,000 dues-paying members, and 30,000 on the bus supporters, who are majority women, predominantly people of color, significantly immigrant and overwhelmingly low income people.

The Clean Air 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. During the WSSD, we learned that since the historic 1992 meeting in Rio, untrammeled corporate plunder and governments that failed to regulate it has 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 here in Los Angeles-the region deemed as the "auto capital of the world.