The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  A month later he was back in New York City for the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden. Among the 204 California Brown delegates were family members (Pat and Bernice Brown, Kathleen and Jeep Rice, Cynthia and Joe Kelly), Warren Beatty, Lucy Casado, Cesar Chavez, Marshall Ganz, and half a dozen other UFW organizers.

  Jerry stayed in the ancient, once grand Hotel McAlpin on Herald Square, where rooms cost $28 a night and mice ran across the floor. In the evenings, he watched the convention on the black-and-white television in his room. The UFW volunteers, accustomed to working for room and board and $5 a week, felt right at home. They were the last guests in the hotel before it was torn down.

  The UFW contingent found themselves in the unusual situation of having nothing to do. The union lived largely off donations, and the boycotters were accustomed to fundraising wherever they went. So they organized an event28 on the spur of the moment, a $10-a-person cocktail party with Jerry and Cesar. A restaurant owner offered to donate enough Mexican food and sangria for a thousand people. Boycotters cleaned the decrepit ballroom in the McAlpin. A farmworker supporter from the Bronx arrived with floral decorations. Someone found a mariachi band.

  A day and a half after they hatched the idea, delegates from around the country waited half an hour for the ancient elevators to take them to the twenty-fourth floor of the McAlpin, where the crowd was packed in so tightly that sweat dripped off their faces. When they arrived, Jerry and Cesar could barely get through to the front of the room. Jane Fonda auctioned off six copies of a book about the UFW, autographed by Chavez and Jerry. Chavez thanked everyone for coming. Then they crammed into the elevators again and headed to the convention hall for an event that felt almost anticlimactic.

  Jerry had asked Chavez to place his name in nomination. Chavez was not a good public speaker, and the address was unremarkable. But the symbolism was hard to miss. Chavez had led a revolution, Jerry said later, “not just against some grower in Madera County, but against what I might call the oligarchy, the power establishment29 elite, the governing class. And as a politician, that’s the class you have to please, because if you don’t you are then stigmatized as an oddball, a radical, a weirdo, not playing by the rules.”

  “This convention is just a beginning,”30 Jerry said the next day, casting California’s votes for Carter. His sister Kathleen said she was sad. “In some ways it seemed like the end … but this was just the moment of truth. I think Jerry handled these last few days, which could have been a real problem for him, with grace, dignity and style.” She laughed when told that Carter’s advisers already worried about a rematch four years later. “The Carter people think Jerry will run in 1980? Then they know more than Jerry.31 Jerry doesn’t even know what he’s going to do next Wednesday.”

  15

  To the Moon and Back

  Jerry Brown was a Californian by birth, a Jesuit by training, a politician by vocation, and a farsighted thinker by nature. The unusual combination shaped a governor whose sustained passion and lasting influence was as an advocate for better stewardship of the earth.

  Forces that had drawn Jerry to the seminary, a world of ideas, philosophy, and absolutes, now attracted him to the realms of environment, science, and technology. The debates were about precious, often finite, resources. The impacts were clear. The needs were urgent. The scientific breakthroughs were stunning. The potential to effect change, and the opportunity for California to lead, were enormous. Jerry would be dismissed and even mocked for espousing ideas ahead of their time, an often fatal flaw in the world of traditional politics. In many ways, his views in the mid-1970s foreshadowed the seminal encyclical on the environment and human ecology that would be issued almost four decades later by the first Jesuit pope.

  “Environmental issues get me more interested than most things.1 It seems to relate to something more in the nature of an absolute,” Jerry said in the midst of his tenure in Sacramento. Like the fundamental realities he studied in the seminary, the stakes transcended material concerns. “If you actually put PCB in the drinking supply, you might poison the food-producing capacity of a whole region. That to me seems more serious than whether or not you have the capacity to buy a second car.”

  He found the clear, visible connections between actions and reactions appealing. More cars spewing ozone worsened pollution already so bad that schools canceled outdoor gym classes on dozens of days each year. Conversely, investments in more efficient technology yielded tangible improvements. The parsimonious governor skeptical of so much “squidlike” spending on schools was more willing to commit money to obvious public goods. He told Resources Secretary Claire Dedrick that she was fortunate to be lobbying for the conservation of pristine land—he could see exactly where the money was going. “The state government has not come to terms with the environmental crisis2 facing California,” he wrote in his first budget message, which included additional money for air and water pollution initiatives.

  He tapped into a historic bipartisan vein of support in California for the natural world as a foundation of much of the economy, a source of recreation, and even, as in the case of Yosemite, an emblem of identity.

  “We think of our wealth as represented in the accounting books by the economists and described on Wall Street. But our true wealth3 is our natural systems. Our land, our soil, our forests, our fishing industry, our water, our weather, that is the fundamental basis,” Jerry said in a State of the State address in which he proposed investing in reforestation, fish hatcheries, and solar power. He warned about the need to manage water and quoted from Fernand Braudel’s book The Mediterranean to caution that California must act to avoid the fate of earlier civilizations in similar climes: “The desert lies in wait for arable land and never lets go.” Pat Brown had engineered the State Water Project by assuring Northern, Southern, and Central California that there was more than enough water for everyone. “We have lived with abundant water,” his son said a decade later, in the midst of a drought. “We haven’t had to worry about it. But we now have to manage it.”

  In Pat Brown’s era, there had been no organized environmental advocacy, nor environmental reviews for massive projects like the water works. The modern environmental movement traced its roots to a 1969 disaster in Southern California, a huge oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara. Oil derricks, part of the seaside landscape since the turn of the century, had moved close to shore after new technology enabled drillers to locate oil reserves near land. In the late 1960s, the federal government issued dozens of leases. On January 28, 1969, a Union Oil well blew out less than six miles from shore, unleashing what was then the largest spill in U.S. waters. Over ten days, between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into the channel, washed up on shore, blanketed beaches with a six-inch layer of black goo, and killed thousands of fish and birds.

  The disaster spurred two lawmakers active in the anti–Vietnam War movement, Congressman Pete McCloskey, a liberal Republican from California, and Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, to borrow tactics and channel energy from that struggle to raise awareness of environmental threats. On April 22, 1970, millions of Americans took part in teach-ins across the country during the first Earth Day. The participants were mostly young, liberal, and white; much of the rhetoric was antiestablishment and antiwar. The warnings from scientists were dire. “Halfway measures and business as usual cannot possibly pull us back from the edge of the precipice,” newscaster Walter Cronkite concluded at the end of a special report that evening, Earth Day: A Question of Survival. “To clean up the air and earth and water in the few years science says are left to us means personal involvement and may mean personal sacrifice the likes of which Americans have never been asked to make in times of peace.”

  Such calls meshed with Jerry’s beliefs and agenda. Environmental issues offered a tangible means to emphasize the importance of limits, in a way that coincided rather than conflicted with the goals of a traditional Democratic constituency upset at his insistence o
n limits in other realms.

  In California, the natural world was so key to the state’s identity that alliances transcended ideology. The importance of a robust environment for many of the state’s leading industries blunted organized business opposition to government intervention. As governor, Ronald Reagan had ushered in a new brand of conservativism, but despite his harsh rhetoric about bloated government, he used the force of the state to protect rivers, coasts, air quality, Indian burial grounds, and scenic wilderness. While he would later be remembered for antienvironmental actions as president, Governor Reagan put in place structures his successor would use to great effect.

  Three regulatory bodies with far-reaching powers, the Water Resources Control Board, the Energy Commission, and the Coastal Commission, originated during the Reagan administration. The California Environmental Quality Act, which required stringent reviews of environmental impact for new development, was signed by Reagan. Like Pat Brown, Reagan loved the Sierra Nevada; his resources secretary was a former Sierra packer who had led trips into the high mountains on mules and horses. Reagan intervened with the Nixon administration to block a proposed highway through the wilderness area and saved the spectacular 210-mile John Muir Trail. Presented with competing bills that designated portions of rivers as “forever wild” to block the construction of future dams, Reagan signed the one with tougher protection. Reagan and Nevada governor Paul Laxalt, also a conservative Republican, formed the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to regulate development and save the once pristine lake from encroaching pollution.

  Jerry dramatically increased the power of the Reagan-era initiatives by appointing environmentalists to head commissions and departments. “People who have been on the outside have had a chance to come inside4 the government bureaucracy and attempt to apply concepts and ideas in the workaday world of government,” he said, citing appointees like Claire Dedrick, a Sierra Club vice president, and environmental advocate Huey Johnson, who replaced Dedrick when she became the first woman on the Public Utilities Commission. Bill Press, director of the Planning and Conservation League, had written a report that recommended abolishing the Office of Planning and Research; he was hired to run the state office. His interview with Jerry took place late in the evening over drinks at Frank Fats. The conversation was mainly about Thorstein Veblen, the economist who coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption.”

  Jerry’s most influential, and controversial, appointee had no environmental background. That did not slow down Tom Quinn as head of the Air Resources Board any more than his lack of political experience had been a bar to running Jerry’s campaigns. Reagan had signed the California Air Resources Board into law in 1967. Because the regulatory agency predated the 1970 federal Clean Air Act, California became the only state empowered to enact its own air quality regulations. That positioned California, home of the most cars in the country, to play a powerful role in forcing changes in the automobile industry.

  Quinn recruited the expertise he lacked, making two key hires who would shape air policy in California for the next four decades: Mary Nichols, a recent Yale law graduate who had taken on the federal government in a high-profile air pollution case, and Robert Sawyer, a Berkeley engineering professor and sharp critic of the recently created federal EPA. Sawyer’s expertise proved critical in guiding the state air board’s decisions on how far to push the auto industry to produce cleaner engines. His assurances that car makers could comply with the state’s requirements gave Quinn the confidence to push back against protestations that manufacturers could not possibly achieve the emission reductions California demanded.

  CAN THIS MAN CLEAN UP CALIFORNIA?5 asked the New York Times headline on an October 1976 profile of Quinn. During his tenure, California imposed exhaust emission standards for motorcycles and restrictions on sulfur and lead content of gasoline; fined cars that didn’t meet exhaust emission standards; ordered oil companies to fix leaks in storage tanks; and fined Chrysler $328,000 and ordered the recall of twenty-one thousand cars and seven hundred trucks for smog violations. By imposing its own strict regulations on auto emissions, the Brown administration effectively blocked the industry’s attempt to slow down stringent national standards.

  Environmental advocates credited Quinn’s media savvy as an effective weapon that bolstered the state as it took on powerful industries. He sent in inspectors at two in the morning to the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana, where they issued 1,015 violation orders, the largest number ever against a single polluter. “Tom Quinn never appears to be on the defensive,” Sierra magazine reported, noting that the governor was happiest on the offensive and consistently backed Quinn. “And that, it seems, is the secret of his success6 with Brown.”

  California took on a different Goliath to protect its rivers. The state imposed standards that required the State Water Project to curtail the volume pumped out of rivers when the quality of the streams fell below certain levels and endangered the fragile ecosystems. The federal government argued that its Central Valley water project was immune from such standards. California sued to force compliance and won a landmark state’s rights decision.

  On another front, Jerry stepped in at the eleventh hour to forge a compromise that preserved public access to the California coast and imposed severe limitations on future development. The eleven hundred miles of shoreline had filled up quickly during the boom years of the 1950s and ’60s. Power plants spoiled the spectacular landscape. Conservationists became alarmed when Sea Ranch, a town of twenty thousand, sprang up on land that had been bucolic sheep farms along the northern coast. Access to the Malibu beaches was cut off by private homes. In 1972, voters had passed the Coastal Initiative, which created a commission that had temporary control over coastal development and a mandate to prepare a longer-term proposal subject to legislative approval. Without further action by the end of 1976, the commission would expire. Jerry negotiated a deal, passed by one vote in the last hour of the legislative session, that created a permanent Coastal Commission with power to review new projects and protect public access to the seashore.

  Jerry Brown would typically arrive in the office in late morning and often work into the early hours of the next day. (Courtesy of the office of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.)

  “The most important part of the environmental movement is that there are absolutes7 that are being communicated,” Jerry said in an interview with Sierra magazine, which devoted its January 1978 issue to an assessment of the Brown administration. “The oceans, the air, the water have to be respected, and when they’re not, then there are negative consequences. And that gives people something to cope with, something against which to define their own behavior, and that’s what’s missing now. The sense that one can do anything is unreal and childish. It’s stimulated by the consumption ethic.”

  Jerry used scarcity to force both lifestyle changes and innovation. Gas-guzzling Californians had been hard hit by rising prices at the pump that spiked after the 1973 oil embargo by OPEC nations. The Iranian revolution in 1979 created another crisis and fears of shortage that led to hours-long lines at pumps. In May, California became the first state to implement an odd-even gas rationing system, restricting service to license plates ending in certain numbers on certain days. To encourage more long-lasting changes in behavior, Jerry’s transportation secretary, Adriana Gianturco, experimented with carpool lanes on the Santa Monica freeway. She was vilified (dubbed the Giant Turkey, among other names), and drivers howled so loudly that the project was scrapped. But even Pat Brown, the master builder, recognized times were changing. “If a great newspaper8 such as yours does not impress on the people the need for more than one person riding in an automobile, I don’t know what will happen,” Pat Brown wrote to Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler after the paper editorialized against the diamond lanes. “It is more than wasteful, it is a profligate use of a diminishing resource.”

  A severe drought in 1976 and 1977, the third-worst in state history, became an opportunity for the Br
own administration to press for conservation and more efficient technologies. The Department of Water Resources launched a pilot project that placed two hundred thousand toilet and shower conservation devices in six communities. When Prince Charles visited Sacramento for lunch, Jerry served him a sprouts sandwich in a paper bag with a Save Water sticker on it.

  “I’ve spoken of an era of limits9 and that made people frustrated. Some people got angry; they felt I was antibusiness; they thought I was somehow suppressing expectation, and failing to dream the possibilities that have made this state what it is,” Jerry said at a conference on water. “But at some point, we do live in a relatively closed system, and we have to learn to live with the resources that are available.” Agriculture needed to change its irrigation methods and look to crops that used less water. Homeowners and businesses needed to rethink their gardens and look to native plants. “I’m not saying it’s going to happen overnight, but increasingly I think people in this state will have to become closer in tune with that which nature feels most comfortable with. When one is either in a desert or near a desert, one can’t act as though he were in a more rainy area.”

  Although energy was not a finite resource in the same sense as water, many types of energy depleted natural resources or polluted the air. The state energy commission, led by Jerry’s campaign strategist and pollster Richard Maullin, reversed a rate structure that had made energy cheaper the more consumers used. The commission instituted incentives for utilities and consumers to conserve. An early champion of solar power, Jerry vowed California would take the lead in producing energy from the sun, which was more ecological and closer to “our Jeffersonian ideals.” By 1980, California had seventy-five thousand solar installations, close to a third of the total in the United States.