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vii Preface and Acknowledgments This book tells the story of a successful grassroots campaign against building an electric power plant in a part of Los Angeles County already burdened with polluted air.Its heart is the story of how the environmental justice organization Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) and its youth group,Youth for Environmental Justice (Youth-EJ), went about defeating a power plant during 2000 and 2001, when California seemed to be in the midst of its worst electricity shortage ever. These activists saw themselves as environmental Davids against the Goliath of Big Power. Marianne Brown, Erin O’Brien, and Bryce Lowery at UCLA’s Labor and Occupational Safety and Health first connected me with these activists,for which I’m grateful. My biggest thanks go to CBE staff, and to the high school students who did the outreach and education that mobilized South Gate residents to become involved. They opened their files and shared their ideas and expertise, their notes, artwork, and photos with me. I also thank their teachers at South Gate High School, who are also important players in this narrative. As I pursued this story, it got more complicated.The good guys and bad guys were not always who I expected them to be. The big power Goliath saw itself as David too. I began to feel like I was solving a mystery, and as with reading a mystery novel, I found myself entering unfamiliar territory. The issue was deeply entangled in local and statewide politics that sometimes had little or nothing to do with electricity, and sometimes had much to do with its technology and political economy.Activists may try to shape the policies and practices of legislative and regulatory bodies, but they usually do it from the outside, because that is where grassroots organizing is especially effective. Like those I study, I am seldom privy to Preface and Acknowledgments viii the metaphorical smoke-filled back rooms of politics,where the landscape of activism is sculpted. The study of grassroots activism and the issues connected to it are areas of research I know something about, but I am no expert on energy, deregulation , emission control technology, or the politics surrounding any of them.When I discovered that it was going to be impossible to tell the story of grassroots activism without telling these stories too, I sought help. South Gate city councilors and city clerk, another set of key players in the book, gave me a tutorial on the back rooms of city politics, and a good education on their differing perspectives about the power plant and the campaign against it. I thank city clerk Carmen Avalos for guiding me through an enormous amount of city data and Erick DeLeon of her office for finding and photocopying documents. Los Angeles Times reporters Richard Marosi and Hugo Martin offered invaluable background information on South Los Angeles politics. I was also fortunate to get a crash course on South Los Angeles history and politics from George Cole, Bell city councilor and longtime labor activist in South Los Angeles. I also owe debts of thanks to Dave Sickler and Goetz Wolf of the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO and to Vince Avila of the South Gate Police Officers Association. It is hard to write about a power plant controversy without some understanding of energy production, emission control, and deregulation policies,as well as state energy and air-quality politics.I’ve had some expert tutors. Robert Danziger, Sunlaw’s founder, explained the company’s technology and what it was up against, and suggested where I should look for evidence.Anupom Ganguli of the South Coast Air Quality Management District tutored me on emission control systems, testing, and AQMD’s protocols. Mark Abramowitz and V. John White, environmentalists who work on improving California’s air quality, helped me to understand statewide energy politics and emission control systems, and guided me through the legislative and regulatory landscape. There’s always the risk that a little learning is a dangerous thing. I hope I got it right, but the mistakes are mine. Excellent volunteers assisted me in conducting interviews at South Gate. Jennifer Tucker conducted a number of them and joined me in several others.Youth-EJ memberVictoria Gutierrez also helped interview. South Gate alum Sylvia Zamora, who was conducting research on the power plant for a Smith College undergraduate project, and I shared our interviews,and Zamora shared her survey of South Gate residents with me...

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