other regional leaders pushed for a national freight movement infrastructure policy to act as a foil against the perceived intrusion from the north, an appeal that harkened back to the Alameda Corridor project of the 1980s.
Private sector members of the logistics regime, including the National Retail Federation, the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, pursued their own federal policies because they believed that centralized strategic plans were needed to overcome fragmented, multijurisdictional planning. For example, in a plan presented at a National Freight Transportation hearing in 2008, industry leaders claimed, “Coordination within transportation corridors can only be achieved by eliminating the piecemeal action of local governments, port authorities, and regional planning organizations.”47 They argued for coordination along “an entire transportation corridor.” According to industry leaders who were present at the hearing, “This systemic perspective, which only the state can provide, must be applied to the prioritization, coordination, and oversight of infrastructure projects.”
Private sector calls for more centralized planning were a response to social movement organizations (SMOs) that successfully used their political capital to win concessions from local and regional state agencies. Business leaders warned that mounting labor unrest and environmental regulations were forcing shippers to route some of their goods away from the San Pedro Bay ports. Michael Jacob, vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, argued, “We are actually on the front end of a long-term structural change of business models where people are building their supply chains around California.”48 This threat narrative was also used to warn policy makers that failure to build enough infrastructure to meet future import projections would result in the loss of tax dollars and jobs to competing cities.49 The underlying message was also clear: business leaders warned that efforts by unions, environmental groups, and liberal politicians to rein in logistics development would result in economic disaster. Such claims sounded like earlier probusiness warnings meant to throttle progressive forces by threatening that factories would move to less-regulated terrain.50 The threat of capital abandonment was meant to discipline both social movements and progressive members of the local state. The warning was obvious: stop your demands for environmental justice and living wages or we’ll take our business somewhere else.
GREENING THE PORTS
The logistics regime embraced a green growth doctrine as a political compromise that would allow the ports to grow while dealing with some of the environmental issues that were being raised by SMOs. Several SMOs established themselves as viable opponents to the logistics regime by arguing that dogged pursuit of a port-based development policy agenda without also accounting for economic and environmental justice was shortsighted and damaging to the public good. Unions and environmental organizations used their growing political clout to challenge dominant neoliberal development narratives, including the idea that logistics represented an upward mobility path for blue-collar workers and poor residents. Instead, SMOs reframed the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by casting goods movement as a dangerous and poverty-inducing industry. An example of how this occurred can be traced back to the early 2000s during policy debates about future port expansion, when some politicians began to question how logistics expansion would affect local communities, especially those located near the ports. The following exchange between Long Beach congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald and Executive Director for the Port of Los Angeles Larry Keller highlights how environmental concerns inserted themselves into the production of Southern California’s logistics landscape:
Congresswoman Millender-McDonald: But are you saying that right now we are going to have a 700 percent increase in cargo with the dredging of both 400 and 300 pier completed, we will go into 24 million tons of cargo? Explain that to me.
Mr. Keller: Congresswoman, our cargo has increased 700 percent since the early 1980’s and in the next 20 years—the two ports right now are putting through about 10 million containers, imports and exports. By the year 2020, we expect that number to rise to 24 million—from 10 million to 24 million. We are not, by any means, done with our development between the two ports. We have additional landfills consolidations and dredging projects in order to allow the larger ships to come in.
Congresswoman Millender-McDonald: Uh-huh, absolutely. That is why it is so critically important that we make sure that the air, the quality of the environment is conducive to your continuing that, because we are looking forward to that, as we talk about international trade and other entities that will help us in our economic vitality.51
This exchange occurred in April 2001 during a congressional hearing on governmental reform. The interaction between Congresswoman Milliner-McDonald and Mr. Keller was particularly poignant because she had played a key role in supporting the Alameda Corridor project during the 1980s. More important, her comments indicated a specific political strategy that enabled future growth if port officials and private business interests paid attention to and mitigated negative environmental outcomes. This was not an antidevelopment intervention. In fact, it created a new path by linking effective environmental mitigation with progrowth policies. The result was a type of green development politics that adopted a pro-environment discourse while seeking technical solutions to possible negative effects. The underlying strategy hinted at by the congresswoman would shape how SMOs contested the unfettered expansion of the logistics regime.
Port leaders needed a green growth strategy because they were liable for environmental and health damages caused by the logistics industry. While the logistics regime touted tremendous trade growth as a positive outcome for the region, such rapid expansion also raised flags about the capacity to absorb the onslaught of new commodity shipments. The 700 percent increase in cargo mentioned by Larry Keller was an astonishing amount, because such vast quantities placed new burdens on the region’s environment. Consider the amount of space required to move ten million twenty-foot containers in the early 2000s. Volume created a spatial problem. Where did they intend to put all the stuff that was being imported, and how were they going to minimize environmental health damage in a densely populated urban area? At the time, most of the vehicles used to move those containers operated on diesel fuel, a deadly and cancer-causing toxin. By 2008 approximately thirty-seven hundred Californians were dying from cancer caused by exposure to logistics-related diesel emissions.52 Many more, eighteen thousand, died annually from exposure to ambient levels of diesel particulate matter. SMO activists used these diesel-related deaths as a counternarrative to push back against the logistics growth regime. Environmental justice activists argued that port expansion was disproportionately affecting parts of the region with high concentrations of poor, Black, and Latinx residents.53
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