Francisca Porchas.
What work do you do?
I am a lead organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center and the Bus Riders Union‘s Clean Air, Clean Lungs, Clean Buses Campaign, based in Los Angeles.
How does it relate to the environment?
The Strategy Center has engaged in environmental-justice and civil-rights campaigns for the last 17 years, combining grassroots organizing and policy work with a strategy that challenges market-driven social policy. The Strategy Center includes the Wilmington Labor/Community Watchdog that fights corporate polluters in the Los Angeles port area and the Bus Riders Union that takes on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Our victories include replacing 2,000 diesel buses with 2,000 compressed natural-gas buses.
What are you working on at the moment? Any major projects?
Get a ticket to ride one of L.A.’s natural-gas buses.
Photo: L.A. County MTA.
The Clean Air, Clean Lungs, Clean Buses campaign is a long-term campaign to dramatically reduce toxic air contaminants and greenhouse gases that cause climate change, mostly impacting black, Latino, and Asian/Pacific Islander low-income communities while wreaking havoc in the Third World. Our primary focus is on the reduction of auto use and the expansion of public transportation in Los Angeles County. After all, with 10 million people and 8 million cars in Los Angeles, and with the U.S. emitting 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, we are a big part of the world’s problem and must be part of the world’s solution.
One of the BRU’s immediate goals is to create bus-only lanes in 29 major corridors in Los Angeles County as dramatic changes in mass-transit public policy can lead to rapid changes in public health.
What long and winding road led you to your current position?
My first and most profound transformative political experience was migrating to the U.S. from Sonora, Mexico, at the age of 9. It was not until I traveled back to my native Mexico that I began to make connections between U.S. foreign policy and the profound poverty and never-ending migration of my country’s people, and that I began to understand the need to organize low-income communities like my own.
Francisca Porchas campaigns with the Bus Riders Union.
Searching for training, I worked with the Union Summer Program organizing security guards in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as the Center for Third World Organizing’s Movement Activist Apprenticeship Program, where I organized in South Los Angeles around health-care issues. I wanted to be an internationalist, class-conscious organizer challenging racism and sexism in a direct organizing campaign, so I applied for the Strategy Center’s National School for Strategic Organizing and stayed on as an organizer.
Where were you born? Where do you live now?
I was born in Cananea, a small mining town in Sonora, Mexico. Today, I live in Los Angeles.
Do you see environmental ills disproportionately afflicting the communities where you live and work?
Low-income and poor communities of color inside the United States are usually the ones living next to smog-ridden freeways and toxic oil refineries. As a result, they are struck the hardest by higher rates of asthma, leukemia, and lung cancer while lacking living wages and health care for their children. At the same time, transnational corporate environmental degradation and “extreme weather” events caused by global warming wreak havoc in places like New Orleans and on whole Third World nations — from Shell’s destruction of the environment in Nigeria to mudslides in Guatemala that convert whole indigenous Mayan villages into mass grave sites.
How can the environmental movement cast a wider net culturally and become a bigger-tent issue politically?
Be the most anti-racist environmental movement possible. Whether addressing recycling, alternative fuels, or regulating corporate polluters, we should always be advocating for policies that are conscious of the survival and well-being of poor, working-class communities of color and Third World communities.
What environmental offense has infuriated you the most?
Traveling to New Orleans was very painful and profoundly transformative. Volunteering in ongoing rebuilding efforts, I heard dozens of black folks speak about the meaning of their historical ancestral home, tracing their lineage in New Orleans to their enslaved grandmothers and grandfathers. This community, which has confronted decades of structural unemployment, police brutality, and high levels of toxic exposure left by polluting industries, was left to die by the very government that continues to be the leading emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
Who is your environmental hero?
The indigenous peoples of the Pacific islands of Tuvalu, a group of nine islands that are home to 11,000 people. Tuvalu is currently demanding that the U.S. government and all other industrialized nations reduce greenhouse gases by at least 50 percent, in a race against the devastating effects of global warming that are submerging their ancestral home under water.
What’s your environmental vice?
Often forgetting to recycle.
What’s your favorite place or ecosystem?
The Chiapas Mountains, where you don’t know where the mountains start and the clouds begin.
If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be?
Reduce U.S. greenhouse gases by at least 50 percent by having stringent regulations on all greenhouse-gas-spewing industries.
If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?
Donate to the Strategy Center, buy from Strategy Center Publications, and tune in to the Strategy Center’s radio show, “Voices from the Frontlines,” on Pacifica station 90.7 KPFK every Monday from 4 to 5 p.m. in Los Angeles, or streaming live on the KPFK website.
Francisca Porchas of the Bus Riders Union.
Fit to Be Ride
How is your organization working with the state of California and the feds to bring cleaner transportation options to your communities? I noted that you mentioned gas-powered buses — how many? — Bill Turner, Dillsburg, Pa.
Our main focus to this day has been working with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, an agency with an annual budget of $3 billion. In the 10 years of our struggle with MTA, we have redistributed approximately $1.5 billion back into the bus system, expanded the fleet by over 550 buses, and created 800 new, green union jobs.
In 1998, the Bus Riders Union’s Fight Transit Racism Campaign forced MTA to replace its entire 1,800-bus fleet of old, dirty diesel buses with compressed natural gas buses, making it the largest clean-fuel fleet in the country. According to a recent study conducted by the Bus Riders Union in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council, since 1998, the BRU’s clean-fuel victories removed 6,713 tons of nitrogen oxides and 335 tons of particulate matter from the air. In turn, this has prevented 33 premature deaths, 805 asthma attacks, 7,000 lost workdays, and 531,209 restricted-activity days for children.
What tactics do you have in mind to lure drivers out of their single-occupant automobiles and onto the natural-gas buses? — Grist editors
Our plan is to ideologically challenge the mentality of “auto is king” by making connections between the proliferation of the auto and what Dr. Robert Bullard calls “drive-by pollution” — tailpipe emissions that send black and brown children to the emergency room every day.
We also will work with the city of Los Angeles, urging them to take the necessary measures to not only reduce but also restrict auto use and promote a more transit-oriented mobility plan. We plan to carry out campaigns to massively expand public transportation and implement policies such as bus-only lanes and auto-free zones — restricting car space and prioritizing it for buses.
A California Department of Transportation study reported that added bus service won by the Bus Rider’s Union on Wilshire Blvd., one of the densest corridors in the nation, attracted more than 17,000 riders to the buses. About 50 percent of those riders were car drivers, meaning that 60,000 car miles, 4.1 tons of nitrogen oxide, and 5,835 tons of carbon dioxide were removed from the road. Now, imagine what a 14-mile bus-only lane could do on this corridor — and added service on 29 major corridors in Los Angeles, including bus-only lanes.
Do you have current figures on deaths related to exacerbated asthma and emphysema from poor air quality? — Ginger Wireman, Richland, Wash.
Children, pregnant women, the elderly, and low-income communities of color — the ones most often living next to toxic, polluting industries and freeways, and lacking health care — are the most vulnerable to the effects of air pollution. For example, young children are very vulnerable to the medical impact of air pollution, because from birth until they reach the age of 10, their lung tissue is in the process of developing. During the 1990′s, for example, in any given year, 94 percent of the children in the South Coast air basin were exposed to first-stage smog alert. Today, children in L.A.– 80 percent of whom are black, Latino, or Asian/Pacific Islander — breathe more air toxins in the first two months of life than is recommended in a lifetime.
Do you have any insights as to why people don’t carpool or use public transportation? Can you offer any thoughts on increasing ridership? — Grist editors
One of the main determinants is that there are no real incentives — like a first-class bus system — to leave the auto. For example, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently proposed a $222 billion infrastructure bond that would build roughly 750 miles of highway. And the federal government approved the last federal transportation authorization bill — amounting to $286 billion, of which roughly 80 percent is being directed to highway programs.
However, in the last 10 years of our civil rights and environmental justice victories, ridership has increased by 12 percent. At the BRU, we have designed a countywide Five-Year New Service Plan on how to expand bus service to provide a viable alternative to the automobile. We think saturating the city with a clean-fuel, fast, efficient, reliable bus system with buses that run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, would provide quality transportation for the almost half a million transit-dependent people and attract thousands more out of their polluting cars.
Why does the Bus Riders Union oppose the construction of rail lines through working-class neighborhoods? — Alexander Zajac, Arcadia, Calif.
The BRU/MTA Consent Decree is a result of a civil rights lawsuit, Labor/Community Strategy Center and the Bus Riders Union vs. Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which mandates the prioritization of the bus system in order to enforce civil rights and break separate and unequal transit policies. We are asking for a moratorium on rail expansion until all Consent Decree obligations are fulfilled. The Consent Decree delineates the priority of the needs of the transit-dependent over any other project and mandates the reallocation of other necessary funding, including rail projects.
We believe that a bus-centered transportation plan is required in a city like Los Angeles. Among transportation “experts” — academics, planners and MTA staff — there was an almost unanimous consensus that costly rail projects served no legitimate transportation objectives in a region with such low-density population and multiple centers of employment, business, residence, and recreation.
L.A. does not have nearly the population density of cities like Tokyo, New York, or London, all of which have rail systems that, with the complementary work of buses, can serve the needs of the transit-dependent. A train with a fixed route is simply a bus that can’t turn. The proliferation of rail and subway construction means the raiding of bus-eligible funding and the starving of the bus system that predominantly serves low-income, overwhelmingly Latino, African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, and significantly female transit-dependent people.
