The inspiring, infuriating, even comic tale of how we defeated L.A.’s smog and why we may have to again

A city of swans, that’s us.

From the world’s vantage point, Los Angeles can look like a place that glides serenely along beneath a beatific sun.

But we know better. We know that underneath, we’re laboring frantically to keep going — sometimes, even just to stay afloat.

Right now, especially now, we’re working hard, so very hard, to recover our mojo. We’ve been dealt a nigh-unbearable hand when two of our communities were utterly savaged by fire. Our legendary powers of invention and reinvention are being mightily tested, and still, to use Maya Angelou’s phrase, we rise — most of the time.

“Smoglandia,” my podcast and column series, that runs online here and in print over four days, starting Sunday, offers a look at a historic huge comeback model. It’s the slow-motion success story that made L.A.’s air not immaculate, but at least livable.

We achieved this sometimes by kicking and screaming, sometimes by the ballot box, sometimes by just following regulations that politicians and policy-makers created and enforced, like smog checks and carpool lanes, and sometimes by letting science and technology do their thing.

Can we still get big things done? Can we remedy our disasters? There are quite a few examples in our rearview mirror past.

Some are nature’s doing. The 1933 Long Beach earthquake, magnitude 6.4, killed more than a hundred people, but it also made seismic safety a requirement throughout the state. After the 6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994, seismic retrofitting became a rule for many buildings, not an option.

Some disasters have been made by human hands. Our two modern-day civil disturbances, or riots — whatever we call them — in 1965 and 1992 were in part the blowback for decades of repression and inequities in public institutions, for rigid and racialized policing for people of color.

The drought cycles that began decades ago forced Southern Californians onto “water diets” indoors and outdoors. Water technology made us passive water savers with devices like low-flush toilets, without too much sacrifice or even awareness on our part. Even though a million more people live in L.A., the city uses pretty much the same amount of water it did 40 years ago.

When it comes to smog, let’s not congratulate ourselves too much; it was technology that did the heavy lifting, not demanding much in the way of sacrifice or even change in our behavior. Cleaner cars have wrought wonders in getting rid of photochemical smog, when all we need to do is buy one.

The Caltech biochemist Arie Haagen-Smit, “Dr. Haagen-Smog,” who proved the connection between cars and smog, laid out the psychology of crisis 50 years ago, “The public wants clean air. Yes, they want clean air — if they don’t have to go to too much trouble.”

In the smog battle a Los Angeles commuter wears an only slightly satiric gas mask on Oct. 2, 1966.

(Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)

The trouble in this moment is human-made, and it comes primarily from President Trump, who makes no secret of his dislike for just about anything Californian.

Los Angeles has gotten a fairly good handle on smog from cars, and it’s turned its attention to other sources — heavy-duty trucks and cargo ships in ports, and even pollution from the cooking emissions from L.A.’s groovy restaurant scene.

And this is the moment that Trump has slammed the brakes on nearly 70 years of bipartisan federal waivers that let the state set stricter air pollution standards — and made the state’s air cleaner and safer. Trump also stopped the state from its ambitious long-range plan to retire diesel trucks and gasoline-fueled cars. And he’s doing again what he did in his first term: reversing fuel-economy standards for cars, which could put bigger and more polluting vehicles out there on our roadways again.

Even in this, California leads the way: at least 10 other states have joined California’s lawsuit against the president whom Gov. Gavin Newsom unsparingly called “a wholly owned subsidiary of big polluters.”

“Smoglandia” is a great California yarn, and one with the ending still unwritten.