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ACCORDING TO LIZ - When we look back on California’s governors, which ones will have risen to the top in the years following their term of office? Will it be Earl Warren? Will it be Pat Brown or Ronald Reagan? Will it be Jerry Brown? Or Hiram Wilson, the state’s only progressive leader?
Let’s look at the “accomplishments of some of the state’s fearless or, perhaps, fearsome leaders.
At his second State of the State Address, the state’s first governor, Peter Hardenman Burnett, called Native people robbers and savages, and committed to “...a war of extermination [that] will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct...”
Under him, the state legislature gave white settlers the right to arrest indigenous people at will for petty crimes, use them as serfs, and seize their children. Bounties were offered and, over time, local militias murdered around 16,000 Native Americans in California’s own precursor to the Gaza genocide.
Those were the years of gold rushes. Since then, it has been orange trees and almonds, POM Wonderful and black gold, even movies and the Sierra Club, all producing new explosions of economic growth. All driven by greed and rape-the-land policies promoting American expansion and exceptionalism.
Setting the state up for its current shaky situation, with rapidly falling aquifers driven by the excessive demands of industrial agriculture and million-gallons-per-frack oil exploitation, with mudslides and wildfires, with infighting between the fishing and tourist and energy industries. Between people’s rights to affordable housing and those of developers who want to maximize their returns by building more unaffordable upscale projects.
The charismatic Gavin Newsom may talk the talk on indigenous rights, on housing, on reducing global warming but has presided primarily over a lot of talk and photo ops and little concrete action.
Although he endorsed renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day, like with his outspoken support of global warming while doing backroom deals with Big Oil, Newsom did not call for any actual changes to the state’s history curriculum or remove the tributes to colonialists and pioneers whose names embellish counties, schools and streets across the land once owned by California’s original inhabitants.
Newsom’s 2019 Truth and Healing Council sought oral histories to “endeavor to accurately represent the diversity of experience of all California Native Americans within the State of California... through communication and consultation” but was little more than a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.
An archival exercise that did not concretely advance indigenous participation in pertinent governance issues. Nor has the City actively acknowledged their land rights.
Nope. It will almost certainly be the Austrian-born bodybuilder best known as The Terminator who history will remember.
Why? Over an issue most indigenous people understand intuitively but have little ability to affect.
Stewardship of Turtle Island, of our planet. Global warming, the existential crisis of our time.
And beyond wildfires and earthquakes, California is vastly overdue for another 100-year mega-flood like the one that floated the state government out of Sacramento in 1862.
Floods and mudslides are a direct consequence of climate damage by European settlers and their descendants.
Increasingly warm air holds more water vapor than cold: in arid areas this means increased evaporation and hence drought. And once that water is in the atmosphere, it comes down not as a gentle rain from heaven for our farmers but as damaging gully washers, generating deluges and flooding of Biblical proportion, gouging young plants from the soil, cutting roads, and sweeping children to their deaths.
Few American elected leaders have been truly proactive about the crisis that has been looming for decades. Not in California, not across the States or around the world. But…
In September 2004, the Governator created the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, pairing environmental protection and economic growth while protecting 25 million acres.
In October 2004, he unveiled the Ocean Action Plan setting ecologically-sound standards for management of ocean and coastal resources.
In August 2006, he signed the Million Solar Roofs Initiative in an all-out effort to make California a leader in renewable energy while significantly reducing the state’s own output of greenhouse gases.
The following month he signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act, making California the first state in the nation to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, to 1990 levels by 2020.
In January 2007, he established the world’s first Low Carbon Fuel Standard to reduce carbon concentrations in fuels by 10% by 2020.
In February, he led the governors of Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington in creating the Western Climate Initiative, setting a shared regional goal for carbon emissions reduction.
That October he announced California and a coalition of American states, Canadian provinces, and European Union countries would form the world’s first International Carbon Action Partnership.
The following October, he signed the nation’s first law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by controlling urban sprawl.
In November 2008, the Governator increased California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard Code to 33%, requiring all retail electricity sellers to source a third of their power from renewables, and streamlined the process of developing and permitting green energy sites.
Then in January 2010, he announced the first-in-the-nation mandatory Green Building Standards Code.
That year he helped launch the Region of Climate Action, the R20, as a non-profit coalition of regional governments working with corporate and public partners promoting projects to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions as well as boosting local economies, improving public health, and generating green jobs.
And California not only met its 1990 emissions target, but did so four years early while attracting billions in green technology and renewable energy investments.
Despite constant criticisms from naysayers and those impacted financially by his changes, despite the ups and downs of implementation against the growing fury of Big Oil and their lobbyists, despite defections and watering-down over the years, Schwarzenegger’s environmental legacy endures.
Ten years ago, five years after leaving office and during Trump’s hatred-laced first climb into the White House, the ex-Governator posed to Facebook:
“A clean energy future is a wise investment, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either wrong, or lying. Either way, I wouldn't take their investment advice. Renewable energy is great for the economy, and you don't have to take my word for it. California has some of the most revolutionary environmental laws in the United States, we get 40% of our power from renewables, and we are 40% more energy efficient than the rest of the country. We were an early adopter of a clean energy future. Our economy has not suffered.”
In the decade following his signature 2006 legislation, California’s state gross domestic product has increased from about $1.8 trillion to more than $2.3 trillion and in spite of the perceived hobbling by those environment-favoring policies, California economic rebound after the Great Recession, exceeded those of most other states.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking at the United Nations: “We hold the future in our hands. Together we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we failed to do the right thing, and let them suffer the consequences.”
Will the Governator be a fading star. Or will his actions stand as a beacon of hope in this time of troubles to inspire and lead Americans out of the wilderness?
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
