Air Apparent

The air is imperceptible until it isn’t. At times it is unfathomably diffuse—a “vast machine,” as the historian of science Paul Edwards memorably put it, of chemical compositions and particulate matter, circulatory systems moving and settling on a planetary scale. At other times it reveals itself in a dramatic display of exception, from the “plague-cloud” of industrial belch that John Ruskin diagnosed in 1880s London to the increasingly ubiquitous wildfire smoke turning our cities sepia. Usually, the fumes of day-to-day traffic are harder to bring into focus. In 2023, I took a group from the California College of the Arts to visit the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP), a community-led environmental justice organization that (among other things) produces participatory research and action plans on local atmospheric pollution. On this day, the irony that we had a charter bus idling outside of an air pollution tour was not lost on the students.

We were met in the organization’s office—an unassuming trailer set deep on an industrial lot pinned between a BART stop and the post–Loma Prieta path of Interstate 880—by the organization’s cofounders, Brian Beveridge and Margaret Gordon. An air pollution tour is an odd thing—unlike a whale watch, there’s no real expectation of seeing the thing you’re there to see. We’d just exited the rainy part of winter, so it was a gloriously blue East Bay day. But for Gordon, who served a term on the Board of Commissioners of the Port of Oakland and to the community is better known by the more familiar “Ms. Margaret,” seeing the city is not only a matter of taking stock of visible conditions but knowing the actors and institutions emitting particulates and how (and where) those particulates settle—sources and sinks, so to speak. For activists of air (Imani Jacqueline Brown’s work on the Mississippi River’s “petrochemical corridor” also comes to mind in this regard), the atmosphere is not only “up there” but comes from, and returns to, the ground.

So we boarded up. We drove through the Port of Oakland, its fields of containers awaiting haul, and past privately owned truck yards. We looked from the road at the facilities of Schnitzer Steel (now Radius Recycling) and the CASS aluminum recycling center on Peralta with grapple cranes poking over a twelve-foot fence. We passed landmarks of the neighborhood’s rich history of post–Great Migration African American life. We drove Mandela Parkway, where only the width of the road would tell you that an elevated section of Interstate 880 ran here before the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct in the earthquake of 1989. The work of reconstruction carried with it the possibility that things could be built otherwise, making the earthquake an important turning point in environmental advocacy in West Oakland, for Gordon and others.

There are histories of Oakland from the perspective of urban studies, like Mitchell Schwarzer’s recent Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption (2022), and there are histories of  West Oakland that take stock of the neighborhood’s rich cultural and political life. (The ongoing Black Liberation Walking Tour is a notable community-led example.) The specific story of neighborhood activism in post-1989 West Oakland as it confronted the currents of neoliberal trade has now been sharply retold, largely from a ground-up perspective, in Alexis Madrigal’s The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of the American City. As a book about how change happens (and sometimes doesn’t) at the local scale, The Pacific Circuit focuses on the forces that resist and redirect economic power, with Gordon—an observer of West Oakland’s many transformations who knows just about everybody in town—as its gravitational center. Biographical sketches of other local actors like homegrown developer Phil Tagami or the Palestinian American trucking leader Bill Aboudi are almost secondary, serving as foils (and sometimes unlikely collaborators) of the community organized by Gordon and others.

The book follows Ms. Margaret through early life, the struggles of parenting, and an environmentalist awakening while thumbing through magazines at her job as a house cleaner in the home of Michael Herz, the founder of the environmental defense group San Francisco Baykeeper. Gordon is a savvy political operator, a neighborhood loyalist, and a no-bullshit negotiator, and her personal story parallels the increasing power of community-led advocacy in the Bay Area. In particular, she is the face of a movement meant to hold the Port of Oakland accountable for its environmental impacts, among them elevated asthma, cancer, and stroke risks (long correlated to diesel emissions)—leading to a life expectancy loss of eight years relative to the rest of Alameda County. Along with her work as a port commissioner, she and Beveridge helmed WOEIP’s successful push to pass California Assembly Bill 617 in 2017, which established the state’s Community Air Protection Program.

The Pacific Circuit’s larger subject is the remaking of US capitalism after the war in Vietnam, foregrounding the role of transshipment in linking oceanic flows to American wealth generation. If the Bay Area has long channeled American empire through its waterways and cities, as Grey Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco (1999) outlines so well, the closing decades of the twentieth century consolidated this position, the shipping logic of “containerization” redrawing West Oakland’s waterfront at the same time as policies of urban renewal (the construction of BART plays a pivotal role in Madrigal’s story) reworked the fabric of neighborhoods shaped by racialized practices of redlining, policing, and disinvestment. As Madrigal frames it here, the offshored sacrifice zones of contemporary capital are not always offshore.

Shingled histories of highway construction, redlining, longshore unions, postal automation, urban renewal, the Black Panthers, Silicon Valley globalism, eminent domain, and containerization draw out the interconnected world within which Madrigal’s Oakland sits. A close reading of Huey Newton’s thoughts on “The Technology Question,” written in the shadow of the Port of Oakland’s gantry cranes in 1972, points with particular clarity to the interconnection of Black life in West Oakland to an emerging economic order. “We will have to acknowledge how the world is hooked up,” Newton writes, which is also, in its way, the aspiration of The Pacific Circuit.

Like air, globalization is a hard thing to grab ahold of. Taking stock of our everyday entanglements with it—particularly the “marriage of American capital and corporate know-how with Asian labor and technical capacity” that has organized US accumulation across the past half century, as Madrigal puts it—feels as unnatural as counting breaths. Living near the Port of Oakland (or slicing through it on BART or skirting it on 880) means having a peripheral sense of the fortunes of this great global slosh—the piles of empty containers and cargo ships awaiting berths offering an index that charts Pacific throughput and trade deficits, registering pandemics and tariffs alike. Having moved to the East Bay (across the channel in Alameda) in the early-but-not-earliest months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I could see in real time the port congestion and supply chain upheavals experienced by everyone as they rippled outward. For traditional economists, the gumming up of capital’s movement was evidence of economic ill health, but “The Pause,” as ecologists have described that period, brought surprisingly (though short-lived) improvements in air quality and marine life. This momentary sense of possibility, an echo of the hope that was felt as rebuilding began after the 1989 earthquake, animates The Pacific Circuit’s closing chapters.

There’s something unnerving but also compelling about the container mountains that bracket West Oakland’s edges. In the right frame of mind, they offer something like a tear in the curtain, a glimpse of the vast machine of conveyance that sustains the seeming seamlessness of a package dropped on the doorstep. They afford a vantage point from which to “attend to the back end of industrial society,” as Madrigal puts it. I am not in fact looking at the port right now but a living room where the toy bins got dumped out this morning—strangely well-traveled subjects of this containerized world that likelier than not passed through the Port of Oakland. The US famously has 3 percent of the world’s children and 40 percent of the world’s toys, a fact that makes you sound like such a scold when you can’t stop yourself from saying it but offers yet another touchpoint for thinking about these flows. Perhaps the intense visibility of the port, as you enter Oakland from the Bay Bridge or skirt it waterside, is part of the power of the collages in the artist Olalekan Jeyifous’s “The Apocryphal Gospel of Oakland” series, which appropriates the architectural language of both the container stack and the Tuff Shed, one of Oakland’s controversial approaches to clearing its encampments of the unhoused. “Like the best sci-fi, it is also familiar, in that the world that emerges post-disaster draws on memories of the pre-disastrous in order to visualize itself,” urban historian Brandi T. Summers wrote of Jeyifous’s The Ark (2020), which imagines a tent colony on the deck of a cruise ship in a decommissioned port. What would it look like if that enormous husk of accumulation were put to other ends?

Toward the end of The Pacific Circuit, Madrigal wrestles with this relationship between global flows and local effects differently, but with similar poignancy. His closing proposition centers the question of land, citing various possibilities for continuing the kind of environmental justice fought for by WOEIP, a community movement in the process of being professionalized through its partnerships (and sometimes frictions) with government agencies like the EPA and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). He takes note of the Shuumi Land Tax, which many Oaklanders voluntarily pay to the Indigenous-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, as well as the work of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, which sees collective ownership as a path toward restorative economic justice for people of color. These are admirable and compelling examples, and I likewise tend to agree with Madrigal that, “yes, we need the state”—an implicit critique of more anarchic movements within Oakland’s left—“and a state with far more capacity than it currently has.”

In Madrigal’s telling, the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project offers in miniature what state-funded reparations could look like at scale, taking environmental harm and the dispossession of Indigenous land and Black life in tandem. He argues that a “place-based” system of reparations would be the model with “the greatest chance to succeed in a multiracial democracy”—a conclusion that seems too singular to me, even if this narrowed view is meant strategically. It overlooks those diasporas of displacement caused by urban renewal and later waves of gentrification and housing crises, as well as the urgent need for a redistributive climate justice that mirrors the global reach of this Pacific circuit he describes. State-supported environmental repair is important, but the kind of interconnected histories related here demands an equally multifaceted response.

A “long note on sources” credits Madrigal’s former Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, among other Black writers and theorists on reparations. Nevertheless, the lack of direct engagement with such texts—or thinking with something like Olúfẹmi Táíwò’s Reconsidering Reparations (2022), which more fully knots the threads of racial global capitalism and environmental justice—feels like an absence in a book otherwise invested in hearing out positions. But in making plain both the breadth and the locality of globalization’s on-the-ground material effects, and in underscoring the work of West Oakland activists like Margaret Gordon who have produced real change in both the urban landscape and the urban air, The Pacific Circuit is a genuine contribution.

The strange and terrifying majesty of the Port of Oakland’s empty mountain of containers can be captured to some extent in photographs. But what the long shots miss, and what Gordon insisted on helping us see as we drove the streets of West Oakland, is the particulate matter, 2.5 micrometers in diameter, floating just over street level. As asthmatics and allergics will tell you, all these big-picture generalities, all this atmospheric collateral, eventually finds itself on the ground. Or more precisely—because of wind patterns, tailpipes, and the relative weight of particulates—finds itself in peak concentration at around one meter above it.

That this is stroller height is not incidental. Madrigal relays the story of when Gordon arrived at the state capitol for a hearing with her grandchildren and godchildren in tow involving port officials. “I had them with their asthma machines and their inhalers,” she recalls, and her antagonists were not pleased. (“I embarrassed the shit out of them.”) When the WOEIP started its work, before today’s ubiquitous Purple Air maps and at-home devices for monitoring air quality, the government-run BAAQMD had a single monitoring station for West Oakland, mounted atop a local school. This makes some sense on the scale of region-oriented science—the height of the monitor was intended to capture generalized air quality rather than the nuances of what went on below—but it points to the conceptual gap between the “vast machine” view of the atmosphere as a mappable global system and the human realities of the urban atmosphere, distributed block by block and floor by floor.

As WOEIP has gained both expertise and collaborators in its work over the decades, its mapping has become increasingly fine tuned—much of the data used in its AB 617 advocacy was generated in partnership with the San Francisco–based air analysis company Aclima, which, among other things, has attached air quality sensors to Google Streetview cars. But the work stems, in the end, from a commitment to being on the actual street. Toward the end of my class’s field trip, Brian Beveridge showed the students a small REI backpack, just large enough to hold a DustTrak II Aerosol Monitor. As WOEIP’s volunteers strapped the monitor on and walked the neighborhood, a new dataset emerged, showing how pollution, both local and global, was affecting the city’s most vulnerable. This mapping-through-walking was a political claim made with embodied patience. By taking scientific measurement into their own hands, residents of Oakland insisted that the real meaning of the air’s impact on the neighborhood had not yet been properly seen, even if it had been felt.