Los Angeles is actually a very young city. In the 1700s, most of Los Angeles contained open-space grassland and oak trees. The Los Angeles River and hundreds of other rivers and streams wended their way through the grasslands into the open and pristine ocean.
Populated by the Venturaño, Chumash, Gabrieleño, and Fernandeño Native Americans, the Los Angeles area provided a robust food supply, including seeds, acorns and other plants, as well as coastal sources like fish, shellfish and marine animals.
But beginning in around 1800, settlers, mostly from Spain and Mexico, moved in and began to use the land for cattle grazing and crops. Coastal scrub was converted to grassland, and natural rivers and streams began to be dammed and channelized.
Wetlands, the nurseries for so many important ocean species, began to disappear. When the Southern Pacific Railroad reached the L.A. area in 1876, the region began to develop rapidly, supporting industries like whaling and fishing. With the discovery of oil, planners drained wetlands to make way for oil derricks, particularly near salt-water marshes like Ballona and Del Rey lagoons.
By 1900, Los Angeles had a population of more than 100,000. And with the development of a network of electric trolley cars, coastal areas became desirable places to live. Developments sprang up in Playa del Rey, Santa Monica and Venice. The construction of Venice, begun in 1905, destroyed 160 acres of important marshland in Abbott Kinney’s quest to reproduce the Italian city.
Unfortunately, all of this coastal development led to flooding during wet years.In response, officials established the Los Angeles County Flood Control District in 1915. Creeks that had been roughly channelized back in the 1800s began to be turned into the huge system of concrete tunnels that form our current stormwater system. By moving water so rapidly to the sea, wetlands eventually dried up. Today, only 5% of our historic wetlands remain.
In 1940, Los Angeles’ population totaled 2.8 million people. By 2000, it neared 9.9 million. All that growth meant a lot more pollution. Until the 1970s, and the passage of the Clean Water Act , sewage often flowed untreated into the Bay. The law permitted chemical companies to discharge into the sewage system, leaving a deposit of more than 110 metric tons of DDT and PCB on the Palos Verdes shelf. This deposit remains in the ocean, and in fact has been designated an EPA SuperFund site (meaning it’s one of the most polluted spots in the United States and needs immediate attention).
All of the sewage and chemical waste began to smother marine life in the Bay. In the early 1980s, scientists found dead zones in our regional seas. Fish had fin rot, and dolphins had tumors. The Santa Monica Bay was in serious need of help. As Heal the Bay and other concerned parties got involved, sewage began to be more completely treated. By the early 1990s, the health of local oceans had begun to improve. Today, habitats are recovering, and species are rebounding. Because the largest threat to marine life is now stormwater (no longer sewage), it’s up to us individually to take the final steps towards protecting the ocean and marine life.