However beneficial, this movement of goods and people comes at a steep price. This summer we rediscovered how steep and who disproportionately bears that burden.

Start with anyone residing near this region’s complex transportation grid or its major oilfields or refineries. For them, oil’s downwind consequences are literally in their faces. No surprise, these areas are home to some of Southern California’s poorest and least advantaged.

Or spend time in University Park, a poor, majority-Latino neighborhood within sight of USC, whose residents had to file hundreds of public-health complaints against AllenCo’s oil operations before the EPA and the city intervened.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is also worrying hundreds of thousands of people living adjacent to the productive Inglewood/Baldwin Hills and Brea-Olinda oilfields, anxious about the impact on air and water quality.

There is nothing new about these deep-seated concerns: they have been a hot-button issue since L.A.’s first black-gold strike in 1892.

This link between that past and our present is the subject of PetroLA, an Oct. 10-11 conference at Pomona College’s Rose Hills Theater in Claremont. The symposium will probe the historical debates and contemporary struggles to resolve Southern California’s century-long dependence on fossil fuels — and its troubling consequences.

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