LOS ANGELES — When the winds shifted last January and smoke from wildfires settled into South LA, the city’s low-lying neighborhoods, residents there didn’t need another study to tell them the air was unsafe. They could feel it. 

For Iretha Warmsley, the soot raining down was another reminder of what decades of fossil fuel extraction have done to her community.

On paper, South LA’s neighborhoods look like any other stretch of the city: blocks of small houses, churches, playgrounds, and busy corner stores. 

But behind chain-link fences and warning signs, oil wells still pump crude just a few yards away from the homes of thousands of mainly Black and Latino people. The constant drilling releases toxic fumes and fine particles that foul the air, heighten asthma risks, and undermine residents’ long-term health.

Warmsley, an LA native, has spent years educating her neighbors about this hidden reality long before the fires came. 

The cycle of pollution in the city’s Black neighborhoods is why she and other Black women across the county are working to shut these oil wells down. They are leading a movement that demands a transition that prioritizes community health, equitable redevelopment, and reparative justice. 

This year’s fires, which destroyed over 10,000 homes across the county, were 35% more likely to happen because of the burning of fossil fuels, according to research from the World Weather Attribution and the University of California, Los Angeles. The extraction, production, and use of fossil fuels contributed to higher temperatures, a drier atmosphere, and drought. It was a “perfect storm,” climate science researchers said, but for Warmsley, it was expected.

“As long as we allow oil companies to drill in Los Angeles, we allow them to pollute the air we all share,” Warmsley, who is a member of Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education, also known as SCOPE LA, wrote in a blog. “It also gives them a blank check to continue to fuel climate change, which helped make the January wildfires so intense and devastating for the entire region.”

Fueled by the disproportionate burden of pollution and climate disasters, organizers from groups like Black Women for Wellness, SCOPE LA, and Stand Together Against Neighborhood Drilling are reframing climate action as an extension of reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. They are insisting that clean air, safe housing, and the right to raise healthy families are nonnegotiable tenets of climate activism.

“I want to see a new normal where everyone has clean air to breathe, where we put health above oil profits, and where we build vibrant communities that are resilient to climate change. That starts at the local level,” Warmsley said.

Her neighborhood, like Wilmington, Baldwin Hills, and Inglewood, sits atop an underground empire of active wells and idle and abandoned ones that leak quietly beside homes, churches, and daycare centers. The network of urban oil wells is the largest in the country, and its harmful impacts extend far beyond times like January’s fires. 

Countless studies focused on LA County have shown that in communities near oil wells, residents have higher blood pressure and preterm birth risk, increased emergency room visits for asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and bronchitis, and frequent headaches, nosebleeds, and nausea. Every year, LA residents experience thousands of annual hospital visits from respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses tied to oil drilling, alongside an estimated 3,600 early deaths each year from oil and gas-related air pollution.

Oil operations can take place right next to homes in South LA. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

“In Los Angeles, you see perfectly how Black families have all of these obstacles for being able to live and exist and thrive and raise a family in a safe and healthy environment,” explained Tianna Shaw-Wakeman, the environmental justice program director with Black Women for Wellness. “That is environmental racism, and it is why we do this work.” 

Building a solution out of defeat

LA was once celebrated for making a historic environmental turn. In 2022, the City Council voted unanimously to phase out oil drilling and ban new wells. But last year, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge sided with the oil companies’ position challenging the ordinance, forcing the city to rescind it.

For the Black women who led that campaign, the ruling didn’t end their movement. Working with state Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, they helped shape state law AB 3233, ensuring local governments retained authority to restrict oil drilling. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it in 2024 alongside a companion bill requiring 1,000 idle wells per year to be capped statewide. The law clarified that cities and counties can prohibit oil drilling to protect public health.

Across LA, roughly 6,600 wells pierce the ground in neighborhoods where residents breathe some of California’s dirtiest air. Now organizers want a shorter phase-out timeline, binding cleanup rules, and stronger community oversight so polluters, not taxpayers, pay for remediation.

The new framework shields cities from industry lawsuits that previously froze local laws. Now, advocates say, LA must act fast. A city study released this year found most companies have already recovered their investments, making it legally defensible to shorten the original 20-year phase-out to five or 10 years.

Still, major obstacles remain: Cleanup funding is uncertain and in the meantime, without strict enforcement or deadlines, wells could keep leaking toxins for years.

At the center of this push to speed up the phaseout is Black Women for Wellness, a South LA–based reproductive justice group.

For the group, oil drilling is inseparable from reproductive justice. It argues that the same conditions threatening a person’s right to raise a healthy family — polluted air, unsafe housing, and environmental neglect — are created by drilling operations concentrated in Black and Latino communities. Seventy-four percent of those most affected are Black or Latino, living in neighborhoods where drilling, freeway traffic, and industrial zoning converge.

“You can’t raise healthy kids if your air is toxic,” Shaw-Wakeman said.  

Pregnant women in neighborhoods closest to heavy drilling are up to 40% more likely to deliver low birth weight babies and 20% more likely to have babies small for their gestational age. They also face higher rates of preterm births — a leading cause of infant death — with chemical exposures from drilling also linked to birth defects and increased Black maternal mortality. 

“The reproductive justice framework offers a really supportive and helpful lens for looking at a whole community and a whole person. All birthing people have a right to have a child, to not have a child, to raise a family if they so choose in a safe and healthy environment, and to have full bodily autonomy and the presence of active oil drilling and of oil wells that are idle stunts that,” she added.

Meeting people on the streets of South LA

Activists have spread the word throughout South LA that oil drilling must come to an end in their community. (Courtesy of Black Women for Wellness)

Community outreach, just as much as lawsuits or lobbying, has powered this movement. Black Women for Wellness, SCOPE and its partners have knocked on more than 26,000 doors, spoken with 5,000 residents, and reached more than 100,000 people through their “Bad Neighbors” campaign. The effort used radio ads, bus stop posters, and even coffee sleeve messages to inform residents about local drilling hazards.

That education-first model builds trust and participation in areas long ignored by regulators, activists said. 

“We’re always meeting people where they are, and continuously,” Shaw-Wakeman said. “We do this with relationship building, trust building, so they can come to us with concerns.”

During the city’s brief drilling pause, data showed direct results. 

According to LA City Planning documents, the number of procedures where companies inject toxic chemicals into wells — also known as acid maintenance operations —  dropped from 37 in 2022 to zero after the city ordinance took effect, as regulators halted new activity. When the policy was rescinded last September, those operations resumed, totaling 32 procedures within six months, according to LAist reporting.

Still, stopping extraction is only half the work. After wells are shut down, they often leak methane and contaminate soil long after they stop producing oil. Cleanup demands money, and organizers insist on the polluter-pays principle. They’ve pushed for laws and local policies requiring companies to finance site remediation. Now, under new LA city and county ordinances, as well as California’s state law AB 1866, oil drillers are required to bear full responsibility for plugging, abandoning, and remediating wells after they are capped. The policy mandates that decommissioning and site cleanup be completed within three to five years of ceasing production.

But activists are equally focused on what comes next. “We don’t want toxic extraction replaced by green gentrification,” Shaw-Wakeman said. Through community meetings, organizers have developed five guiding principles for redeveloping decommissioned sites: affordable housing, grocery stores, medical clinics, green space, and community ownership. The goal is to turn cleanup into reinvestment, not displacement.

“We see justice and environmental justice not just being ending this atrocity, but we also see it as ensuring that community members have agency in determining what comes next … with recognition [of] the fact that a lot of our neighborhoods also have other things that we need, which are grocery stores, affordable housing, medical centers, green space,” she added.

That blueprint is already influencing county policy. Since 2022, LA County’s Just Transition Strategy has retrained 600 former oilfield workers for restoration and renewable energy jobs. It’s an early sign of what “ending extraction” could mean for local economies built on fossil fuel labor, according to city officials and activists.

The shift from confrontation to constructive replacement marks one of the state’s clearest examples of community-led transition planning. The coalition has seen increased engagement in city planning meetings and used their organizing to also register voters, reaching more than 25,000 people across South LA districts every year. 

Meanwhile, the data-driven approach helped shape statewide regulatory change. Activists translated health research from USC and UCLA into testimony and legal briefs cited in state law AB 3233’s legislative findings. Their model — marrying public health metrics with grassroots pressure — offers a replicable pathway for other oil-dependent regions.

Outside of LA, residents of Kern County in central California have followed in the footsteps of the activism of these women. Over 100,000 Kern County residents live near oil wells, and local advocacy is ramping up efforts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable with policy proposals inspired by Southern California’s organizing strategies. Advocates in Kern County are escalating their fight by launching new political action committees, organizing door-to-door campaigns, mobilizing neighborhood leaders, pushing for local health and safety buffer laws similar to LA’s, and defending statewide protections.

And in Denver, climate organizers with Resilient Denver filed a proposed amendment to the city charter to prohibit all fossil fuel extraction within city limits. The proposal specifically referenced public health protections and lessons learned from LA’s urban oil drilling campaigns. This shift culminated in a law that changed the mission of the state’s oil and gas agency from fostering energy development to prioritizing public health, safety and the environment. Today, regulators say they issue fewer drilling permits because of the tighter standards on energy companies.

Fighting through obstacles for clean air 

But under the federal administration of President Donald Trump, which is ending environmental justice-oriented policies, progress remains fragile. The administration has rolled back pollution protections, cut funding for environmental justice programs, and repealed regulations that target industrial pollution and climate risks in neighborhoods already overburdened by toxic exposure, which studies show could increase rates of cancer, asthma, and premature death among Black Americans.

In LA, in neighborhoods where fossil fuel production remains strong, air pollution levels are two to three times higher. Lawsuits from oil firms continue to stall enforcement, while cleanup funding remains insufficient. 

Yet, even setbacks have strengthened coordination among racial and environmental justice networks. By merging reproductive rights, labor, and pollution advocacy, South LA organizers hope to redefine what climate leadership looks like in urban America. 

“We can no longer tell people they just have to wait, allowing the next generation of LA’s kids, workers, and elderly to breathe in toxic air,” Warmsley said.

“You can’t raise healthy kids if your air is toxic.”

Tianna Shaw-Wakeman, the environmental justice program director with Black Women for Wellness

Movement leaders say the next step is building permanent systems, like stronger enforcement, emergency preparedness, and deeper community ownership, to ensure that policy wins actually protect families, keep polluters accountable, and stop developers from turning disaster recovery into displacement. In the historically Black LA suburb of Altadena, the aftermath of the January wildfires, which researchers say were made worse by fossil fuel production, has pushed residents into foreclosure and threatened residents’ ability to retire. 

The movement to phase out fossil fuel production in America’s second-largest city has strength because of its broad vision. The same teams fighting drilling bans run voter education drives, support immigrant families, and assist residents displaced by wildfires. Their approach treats environmental justice as social infrastructure that can be built block by block and sustained through care and solidarity.

Each legislative victory stems from this model: combining science with storytelling and policy with relationships and trust. The result is not only a cleaner LA but a more participatory one, led by women who refused to separate environmental reform from community survival, Shaw-Wakeman said. 

“These overarching campaigns and these overarching themes are about improving our life outcomes, reducing the Black maternal mortality rate, supporting Black women and girls,” she said. “These are crises unfolding in our community, and they deserve to be addressed.”