One nit on LA: it was suffering from photochemical smog (I think that's the term) when white men arrived. Local geography and climate + lots of reactive hydrocarbons released by vegetation as a byproduct of photosynthesis.
Reagan wasn't off his rocker when he mentioned the contribution of trees to "pollution", and it's ironic that the easiest way for a lot of cities to meet EPA smog limits (which use an insane measure, not tolerating more than a few days per year of high levels of ozone) would be to cut down a lot of trees.
Heh, any worries the EPA would harass my home town were "solved" by an EF5 tornado in 2011....
Creosote is a form of ground cover, colloquially know as "scrub-brush".
Like many plants, it has active organic chemistry and was one used for medicinal and industrial uses. While creosote has been linked to naturally occuring compounds that "makes smog worse", to equate "chopping down trees" to managing "emissions" is pretty loose logic.
The relationship of man-made pollutants to smog is that the latter are not uniformly benign; local topography weather, and fora combine industrial air-borne pollution more problematic in some areas (LA) than others (eg SF).
In theory, if we paved over LA we could reduce the dust and the creosote and maybe reduce "smog", but again this is not environmentalism, but rather geo-engineering.
Reagan wasn't off his rocker when he mentioned the contribution of trees to "pollution", and it's ironic that the easiest way for a lot of cities to meet EPA smog limits (which use an insane measure, not tolerating more than a few days per year of high levels of ozone) would be to cut down a lot of trees.
Heh, any worries the EPA would harass my home town were "solved" by an EF5 tornado in 2011....