Look closely at the front of practically any restaurant in California, or thousands of other everyday consumer store fronts, and you will see a notice warning that entry to the premises implies possible exposure to one of a range of chemicals which the State of California has determined may be unsafe. The warning on this so called Proposition 65 notice is sobering one, and one might imagine that it would be intimidating to many members of a public which is increasing anxious in the eyes of some business interests and their defenders, irrationally so about environmental hazards. Yet the Proposition 65 notices seem to have no negative effect on the businesses which must post them. Their very ubiquity renders them virtually meaningless; when half the stores one enters have such a notice, it no longer connotes an unusual and distinctive hazard but becomes part of the invisible background noise of commercial life.
The ironic fate of Proposition 65 is thus to have become at once a conspicuous and an invisible feature of California life. You can hardly go a day without seeing a warning notice referring to it, but you probably won't see it, because you have learned to ignore it. Yet one of the most furious and expensive of California political battles was fought over Proposition 65. What led up to Proposition 65? What forces brought it about, what forces fought it, and what if anything was the consequence and effectiveness of the proponents' victory? These are the questions addressed below. Our concern is not mainly with the actual merits of Proposition 65, either the need it claimed to meet or the means it proposed for meeting them, but rather with the public process which brought it into being and which must ultimately judge it.
For the first century of California's history, the environmental question as we know it did not exist. Battles were fought over questions we no understand as environmental ...