How a drought led to the rise of skateboarding in 1970s California

Why did professional skateboarding appear in Southern California in the 1970s? Was it a coincidence or was it a perfect storm of multiple factors?

It is fairly well known that a drought in Southern California in the mid-1970s led to a ban on filling backyard swimming pools, and these empty swimming pools became playgrounds for freestyle skaters of the great Los Angeles area. However, a new interdisciplinary study from the University of Cambridge shows that beyond drought, it is the tangle of environmental, economic and technological factors that has led to the explosive rise of professional skateboard culture in the 1970s.

The authors argue that professional skateboarding could not have started anywhere else, at any other time. Their study, reported in the journal Nexus PNASshows how small environmental changes can have profound effects on human behavior and spur cultural and technical innovation.

Even the rise of popular pastimes like skateboarding is a result of the deep connections between humans and the climate.

“We often look to the past to make associations between climate and society, but as we go back in time, the evidence for these associations becomes less and less,” said lead author Professor Ulf Büntgen of the Department of Geography, Cambridge. “We wanted to find a more modern example of how climate affects human behavior, where we had a lot of data to look at, and that’s how we ended up studying skateboarding.”

California has a highly variable climate, and in the 1970s it experienced a prolonged period of drought. Although this period of drought was not exceptional when considering conditions over a thousand years, it was exceptional in the short term: 1977 was the driest year of the 20th century in California. The Colorado and Sacramento rivers, which are vital to the state’s water supply, were both at exceptionally low levels.

The drought caused an estimated $3 billion in losses to California’s huge agricultural sector, and storage in the state’s reservoirs reached a record high in 1977. State water agencies responded by imposing severe cuts, including a ban on filling garden swimming pools.

While swimming pools are almost synonymous with California today, in the 1970s they were still relatively new to many families. The widespread economic prosperity of post-World War II America, combined with sweeping changes in planning regulations, resulted in the construction of more than 150,000 swimming pools in California by the 1960s.

Kidney-shaped pools were particularly trendy at that time: as many as 20,000 of these pools were installed per year in the greater Los Angeles area, accompanying a real estate boom in single-family home construction. Soon, new curved-wall pools in suburban Los Angeles accounted for 60 percent of all pools in California.

When the California drought hit in the 1970s, many of these kidney-shaped pools were empty, making them an ideal playground for freestyle skateboarders in the Los Angeles area. Skateboarding has been a hobby for teenagers since the 1950s and 1960s, but in the 1970s the freestyle scene exploded in popularity. Freestyle borrowed much of its style from surfing, and California was the epicenter of American surf culture.

“The popularity and influence of surf culture was absolutely essential to the rise of skateboard culture, which is why it could only happen in Southern California,” Büntgen said. “You could have had the same drought, the same pools in a place like Phoenix, but because Phoenix doesn’t have a built-in surf culture, professional skateboarding couldn’t have been born there.”

Another ingredient in the rise of professional skateboarding came from the chemical industry, which began industrial production of polyurethane in the 1950s, supporting a revolution in sports equipment. In the 1970s, polyurethane was used for skateboard wheels, giving them excellent grip and strength. Polyurethane wheels allowed skaters to perform faster turns at higher speeds than with earlier steel wheels.

The combination of improved equipment, the influence of surf culture, and empty kidney-shaped swimming pools, among other factors, led to the rise of what was initially called “vertical” skating. Empty swimming pools allowed skaters to perform gravity-defying tricks, and professional skating teams such as the Zephyr Competition team, known as the Z-boys, began to emerge.

By the end of the decade, the sport had professionalized considerably. The pages of Skateboarder magazine showed the extraordinary pace of change in the skateboarding community between 1975 and 1979. Major skateboard companies were founded during this period, and the sport began to influence music and fashion.

“California is known for its entrepreneurial culture, which also helped popularize skateboarding,” Büntgen said. “These kids took risks and started businesses, some of which are still major players in the industry today.”

In the 1980s, skateboarding became a global industry. The development of handheld consumer video cameras enabled commercial videography of skateboarding, which helped make the sport popular around the world. Skateboarding films such as Bones Brigade (1984) and Shackle Me Not (1988) were made, and skateboarders such as Tony Hawk, Danny Way and Tony Magnusson became global media stars. Nearly 50 years after its beginnings, skateboarding is now a multi-billion dollar industry, which has led to the rise of snowboarding, another multi-billion dollar industry.

“We often think about the negative effects of climate change, and these are deeply worrying when considering current trends,” Büntgen said. “But our study shows that local climate triggers can have unexpected and major impacts on human society and that they are not all negative. In this case, a drought in California led to the development of a huge industry.

“When we look a little deeper, it confirms our thinking that climatic and environmental factors profoundly influence society. These developments are not random: in the case of skateboarding, each of the ingredients must exist in the same place and at the same time. It couldn’t have happened ten years earlier, ten years later, or a few hundred miles away.”