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taylorvich [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/12/231212112320.htm [sciencedaily.com]

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

It's 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 pools became playgrounds for freestyle skateboarders in the greater Los Angeles area. But a new cross-disciplinary study from the University of Cambridge shows that beyond the drought, it was the entanglement of environmental, economic and technological factors that led to the explosive rise of professional skateboarding culture in the 1970s.

The authors say that professional skateboarding could not have started anywhere else, at any other point in time. Their study, reported in the journal PNAS Nexus, shows how small environmental changes can have profound effects on human behaviour, and stimulate cultural and technical innovation. Even the rise of popular pastimes such as skateboarding are the result of the deep relationships between humans and the climate.
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California has a highly variable climate, and in the 1970s, it experienced a period of prolonged drought. Although this period of drought was not exceptional when looking at conditions over a thousand-year period, it was exceptional in the short-term: 1977 was California's driest year of the 20th century. The Colorado and Sacramento Rivers, which are vital to the state's water supply, were both at exceptionally low levels.

The drought resulted in estimated losses of $3 billion in California's massive agricultural sector, and the state's reservoir storage reached a record low in 1977. The state's water agencies responded by mandating severe cuts, including a ban on filling backyard 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 radical changes in urban planning regulations, resulted in the construction of more than 150,000 swimming pools in California during the 1960s.

Kidney-shaped pools were particularly trendy during this period: up to 20,000 of these pools were installed per year in the greater Los Angeles region, accompanying a housing boom of single-family home construction. Soon, the new, curved-walled swimming pools in the suburbs of LA accounted for 60% of all pools in California.

When the California drought took hold in the 1970s, many of these kidney-shaped pools were empty, making them ideal playgrounds for freestyle skateboarders in the LA area. Skateboarding had been a hobby for teens 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 epicentre of US surf culture.

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