Looking back on her five year journey as co-executive director of the Community Water Center in Visalia, Laurel Firestone believes that although progress has been made in communities that suffer from lack of safe drinking water, there is still a lot of work to do to bring safe, sustainable drinking water to everyone.
“We are still working with individual communities with their water problems because it is still taking a while,” said Firestone, who is also an attorney and human rights activist. “And while [these communities] wait, we look at how we can improve policies and make real changes.”
News
This page features excerpts from news about environmental justice advocacy in the San Joaquin Valley and links to their original sources. Use the features on the right to sort by topic, news source, date, key word or author. You may also subscribe to receive the news by e-mail or through an rss reader. Please note that links to original sources may expire over time.
Fresno resident María Arevalo does not need an air quality monitor to know when the San Joaquín Valley air is severely polluted. Her health, and the health of her children, are the strongest indicators of local air quality.
Two of Arevalo’s six kids suffer from severe asthma. One child’s asthma flares up when the air is particularly polluted, as it was last week when regional ozone levels reached unhealthy levels multiple times.
Arevalo herself was recently bed-bound for days with an allergy attack that caused pain in her eyes, head and throat. Because she is uninsured, her only option was to buy allergy medicine at the pharmacy.
But Arevalo’s family’s experiences with air pollution and its associated health problems are not unique.
Alegria de La Cruz, Legal Director at Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment
Rebecca Flournoy, Associate Director of PolicyLink
Yvonne Liu, Senior Research Associate at Applied Research Center
The Central Valley Air Quality Coalition hosts a radio show on KFCF 88.1 FM, which airs on the 4th Friday of every month from 3:00-3:30pm. On the show you will hear interviews with individuals at the forefront of air quality issues, policy and research. KFCF can be heard from Merced to Delano and live at www.kfcf.org. KFCF broadcasts Pacifica’s KPFA station to the Central Valley as well.
9/23/11 – Flaws in the air district’s alert systems & the Arvin monitor removal
Hosts- Jenny Saklar
Guest(s): Tom Frantz, Associated of Irritated Residents
To listen click HERE
One out two Latinos in the U.S. live in counties that frequently violate air pollution standards, a report published by Natural Resources Defense Council has found. A large majority of them living in areas where the Environmental Protection Agency has determined the air is unsafe to breathe.
The pollutants in these areas is released into the air by vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources, according to the report, “U.S. Latinos and Air Pollution: A Call to Action.” Latinos are three times more likely to die from asthma than other racial or ethnic groups, the report suggests there is a connection between air quality and elevated rates of asthma among Latinos.
A new study finds that half of California’s Latinos are at risk of breathing polluted air. The survey says the nation’s fastest growing population is also the most vulnerable.
Soon, residents of the Kern County city of Arvin will be taking the job of monitoring their contaminated air into their own hands, the Bakersfield Californian first reported Sept. 15.
With the training and guidance of El Cerrito-based non-profit GlobalCommunity Monitor, Arvin residents will begin testing their own air quality. Using a grassroots air monitoring program known as “bucket brigades,” residents will test the air they breathe for particulate matters 2.5 and 10 – both of which can get deep into the lungs and cause serious health problems. Residents can also use the monitors to find out what pollution sources are emitting those particles.
Arvin, which is located at the base of the San Joaquín Valley, has earned national recognition for having some of the worst air quality in the country. Residents have told me about the high incidences of asthma and Valley fever in their city, which is 89.9 percent Latino.
As a contractor, I am a jack of all trades: I write, moderate an online community and translate, usually from English to Spanish. Most recently, a friend and I translated a 110-page document released by PolicyLink and The California Endowment called, “Why Place and Race Matter.”
Our jaws were on the ground upon reading the report. “¡Que fuerte!” my friend Xochitl blurted out after we translated, yet, another horrifying statistic.
Ruth Martinez is a community organizer who lives in the small town of Ducor in the San Joaquin Valley. I interviewed her several years ago for my Master’s thesis and wrote the story below based on what she told me about how she came to be an activist. I stopped by her house this morning to get her permission to share her story. Ruth was keeping off her feet after having broken her foot on a recent United Farm Workers of America (UFW) march to Sacramento. Besides her involvement with the UFW, Ruth is also active with the Center on Race Poverty and the Environment, the Community Water Center, and the Asociación de Gente Unida por el Agua.
Arvin residents concerned about air quality will be monitoring pollutants themselves, thanks to $130,000 in funding they will receive over two years.
The money, which comes from The California Endowment, will be used to purchase air monitoring devices and train residents on how to use them. The goal of the self-collected data is to shed light on the region’s pollutants, the locations most affected and their overall prevalence. Historically, Arvin air has been among the worst in the nation.