As a practicing pulmonologist, I specialize in helping my patients maintain healthy lungs — not always the easiest task here in Fresno. What drives me to fight for healthy air is that I have witnessed firsthand the harm that our poor air quality causes to my patients, local families, and our community.
Year after year, Fresno ranks among the most polluted cities in the United States. Recently, the American Lung Association released its 2019 State of the Air report and — once again — Fresno ranks at the top of the list for worst air quality. We are listed in the top 10 for the number of unhealthy days of ozone and particle pollution and ranked No. 1 in the country for year-round particle pollution…
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.
Just as it is now, Fifth Avenue has long been home to expensive shops drawing not only wealthy New Yorkers, but moneyed visitors. In 1916, when the shop merchants in the Fifth Avenue Association voiced concerns about congestion and declining land values affecting their profits, New York City introduced zoning as a legal apparatus. It was a new concept.
The merchants felt that their land values would be affected by the tall skyscrapers being built near Fifth Avenue to house the garment industry. And they didn’t want the people working in the garment industry to mix with their wealthy shoppers. Zoning’s beginnings had a lot to do with the exclusion of low-income people from certain areas of the city, and, in the intervening century, zoning has continued to be used to confine low-income people and people of color to particular areas of a city…
In the rugged hills to the east of the Napa Valley, chainsaws and bulldozers converted a steep hillside of scrubby oak woodland and rockpiles into another vineyard.
“That was an incredible rock-hopping wonderland, with frothing, amazing, waterfalling cascades every time it rained—I mean, it should have been a park,” said nearby resident Kellie Anderson of what is now a plot of grapevines at Bremer Family Winery, in the small community of Deer Park…
In the rugged hills to the east of the Napa Valley, chainsaws and bulldozers converted a steep hillside of scrubby oak woodland and rockpiles into another vineyard. “That was an incredible rock-hopping wonderland, with frothing, amazing, waterfalling cascades every time it rained—I mean, it should have been a park,” said nearby resident Kellie Anderson of what is now a plot of grapevines at Bremer Family Winery, in the small community of Deer Park…
After two decades of co-sponsoring and co-funding research centers that do important scientific investigation related to children’s health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) are planning to end their support. EPA has announced that it will no longer renew its grants to these centers. As of July, they will lose a huge portion of the funding that has allowed them to deploy hundreds of scientists — in genetics, toxicology, and neurodevelopment — on unusually comprehensive and longitudinal studies of what factors in children’s experiences and communities impact their health….
As a resident of Bakersfield, I experience the impacts of Kern County’s runaway oil and gas development every single day. When I step outside and breathe in the nation’s most heavily contaminated air, I think about the residents of my community who are unaware of the dangers associated with oil and gas production. For those of us in this community the side effects of pollution from the headaches to the coughing, bloody nose and lightheadedness, these are too common occurrence. That is why when I saw that the Bureau of Land Management was planning to open up another million-plus acres of land in Central California to fracking, I was appalled. The closer people live to oil and gas wells, the more likely they will be exposed to toxic air contaminants increasing the likelihood of negative health impacts…
The evidence seems clear: “The Central Valley’s heavy wintertime tule fog – known for snarling traffic and closing schools – has been on the decline over the past 30 years, and falling levels of air pollution are the cause, says a new study by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley,” as was explained in a UC Berkeley press release dated Apr. 10, 2019.
“Zoning’s beginnings had a lot to do with the exclusion of low-income people from certain areas of the city, and in the intervening century, zoning has continued to be used to confine low-income people and people of color to particular areas of a city,” notes Nicole Javorsky in CityLab. Zoning has long facilitated the concentration of environmental hazards like hazardous waste facilities, fossil fuel storage and transportation sites, and other polluting facilities in communities of color and low-income communities. But now some cities are using zoning to reverse this damage…
Just as it is now, Fifth Avenue has long been home to expensive shops drawing not only wealthy New Yorkers, but moneyed visitors. In 1916, when the shop merchants in the Fifth Avenue Association voiced concerns about congestion and declining land values affecting their profits, New York City introduced zoning as a legal apparatus. It was a new concept.
The merchants felt that their land values would be affected by the tall skyscrapers being built near Fifth Avenue to house the garment industry. And they didn’t want the people working in the garment industry to mix with their wealthy shoppers…
Just as it is now, Fifth Avenue has long been home to expensive shops drawing not only wealthy New Yorkers, but moneyed visitors. In 1916, when the shop merchants in the Fifth Avenue Association voiced concerns about congestion and declining land values affecting their profits, New York City introduced zoning as a legal apparatus. It was a new concept.
The merchants felt that their land values would be affected by the tall skyscrapers being built near Fifth Avenue to house the garment industry…