By Tom Frantz Personal air monitoring has been gaining popularity in the San Joaquin Valley. Many people have recently installed a fine particulate monitor from a company called PurpleAir. At a cost [...] Continue Reading
Environment
Community Activism Delivers
By Vic Bedoian Will Arvin’s new oil ordinance translate into environmental justice gains in other hard-hit San Joaquin Valley towns? Juan Flores, a Delano-based community organizer with the Center on [...] Continue Reading
Fresno City Council Recognizes Mike Rhodes
The Fresno City Council acknowledged local journalist, newspaper publisher and political activist Mike Rhodes with a day in his honor. Rhodes is widely respected in the community for his decades of [...] Continue Reading
Arvin’s Oil Ordinance Points the Way Toward Environmental Justice in the Valley
By Vic Bedoian In July, the City of Arvin made a decision that could become a landmark of environmental justice throughout the state. The City Council passed an ordinance regulating oil-drilling [...] Continue Reading
Clearing the Air: Poor Air Quality Is Causing Diabetes
By Tom Frantz This article is about diabetes. Diabetes is related to air quality because fine particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) has been recently proven, without a doubt, to be a significant cause [...] Continue Reading
One Valley, One Planet
By Kevin Hall Islands around the world are often held up as microcosms of unchecked climate change’s disastrous effects. From Puerto Rico and Easter Island, to archipelagos throughout the South [...] Continue Reading
Let’s Try Real Political Accountability
By Kevin Hall To combat climate change in the San Joaquin Valley, its political climate must change, too. I’ve spent nearly 20 years trying to do just that through a variety of methods: environmental [...] Continue Reading
Clearing the Air: Combustion Is the Problem
By Tom Frantz Air pollution in the San Joaquin Valley is described many different ways. For example, there are two basic types of pollution, three classes of chemicals that form it and several [...] Continue Reading
Clearing the Air: Wrong Way to Clean the Air
By Tom Frantz The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District (air district) is considering a hot-spot strategy to address pollution from residential wood burning and restaurant charbroiling. [...] Continue Reading
Coalition of Fresno Citizens Rallies for Better Parks
Fresno for Parks Leads Grassroots Effort to Let Voters Decide on a November Ballot Measure By Natasha Biasell Residents are gathering signatures to ensure November’s general election ballot includes a [...] Continue Reading
DEEP FRESNO: Brand Demands, Council Okays Diesel Exhaust for Viking Elementary Students
By Kevin Hall “The lower we go, the stronger our negotiating position becomes.” — Mayor Lee Brand, April 4, 2018 With the latest in a string of negative declarations of environmental impacts [...] Continue Reading
20 Years of Documented Diesel Damage to Fresno Children Ignored by City
By Kevin Hall Our kids are the canaries in Fresno’s coal-mine-like atmosphere of microscopic pieces of soot and gases. The more deleterious impacts to their sensitive, developing systems play out [...] Continue Reading