Clean air in California’s Central Valley

Nicole Pozzo is a Junior at Pitzer College. She is majoring in Environmental Analysis.

The Central Valley is the beating heart of California’s conventional agriculture operations—cultivating over 250 crops, it supplies one third of U.S. produce.[1] The impressive output of this valley is maintained by input intensive chemical agriculture. The prominent position of this region in national and global food production comes with a hefty cost for local public health. In 2017, 95 million pounds of pesticide were applied in Fresno, Kern, Tulare, and San Joaquin counties. Unlike other hotspots of input intensive agriculture, such as the Midwest, the unique geography of the valley—positioned between the Cascade, Sierra Nevada, Tehachapi, and Coastal mountain ranges—constrains and stagnates air pollution from agricultural operations.[2] This region frequently fails to meet ambient air quality standards for ozone or particulate matter set by the California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board, and enforcement of these standards is lacking.[3] Of the most polluted American cities identified in the American Lung Association’s ‘State of the Air’ 2020 Report, four of the top ten for ozone and three out of the top ten for particulate pollution are located within the Central Valley.[4]

Many of the communities in the Central Valley that must contend this air pollution are low income, with high numbers of Latinx, Africa-American, and Southeast Asian residents. The pesticide and air pollution create adverse acute and chronic health outcomes for impacted communities; the Central Valley has high rates of childhood asthma, neurodevelopmental disorders (such as ADHD, behavioral impacts, etc.), impacted births, (preterm and birth malformations), and cancer.[5] The poor air quality of the Central Valley undermines community health and exacerbates existing inequities.

This project centers on a proposal for a lower atmospheric trust in the Central Valley. The trust would encompass the entirety of the valley ( approximately 450 miles in length and 60 miles in width) and would regulate emissions within the troposphere (3.7 to 6.2 miles above ground).[6] Focused on community-driven policy solutions, this trust’s priority is protecting the health and resilience of impacted communities in the Central Valley. Of the five million acres of farmland cultivated in the Central Valley, only approximately 58 thousand acres promote organic and regenerative farming systems.[7] This trust has a radical vision of transitioning the entirety of the Central Valley to regenerative farming; Over a 50-year timeline, the trust will mandate a complete phase out of pesticide use and attainment of federal air quality standards for ozone and particulate matter. This trust prioritizes banning organophosphates and fumigants.

The trust will have a governing board and five committees: Community Advocacy and Stakeholder Engagement, Health Equity and Education, Finance, Monitoring and Regulatory Enforcement, and Research. The board will publish status impact reports every five years following a third-party health and compliance audit; these reports will evaluate the efficacy of trust measures and make recommendations for best management practices. The trust will establish comprehensive, community-based air and pesticide monitoring programs, alongside establishing extensive infrastructure to track community health outcomes, particularly rates of cancer, and respiratory and neurodevelopmental diseases.

While implementing a lower atmospheric trust requires an extensive restructuring of the Central Valley landscape, this transition to a regenerative paradigm is inevitable if this region intends to continue to produce food in this era of accelerating defaunation and climate change.[8] There is urgent need to establish a lower atmospheric trust in the Central Valley; such a trust would not only protect community heath, but it would also enhance the ecological resilience of agricultural landscapes, contribute to the mitigation of climate change, and safeguard food security for present and future generations. By serving as an example of radical community mobilization, this trust intends to demonstrate how the sustainability, accessibility, and resilience of the domestic and international food systems must be rooted in community supported and place-based channels of knowledge.

[1] Bittman, M. (2012, October 10). Everyone Eats There. The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/californias-central-valley-land-of-a-billion-vegetables.html.

[2] United States Geological Survey. (2020). California’s Central Valley. https://ca.water.usgs.gov/projects/central-valley/about-central-valley.html.

[3] Abrams, C., Erbstein, N., Hartzog, C., London, J., and Watterson, S. (2016). California’s San Joaquin Valley: A region and its children under stress. UC Davis Center for Regional Change. https://www.sierrahealth.org/assets/pubs/A_Region_and_Its_Children_Under_Stress-Web.pdf.

California Air Resources Board. (2020). Community Air Protection Program. https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/capp.

Carroll, R. (2016, May 2013). Life in San Joaquin valley, the place with the worst air pollution in America. The Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/california-san-joaquin-valley-porterville-pollution-poverty.

[4] American Lung Association. (2020). State of the Air. http://www.stateoftheair.org/.

[5] Abrams, C., Erbstein, N., Hartzog, C., London, J., and Watterson, S. (2016). California’s San Joaquin Valley: A region and its children under stress. UC Davis Center for Regional Change. https://www.sierrahealth.org/assets/pubs/A_Region_and_Its_Children_Under_Stress-Web.pdf.

Bush, J., Dodge, JL., Mills, Pk and Shah, P. (2019). Agricultural exposures and breast cancer among Latina in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 61(7): 552-558.

Deschenes, O., Gaines, S., and Larsen, A. (2017). Agricultural use and adverse birth outcomes in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Nature Communications. 8(302): 1-9.

[6] United States Geological Survey. (2020). California’s Central Valley. https://ca.water.usgs.gov/projects/central-valley/about-central-valley.html.

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. (2011). The Troposphere Overview. https://scied.ucar.edu/shortcontent/troposphere-overview.

[7] Schapiro, M. (2019, June 23). Centers of insurrection: Central valley farmers reckon with climate change. KQED. https://www.kqed.org/science/1943671/centers-of-insurrection-central-valley-farmers-reckon-with-climate-change.

[8] Dirzo, R., Young, H.S., Galetti, M., Ceballos, G., Isaac, N.J.B., and Collen, B. (2014). Defaunation in the Anthropocene. Science. 345: 401–406.