Reading, Writing, and Breathing

This report looks at the distribution of air toxics, respiratory hazard, and school children in the state of California. The report finds evidence of disproportionate exposure and a potential link between such exposure and school-level academic performance, and calls for policy changes that can better situate environmental health concerns within initiatives for school improvement

Still Toxic After All These Years: Air Quality and Environmental Justice in the San Francisco Bay Area

From West Oakland's diesel-choked neighborhoods to San Francisco's traffic-snarled Mission District to the fenceline communitis abutting Richmond's refineries, poor and minority residents of the San Francisco Bay Area get more than their share of exposure to air pollution and environmental hazards. That's the conclusion of a new report issued by the Center for Justice, Tolerance & Community (CJTC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The first published analysis of the overall state of environmental disparity in the nine-county region, the report is entitled, "Still Toxic After All These Years... Air Quality and Environmental Justice in the Bay Area.

Minding The Climate Gap: What's at Stake if California's Climate Law isn't Done Right and Right Away

Minding the Climate Gap: What's at Stake if California's Climate Law isn't Done Right and Right Away details how incentivizing the reduction of greenhouse gases -- which cause climate change -- from facilities operating in the most polluted neighborhoods could generate major public health benefits. The study also details how revenues generated from charging polluters could be used to improve air quality and create jobs in the neighborhoods that suffer from the dirtiest air. In California, children in poverty, together with all people in poverty, live disproportionately near large facilities emitting toxic air pollution and greenhouse gases.People of color in the state experience over seventy percent more of the dangerous pollution coming from major greenhouse gas polluters as whites, and the disparity is particularly sharp for African Americans. The racial differential in proximity to pollution is not just a function of income: people of color are more likely to live near these polluting facilities than whites with similar incomes. Continuing to move forward with California's climate law presents the opportunity to save lives and bolster California's economy by focusing pollution reductions in neighborhoods suffering the worst public health impacts

The Climate Gap: Inequalities in How Climate Change Hurts Americans & How to Close the Gap

By now, virtually all Americans concur that climate change is real, and could pose devastating consequences for our nation and our children. Equally real is the "Climate Gap" -- the sometimes hidden and often-unequal impact climate change will have on people of color and the poor in the United States. This report helps to document the Climate Gap, connecting the dots between research on heat waves, air quality, and other challenges associated with climate change. But we do more than point out an urgent problem; we also explore how we might best combine efforts to both solve climate change and close the Climate Gap -- including an appendix focused on California's global warming policy and a special accompanying analysis of the federal-level American Clean Energy Security Act

Environmental justice and regional inequality in southern California: implications for future research.

Environmental justice offers researchers new insights into the juncture of social inequality and public health and provides a framework for policy discussions on the impact of discrimination on the environmental health of diverse communities in the United States. Yet, causally linking the presence of potentially hazardous facilities or environmental pollution with adverse health effects is difficult, particularly in situations in which diverse populations are exposed to complex chemical mixtures. A community-academic research collaborative in southern California sought to address some of these methodological challenges by conducting environmental justice research that makes use of recent advances in air emissions inventories and air exposure modeling data. Results from several of our studies indicate that communities of color bear a disproportionate burden in the location of treatment, storage, and disposal facilities and Toxic Release Inventory facilities. Longitudinal analysis further suggests that facility siting in communities of color, not market-based "minority move-in," accounts for these disparities. The collaborative also investigated the health risk implications of outdoor air toxics exposures from mobile and stationary sources and found that race plays an explanatory role in predicting cancer risk distributions among populations in the region, even after controlling for other socioeconomic and demographic indicators. Although it is unclear whether study results from southern California can be meaningfully generalized to other regions in the United States, they do have implications for approaching future research in the realm of environmental justice. The authors propose a political economy and social inequality framework to guide future research that could better elucidate the origins of environmental inequality and reasons for its persistence

Community-Based Health and Exposure Study around Urban Oil Developments in South Los Angeles.

Oilfield-adjacent communities often report symptoms such as headaches and/or asthma. Yet, little data exists on health experiences and exposures in urban environments with oil and gas development. In partnership with Promotoras de Salud (community health workers), we gathered household surveys nearby two oil production sites in Los Angeles. We tested the capacity of low-cost sensors for localized exposure estimates. Bilingual surveys of 205 randomly sampled residences were collected within two 1500 ft. buffer areas (West Adams and University Park) surrounding oil development sites. We used a one-sample proportion test, comparing overall rates from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) of Service Planning Area 6 (SPA6) and Los Angeles County for variables of interest such as asthma. Field calibrated low-cost sensors recorded methane emissions. Physician diagnosed asthma rates were reported to be higher within both buffers than in SPA6 or LA County. Asthma prevalence in West Adams but not University Park was significantly higher than in Los Angeles County. Respondents with diagnosed asthma reported rates of emergency room visits in the previous 12 months similar to SPA6. 45% of respondents were unaware of oil development; 63% of residents would not know how to contact local regulatory authorities. Residents often seek information about their health and site-related activities. Low-cost sensors may be useful in highlighting differences between sites or recording larger emission events and can provide localized data alongside resident-reported symptoms. Regulatory officials should help clarify information to the community on methods for reporting health symptoms. Our community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership supports efforts to answer community questions as residents seek a safety buffer between sensitive land uses and active oil development

Playing It Safe: Assessing Cumulative Impact and Social Vulnerability through an Environmental Justice Screening Method in the South Coast Air Basin, California

Regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) and state authorities like the California Air Resources Board (CARB), have sought to address the concerns of environmental justice (EJ) advocates who argue that chemical-by-chemical and source-specific assessments of potential health risks of environmental hazards do not reflect the multiple environmental and social stressors faced by vulnerable communities. We propose an Environmental Justice Screening Method (EJSM) as a relatively simple, flexible and transparent way to examine the relative rank of cumulative impacts and social vulnerability within metropolitan regions and determine environmental justice areas based on more than simply the demographics of income and race. We specifically organize 23 indicator metrics into three categories: (1) hazard proximity and land use; (2) air pollution exposure and estimated health risk; and (3) social and health vulnerability. For hazard proximity, the EJSM uses GIS analysis to create a base map by intersecting land use data with census block polygons, and calculates hazard proximity measures based on locations within various buffer distances. These proximity metrics are then summarized to the census tract level where they are combined with tract centroid-based estimates of pollution exposure and health risk and socio-economic status (SES) measures. The result is a cumulative impacts (CI) score for ranking neighborhoods within regions that can inform diverse stakeholders seeking to identify local areas that might need targeted regulatory strategies to address environmental justice concerns

Macronutrient intake and simulated infection threat independently affect life history traits of male decorated crickets.

Nutritional geometry has advanced our understanding of how macronutrients (e.g., proteins and carbohydrates) influence the expression of life history traits and their corresponding trade-offs. For example, recent work has revealed that reproduction and immune function in male decorated crickets are optimized at very different protein:carbohydrate (P:C) dietary ratios. However, it is unclear how an individual's macronutrient intake interacts with its perceived infection status to determine investment in reproduction or other key life history traits. Here, we employed a fully factorial design in which calling effort and immune function were quantified for male crickets fed either diets previously demonstrated to maximize calling effort (P:C = 1:8) or immune function (P:C = 5:1), and then administered a treatment from a spectrum of increasing infection cue intensity using heat-killed bacteria. Both diet and a simulated infection threat independently influenced the survival, immunity, and reproductive effort of males. If they called, males increased calling effort at the low infection cue dose, consistent with the terminal investment hypothesis, but interpretation of responses at the higher threat levels was hampered by the differential mortality of males across infection cue and diet treatments. A high protein, low carbohydrate diet severely reduced the health, survival, and overall fitness of male crickets. There was, however, no evidence of an interaction between diet and infection cue dose on calling effort, suggesting that the threshold for terminal investment was not contingent on diet as investigated here

Insights in the exhumation history of the NWZagros frombedrock and detrital apatite fission-track analysis: evidence for a long-lived orogeny

We present the ¢rst ¢ssion-track (FT) thermochronology results for theNWZagrosBelt (SWIran) in order to identify denudation episodes that occurred during the protracted Zagros orogeny. Samples were collected from the two main detrital successions of the NWZagros foreland basin: the Palaeocene^early Eocene Amiran^Kashkan succession and theMiocene Agha Jari and Bakhtyari Formations. In situ bedrock samples were furthermore collected in the Sanandaj-Sirjan Zone. Only apatite ¢ssion-track (AFT) data have been successfully obtained, including 26 ages and11track-length distributions. Five families of AFTages have been documented from analyses of in situ bedrock and detrital samples: pre-middle Jurassic at 171 and 225Ma, early^late Cretaceous at 91Ma, Maastrichtian at 66Ma,middle^late Eocene at 38Ma and Oligocene^early Miocene at 22Ma.The most widespread middle^late Eocene cooling phase, around 38Ma, is documented by a predominant grain-age population in Agha Jari sediments and by cooling ages of a granitic boulder sample. AFTages document at least three cooling/denudation periods linked to major geodynamic events related to the Zagros orogeny, during the lateCretaceous oceanic obduction event, during the middle and late Eocene and during the earlyMiocene. Both late Cretaceous and early Miocene orogenic processes produced bending of the Arabian plate and concomitant foreland deposition. Between the two major £exural foreland episodes, the middle^late Eocene phase mostly produced a long-lasting slow- or nondepositional episode in the inner part of the foreland basin, whereas deposition and tectonics migrated to theNE along the Sanandaj-Sirjan domain and its Gaveh Rud fore-arc basin. As evidenced in this study, the Zagros orogeny was long-lived and multiepisodic, implying that the timing of accretion of the di¡erent tectonic domains that form the Zagros Mountains requires cautious interpretation