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That kind of victory was once inconceivable for California’s environmental justice organizations, said USC sociologist Manuel Pastor, a panelist at last night’s Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event, “Can California Solve Its Air Quality Inequality?” But the win, a decade in the making for the grassroots coalition STAND-L.A., shows how far these organizations have come. Today, they work directly with researchers and policymakers to achieve their goals. This was one of the major takeaways of the evening: making progress in combating air pollution, which is distributed unequally across racial and economic lines around the state, requires individuals and organizations to join forces.

Moderator Saul Gonzalez, KQED correspondent and co-host of The California Report, began the discussion by looking back to 1985. “When I take a breath of California air in 2022, how does it compare,” he asked—generally speaking—to air quality back then?

Former California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols recalled that when she moved to California in 1971, the state violated federal clean air standards almost 250 days of the year. “It has improved,” she said. However, she cautioned, “the picture is not a steady line in the direction of progress by any means.”

Pastor, whose new book, Solidarity Economics, co-authored with fellow USC professor and public policy expert Chris Benner, explores how people can lead progressive social change, agreed. He also pointed to overall progress as obscuring research showing that your race and ethnicity remains the greatest single factor in determining how unhealthy your air is, regardless of your income or location. Unequal distribution of polluted air due to factors like freeway location and zoning remains “a reflection of structural racism.”

Climate change, which causes record temperatures and wildfire smoke, only exacerbates this inequality, said Central Valley Air Quality Coalition executive director Catherine Garoupa White. In the San Joaquin Valley, which ranks among the nation’s worst regions for air pollution, “we suffer epidemic levels of sickness,” they said, and “it’s not distributed equally. There are particular neighborhoods where people of color, low-income communities, and all of these other social and economic vulnerabilities are layered.”

Gonzalez asked Garoupa White to imagine the year 2050: What do you fear if temperature rise continues at the rate of current projections?

“We need to have hope that things can be different,” said Garoupa White. “There are a lot of solutions. There are a lot of things that we can transform and change now so that in 2050, that won’t be our reality,” including designing “resilient communities where people will be protected regardless of what happens.”

By Soobin Kim.

Still, it’s an open secret that agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley today is not sustainable. “That’s why we have the worst air pollution in the United States, because we are over-exploiting the system. We are putting more pollution into it than it can possibly sustain,” Garoupa White continued. California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), will help alleviate some of this burden. But, they said, “it would be a lot better if we crafted, regionally, a vision for what type of agriculture we wanted.”

Looking back, Gonzalez asked the panelists, what did we get wrong when it comes to policy around air pollution?

Considering air quality from a regional approach rather than at a city, community, or neighborhood level, said Nichols in reference to the federal Clean Air Act. “What that didn’t take into account is that at the local level, and where people actually are breathing this stuff, there really are differences,” she said. “And it didn’t take into account that not all pollutants are equally distributed, so some types of pollutants, like for example, the toxic chemicals that come out of diesel vehicles, are going to be more harmful. There are more of them, and more people will breathe them when they’re right next to the freeway or the port or the distribution center.”

What’s one solution—possibly even painful—that you would embrace today, asked Gonzalez, for cleaner air?

“The oil industry—let’s remove their subsidies,” said Garoupa White. Emission credits and market-based approaches are not working, they continued. Rather, they are “concentrating pollution in low-income communities and communities of color” while allowing oil companies “to take credit for something that happened in some other place.”

What about land use policy, Gonzalez asked: How much will this impact the environment?

Land use policy plays a major role, said Nichols, and can even be a form of discrimination. “If you continue to require people to move further and further away from where they work, or from where there’s opportunity, you’re also making it impossible for them to use mass transit in many cases or to live a healthy life by walking to various kinds of amenities,” she said.

Before wrapping up the discussion, Gonzalez asked a recurring question raised in the live YouTube audience chat: What is something that everyday people can do to help their neighbors breathe easier?

Make this more than an individual fight, said Pastor.

“My own behavior isn’t going to change things unless I link up with other people who want to change the concentration of power and change the policies that we pursue,” he said. Pastor called on listeners to “figure out how you can organize your community to accept more affordable housing, to change the zoning, to push for free public transportation, to get the state of California to pay special attention to hotspots, to make sure that we’re dealing with the inequities in the Central Valley.”

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You’ve probably never heard of the Air Resources Laboratory. I hadn’t until two years ago, when I was hired to preserve a trove of oral histories recorded in the early 1990s. Those audio cassettes held a history of hidden science, full of amazing stories about nuclear explosions, air pollution, and volcanoes. I encountered scientists whose research had strengthened national security, improved emergency response, and protected human health for almost 70 years—with barely any credit or acclaim.

And with the lab now under threat of budget cuts, it’s all the more important to understand its little-known history.

The Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) researches atmospheric transport, dispersion, and diffusion—how dangerous things move around in the air. It is part of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the government agency that monitors the oceans and atmosphere to help individuals, businesses, and the government make informed decisions.

A tetroon being deployed by an ARL technician, 1950s. Photo courtesy of NOAA.

The ARL began in 1948, as a handful of security-cleared Weather Bureau meteorologists whom other government agencies could rent to answer questions about nuclear fallout. The lab met its first challenge a year later, when an Air Force “bugcatcher” trapped radioactive dust during a flight between Alaska and Japan in 1949. ARL scientists tracked the air mass backwards to deduce potential sites of the first Soviet atomic bomb test.

The Atomic Energy Commission became the ARL’s primary client as open-air nuclear testing intensified through the 1950s. ARL scientists worked in Nevada to delay blasts when nuclear debris was likely to blow over urban areas. The Atomic Energy Commission originally assured citizens that radioactive debris would remain safely suspended high in the stratosphere. But ARL research challenged that claim. The ARL showed that debris would fall out of the atmosphere before most of the radioactivity decayed, and that dangerous fallout would concentrate in the middle latitudes of the Northern hemisphere. This discovery set the stage for the Limited Test Ban Treaty negotiations in 1962; ARL expertise informed sections on monitoring compliance.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, ARL meteorologists prepared daily forecasts for dozens of cities, predicting how fallout would travel in case of an atomic attack. Throughout the Cold War, ARL staff practiced deploying to the doomsday bunker buried beneath Mount Weather in Maryland, where they would track fallout and advise the surviving leaders of the US government during a nuclear war.

Nuclear bombs aren’t the only things that shoot dangerous dust into the stratosphere. In December 1989, a 747 flying above Alaska lost all four engines when it flew through a cloud of invisible volcanic ash. The Federal Aviation Administration sponsored ARL scientists to develop a computer simulation that allows airlines to find the most efficient ways to safely avoid ash plumes. Similar models continue to direct global air travel, including during the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland.

As nuclear testing declined and the environmental movement grew, new agencies began to request the ARL’s expertise. The Public Health Service and later the Environmental Protection Agency sought to understand the movement of air pollutants. The lab conducted field experiments to verify its computational models. One smog experiment tracked radar-reflective pyramid-shaped balloons, called tetroons, across the Los Angeles basin. An experiment related to acid rain measured the dispersion of distinctive chemical “tracers” over continental distances. Today, one of the lab’s jobs is to study mercury deposition, a potentially serious pollution problem caused largely by burning coal.

Understanding atmospheric transport is essential to many kinds of emergency response. The lab’s research guided government responses to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. The lab’s HYSPLIT computer model helps the National Weather Service protect first responders during chemical spills. First deployed in the 1980s and iteratively improved since, the model integrates current weather observations with information about a chemical release to predict where toxic substances will go and in what concentrations. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the ARL’s Field Research Division conducted tracer experiments in Manhattan and other urban areas to explore how chemical or biological weapons might disperse at ground level. This work can aid emergency personnel in case of a dirty bomb or bioweapon attack.

Listening to the scientists tell these stories, I was struck by the absence of self-promotion common in oral histories of Nobel Prize winners or scientist-entrepreneurs. The ARL staff were modest people content to have made a modest contribution to the problems of their time.

But this modesty is dangerous in an era when government and science are often denigrated. The government rarely gets credit because the benefits of its scientific services are designed to be invisible, like plane crashes that don’t happen, chemical burns that don’t kill and maim, and people who aren’t poisoned. And the ARL costs less than 2 cents per American per year—NOAA has been famously frugal since the 1930s, when its predecessor, the Weather Bureau, instructed weathermen to write on both sides of every sheet of paper.

While the work of the ARL is worth knowing on its own terms, it can also stand in for a swath of hidden science. We think a lot about the kinds of science that are culturally influential, but much less about the science that is practically important. There are many organizations across the federal government like the Air Resources Lab, modest groups of researchers whose quiet expertise makes us safer. We forget about their service at our peril.

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