The history and idea of California are so tied up with oil—from the oil fields of Bakersfield and Signal Hill to millionaires like J. Paul Getty and Armand Hammer to the state’s famous car-and-freeway culture—that it is hard to imagine the state without oil. But that is exactly what many Californians are imagining.

For decades, any discussion of limiting oil was quickly overwhelmed by fears about job losses or high gas prices, and as suburbs and cars expanded, oil consumption rose. Today, with the drought making the idea of global warming more real, there’s a different kind of discussion.

Technologies as diverse as Facebook, compost bins, and electric vehicles have made many Californians see themselves as participants in building an oil-free future, without much fear of the potential downsides. And the participants are hardly ideologues. When I found Hubina early one morning in June, he’d just come back from surfing. He recoiled when I asked if he considered himself an environmentalist. “No! I love nature. Everyone loves dolphins.”

To better understand this change, I recently drove north along the coast to Santa Barbara. It was in this wealthy jewel-box community that the modern environmental movement was born in 1969, with a 4-million-gallon oil spill. Photographs of thousands of pitiful oil-soaked birds sparked the creation of Earth Day and the EPA, among other environmental institutions.

“The oil hit the shores and it energized us,” said Paul Relis, who was one of the original members of Get Oil Out, or GOO, a grassroots activist group that expanded its mission from cleaning up the oil spill to a radical opposition to oil use itself. Relis, like many transformed by the spill, went on to a lifetime of environmentalism, working at California’s own environmental protection agency and then as entrepreneur with a company that converts waste from 40 Southern California cities into renewable natural gas. “We developed a blueprint for getting off oil,” he says of his fellow activists. “But, unlike 45 years ago, now we have the technology to do it. California is kicking ass.”

In June of 1969, Marc McGinnes was a young lawyer with a new baby when Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey encouraged him to move to Santa Barbara to start the new field of environmental law. McGinnis taught environmental law for 33 years at UC Santa Barbara. Looking back, he has regrets. The environmental movement deflected energy from the civil rights struggle, he says. What’s more, the movement morphed from a citizen’s initiative that was concerned with community into a consumerist one. Consumers saw environmentalism as self-interest, used purchasing and boycotts to vote with their pocketbooks, and when it came to oil they were torn between their cars and their environmental aspirations.

For decades, Californians voted like conflicted consumers, too: When oil prices were low, they voted against oil drilling offshore. But when oil prices were high, they’d reverse their opinion on the sanctity of national parks and pristine beaches to vote in favor of drilling, according to work done by UC Santa Barbara professor Eric R.A.N. Smith.

After the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, national environmental groups focused their energy on reducing oil drilling in the U.S. while oil consumption and imports grew. But Santa Barbara’s independent environmental groups remained committed to “Getting Oil Out”—entirely, not just reducing oil drilling.

Santa Barbara became a demonstration project, with wealthy locals offering both money and volunteer time to back a citizen’s campaign against oil that didn’t have support elsewhere. They supported the Environmental Defense Center, a public interest law firm that has worked on behalf of cleaner oceans, air, and endangered species while taking on dozens of cases against oil exploration, extraction, and processing, not to mention a golf course owned by the oil company ARCO, since 1977. Starting in 1971, the Community Environmental Council worked to solve local problems in sustainable ways. When local landfills filled, they pioneered city recycling, and then exported their model statewide; in 2004, they decided to try to move the region off of fossil fuels within this generation, focusing on reducing oil demand, rooftop solar and electric vehicles.

The rest of California is now starting to think a lot like the utopians of Santa Barbara. Recently, the state legislature prepared Senate Bill 350 to reduce the state’s oil consumption by half by 2030. In a July poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, the bill was supported by 73 percent of Californians. Rather than being afraid, a surprising number saw an economic upside in getting oil out: In polls, 43 percent of Californians said that cutting gasoline use would create jobs, while only 13 percent said it would kill them.

SB 350’s radical prescription on oil use was defeated politically, without a vote, in part by the Western States Petroleum Association, which had funded 14 “grassroots” groups with goofy names like “Fed Up At the Pump,” and “Tank the Tax.” (Moderate Democrats, who must depend heavily on corporations for campaign contributions in California’s new election primary system, blocked the oil provision.) But outside of Sacramento, Californians just aren’t that into oil anymore: Between 2008 and 2014, the country’s highest gas prices led drivers to decrease their gas consumption by a billion gallons a year

No place in California has been more beholden to oil and more bedeviled by it than the East Bay city of Richmond. There, the grid of modest houses ends at the train tracks and the refinery picks up with streets named Xylene and Petrolite. Richmond is about as far from a jewel-box of billionaires as you can get: The Chevron refinery is so much a part of the town’s identity that Richmond High’s mascot is an oil can. Still, Richmond has become a leader in the push to eject oil from California. After a disastrous refinery fire in August 2012 that sent 15,000 people to the hospital, the city elected only anti-Chevron candidates in 2014 even though the company spent $72 per voter.

I caught up with Andrés Soto, musician and organizer for Communities for a Better Environment, in the organization’s big downtown space decorated with pictures of radical abolitionist John Brown, labor activist Joe Hill, and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Soto’s story is as much about 30 years of successful neighborhood organizing as it is about Chevron—and how the fire, the company’s failure to support the local hospital, and demands for tax breaks have eroded its social license to operate. Eventually, Richmond voters saw no upside in accommodating the company. Soto is convinced that Chevron is not part of the city’s long-term future. As oil demand falls, Chevron will hang on while smaller refineries close, but eventually it will close too. Anyway, rising sea levels will begin to encroach on the refinery’s cooling towers, which were built on reclaimed land. Soto wants the city to make plans to use the refinery’s site for cleaner energy production: solar, wind, or tidal.

At AdamsCrest Farm in the Richmond hills, the local non-profit Urban Tilth is tending gardens at an unused school where they grow more than 5,000 pounds of produce a year. The refinery is the biggest thing on the horizon, but it’s not part of the future imagined by Jessie Alberto, who coordinates volunteer farmers and interns. Alberto is studying geology not to work for oil companies—which have employed generations of geologists—but with the aim of being an urban planner. There are more jobs—and more hope—in the crazy eruptions of squash vines and piles of compost behind him than in the refinery. But he recognizes that Chevron has kept property values low in Richmond, making it one of the few affordable areas in the Bay Area. He’s wary of making the farm too neat or artsy enough to attract gentrifiers. “It’s good to have some chaos,” he says.

When Gov. Brown took SB350 out of the running, he said that Big Oil had won a skirmish, but would lose the war. The losing of that war will take some time: The state uses 629 million barrels of oil yearly, is the third largest producer and third largest refiner in the U.S.

But one reason the war will be lost is that Californians are no longer acting like conflicted consumers. They have now purchased more than 123,000 electric and plug-in electric vehicles. As of fall 2014, 10 percent of new vehicle sales in the state were either electric, plug-in hybrids, or hybrids like Priuses. This is not enough to change the state’s energy balance, but seems to be enough to change the psychology.

From Richmond, I drove over to Albany where some old friends wanted to show me the new blue Nissan Leaf that they’ve named “The Toad.” Their daughter, 15, sees signs of climate change everywhere from the neighborhood’s dead lawns to the snowless Sierras. She championed the little electric Leaf when one of the family’s two cars needed replacing. Leasing a Leaf—with state and federal incentives—fit the family budget, and the parents liked the idea of skipping the cost and hassle of buying gas.

They even installed solar panels that feed the Leaf, making them participants in generously funded state programs—and in a very different future. As we whizzed noiselessly over the brown East Bay hills past the Phillips 66 refinery in Rodeo, my friends and their kids talked about battery range as avidly as they had talked about Fruit Ninjas video games a few years ago. Not being gasoline consumers has become part of their identity. They aren’t afraid. And it is very easy to imagine the refinery gone.

The post Imagining California Without Oil Refineries appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

According to the Alameda County Public Health Department, over 500 Native American babies are born in our county each year. With our colleagues at the Strong Families Tribal Home Visiting Project, we have worked with more than 50 of these children in the past two years, meeting with them weekly or biweekly from pregnancy through age three. We support families by connecting them to the services they need, while also providing tools for nourishing community and family health, teaching life skills, and developing parenting knowledge and engagement. We are part of the extended family for urban Native Americans in this county.

Oakland today reflects an important part of Native American history. In 1953, Congress passed HRC 108, which aimed to shut down rural reservations and relocated more than 100,000 Native people to designated cities. Due to this relocation, 70 percent of us now live in cities, including those in the Bay Area. Moving from as far away as Oklahoma, families got very little support for the actual re-making of their lives when they were placed in government housing in the Bay Area. They were deliberately separated from each other in an attempt to hasten their integration.

Uprooted families struggled with lack of support, invisibility, discrimination, and separation from their communities and culture. But in the early 1960s, a new, politically conscious “Urban Rez” began to take shape as Native American leaders created community in Oakland and San Francisco. These leaders founded the Native American Health Center, where we work, as well other resource centers and friendship associations that provided everything from Wednesday night community dinners—where people could form new bonds—to health care. Years later, our community still needs special care: Community members face all the issues of living in East Oakland while support networks are stretched to the breaking point between multiple cities and rural areas.

Our program aims to meet the whole family where they are at: Some need information, some need services, and others need more. If they need food or housing, we help with that. If they need help advocating for themselves for housing, in court, at school, or with health care, we take them and help them learn the system. We’ve come to understand that it doesn’t make sense to teach a lesson on potty training if the water or lights are shut off. We help with what they need first.

Sometimes things go really well. A home visit that Paty did recently went like this: The family’s 11-month-old baby was walking for the first time. She was doing that funny stumble they do; it was amazing. The family has stable housing and food right now. Their six-year-old daughter was home from school. And so was the dad. And Paty got to see all of them interacting with one another. The daughter said, “I want to exercise and you should, too, Dad,” which showed Paty that the whole family is engaged in thinking about their health. So she did a lesson on hand-eye coordination and also on setting boundaries. To Paty, that was a successful visit: Everybody in the family was participating. No one was stressed, upset, or uncomfortable.

This is a textbook case of what our visits are supposed to be like. Our “textbook” is a curriculum called Family Spirit, which teaches health education, life skills, child development, and parenting skills through home visits, which was developed by rural Apache and Navajo tribes in partnership with Johns Hopkins University. But we’ve found we’ve had to stray from the textbook, too. Our families come from 200 different tribes—not just two—and in Oakland, our families struggle to navigate the overburdened, often dysfunctional service system. For urban Native Americans, we’ve had to take the broader view that community is extended family.

We’ve also had to go well beyond routine home visits. For example, Cara had only known a mom for a few months when the mother went into labor. Normally, the new mom would have support from family members. But this mother was on her own, so Cara kept her company the morning she had to go in to be prepped for her C-section, drove her to the hospital, and waited with her until it was time for the procedure. This broke down a wall between them. When someone’s vulnerable and has no one to walk with them in heavy situations, our job is to be there for them. We see it as a way to build trust with them and their child. This mother was able to open up to Cara about what she needed.

It’s the aunty thing: Traditionally, you’d have grandparents, aunties, uncles and extended family members to help raise a child, help give you guidance. Some of these families have only us to support them and so we become like aunties. We’re moms ourselves and we want to empower them as parents. Paty worked with a mother who was short-tempered with her children. She had been in the foster system with very little contact with her own parents, so she had never had an example of attentive parenting to follow. When Paty goes to the house, she gives the child five to ten minutes of conversation time to get things off his chest. Now she’s noticed that his mother has started doing that, too. She lets her son have his chatterbox moments and she invites him to help her with activities.

Part of the reason our program works is that we’re community members—not social workers. The term social worker reminds people of the times when Native children were taken from their homes by government workers and placed in Mission schools. Native parents feel that social workers judge us, or they’re looking to see if the house is clean, and they might take our kids. It is a fear we peer specialists understand, as Native children in California and all over the country are still routinely placed with non-native foster parents.

When we work with families in Oakland, we’re pushing them to change in small ways, but we’ve also had to push ourselves to re-imagine how we work with people. Here’s an example: A mainstream social services agency might just give a handout on budgeting to a family and leave it at that. Cara took one family to shop for groceries while at the same time providing savings strategies and empowering the mother to look at healthy options while in the grocery store. Even the children were engaged in exploring healthy foods—touching, smelling, and tasting fresh fruit and vegetables. For an isolated, single mother with two young children in a big city, it can make a big difference to have a supportive person with you at the grocery store.

There is no substitute for family, but our team is doing its best to re-create a traditional community with a nine-to-five work week. Some of the parents we work with have never known a healthy, consistent relationship. We meet when we say we will meet; we let them know if we are running late; we show up every week when they ask; we listen to them without judgment; we believe in them when they have trouble believing in themselves. The work is slow, but it is powerful.

When parents feel held with tenderness and accountability, they are better able to hold and nourish their child, and we believe the result will be a stronger community.

The post Nourishing Native American Community Five Days a Week appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The average family income in the area is $23,000 a year. The first day I started teaching there, a cold, winter morning, I saw prostitutes out walking. Old couches and mattresses littered the street behind campus. During my first month at Burton Tech, a woman was found burned and dead in a grocery cart a few blocks over.

What I want to tell you is how three of my students—Yamilex Velgara, Daniel Moreno, and Heidy Santos—ended up going to UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Brown University this fall. In seeing how they accomplished the American dream of starting with very little and still going to a prestigious university, you can see one particular formula for success.

I taught Yamilex, Daniel, and Heidy during their junior year of high school and got to know them well—one of the benefits of teaching writing. Yamilex is the no-nonsense one. Alpha female. Class president. Valedictorian. Fast food job on the side. When she finished work early in class, she didn’t socialize or sleep. Instead, she pulled out a book or other classwork and worked on it diligently. What wasn’t obvious was that her dad’s first wife was in a gang and three of her four brothers are on probation. She told me she needed to make something of her life.

Daniel and I connected early in the year when we discovered we both admired trees. Daniel is the kind of kid who’d ride his bike over 50 miles in one day, conducting his own impromptu tour of Los Angeles colleges. But after his father left them, his family of five lost their home during the recession and they were homeless for a time. For Daniel, the lessons from this were clear: education was the only way out. Not being able to hear people talk because police sirens were blaring was an important reminder to do his homework.

Heidy was detail-oriented and inquisitive. She frequently stayed after class to ask questions until she completely understood an assignment. She volunteered hundreds of hours to host school and community events like blood drives and fundraisers. Her parents had both immigrated from El Salvador with grammar school educations. In her college application essay, she wrote about living in a one-bedroom apartment with six people. She studied by the light of an old laptop, her mattress so close to her parents’ she could touch them.

As a charter school, of course we knew we were working with a curated population of kids—students with parents saavy enough to find alternatives to the local schools. Furthermore, they’d also been selected by teachers and mentors along the way. But what distinguished the class with my three students from previous classes was not just their camaraderie but also a collective momentum, an innate recognition early on of their own intellectual talent and driving ambition. Even though only 7 percent of the community has more than a high school education, 66 percent of their freshman class ended up going to a four-year college.

Once they got to Burton Tech, we showered them with advantages they wouldn’t have had in traditional public schools. We had a brand new, secure campus, digital “smartboards” in every classroom, and a 10th grade class dedicated to the basic skills needed to pass the California High School Exit Exam. All critical tests such as the SAT—as well as college tours to New York and elsewhere—were covered free of charge. Additionally, all students were on a college track curriculum because it was the only curriculum offered. And when it came time to write those college essays, they were enrolled in a class (taught by me) that made sure they wrote a compelling one.

We brought in guest speakers by the ton. We provided them with a rare high school afterschool program called “All-Stars” where they gained valuable leadership and management experience by hosting community events. So they no longer just heard about college and careers second-hand, they saw them, breathed them, and lived them for themselves.

But resources alone don’t make for success.

Our charter school had its challenges—we had high teacher turnover, the regular hiring of un-credentialed Teach for America teachers and rookie teachers just out of school, and unproven and experimental teaching practices forced upon us. And don’t get me started on the excessive number of donor visits where the gaze of big-moneyed education reformers was uncomfortably distracting at best—and zoological at worst.

But at Burton Tech, the teachers and students did share a crucial commonality that is often missing when working with minority students. Many of us were teachers of color from immigrant backgrounds. Most of us were first-generation college students just a decade ago. One Mexican-American teacher went from working construction to community college to graduating summa cum laude from UCLA and then USC with his masters. The very popular Iranian-American calculus teacher also went from a junior college to a UC (Irvine). A social science teacher from Ghana grew up in South Los Angeles himself and then went on to UC Santa Barbara.

I often told them my own story, and though my family was from Vietnam and my students were from Mexico and Central America, I wanted them to see the similarities between us. Refugees and immigrants. Monolingual parents who didn’t go to school in this country. The urban violence of North Long Beach and South L.A, which was a mere 10 miles apart. The sense of isolation and confusion applying for college that only magnified once I got there.

We didn’t just relate to the students. We actually looked like them. We had lived like them. A few years earlier, we were them in all the ways that mattered. To them, we were role models who had succeeded “out there.” For us, they weren’t brown kids that needed to be “saved” in the Hollywood Dangerous Minds model. They were talented youth that just needed a road map to guide their already evident gifts.

We took on a parental role, comforting them when they needed comfort, but also pushing them when they needed to be pushed. There was a lot of tough, even harsh love. We shoved them when it came to every college-going factor: grades, AP tests, SAT, extracurriculars, and college essays. We asked them to do things that made them uncomfortable and go beyond their own imagined limits. Many of us had been short-changed by teachers who had expected so little of us, we weren’t going to let that happen again.

Studies show that the surest predictor of college attendance is not the school students attend nor the qualifications and experience of its teachers, but whether your parents graduated from college. If your home does not have parents who went to college, you need a surrogate for college role-modeling. We tried to do that for them: “You used to tell us your stories about college and I was like, ‘Man, I want to do that,’” said Daniel.

A few weeks before my “kids” left for college, I took them out for a farewell lunch. We went to an Italian restaurant just a few miles from their neighborhood. They had never been there, had never eaten gnocchi or gelato. It reminded me of the time my high school mentor, a newspaper reporter, took me to eat calamari for the first time.

I was so excited for them and all the new experiences they were about to have. They would be so many firsts that their new lives would burst with them. Yamilex said she wanted to become a family doctor with a determination that suggested the only thing barring her way is time itself. Daniel is not sure what he wants to do yet, but he’s finding his way with neighborhood activism. Heidy said she planned to work for the U.N. or UNICEF. She said it so casually it took me aback: She had already become a confident, big-picture Ivy Leaguer without even stepping on campus.

Two days ago, I was reminded about how I am still teaching them. Yamilex sent me a text asking how do citations on a paper. Today, Heidy sent me a picture of her first college paper and the first A she had earned at Brown.

How do you measure that?

The post When Teachers Look and Have Lived Like Their Students appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I hung up the phone, I felt demoralized reflecting on the fact that I and so many of my public health colleagues across California have been working to reduce the burden of asthma for decades. If we’re still seeing discouraging data, does that mean California is losing the fight against asthma?

The answer is that we’re not losing, but it’s also not a fight we’ll be “done with” any time soon. We’re not working on a communicable disease for which we might discover a vaccine. Asthma is a complex chronic disease, and its prevalence and severity are shaped by an array of factors from access to medical care to climate change to transportation policy to income inequality. This requires a comprehensive, long-term response. Some health conditions have a single cause, like a virus; asthma is not one of them.

When a kid ends up in the ER in Madera with asthma, the list of potential culprits is long. Sure, the cause could be the region’s chronically poor air quality, but the cause of this particular child’s asthma attack on this particular day could also be housing infested by cockroaches or containing mold, which are common asthma triggers. Another child’s family might need to use certain medications more consistently, requiring instructions on how to manage his or her asthma from a community health worker who speaks Hmong. We now have evidence suggesting stressful experiences, like living with someone who is abusive, could lead children to develop asthma, so that child needs a social worker. Finally, while every asthma attack is its own perfect storm, asthma hits low income communities and communities of color particularly hard: This is most striking for blacks, who have 40 percent higher asthma prevalence, four times higher asthma ER visits and hospitalization rates, and two times higher asthma death rates than whites in California.

We started off thinking asthma was a medical issue, but it quickly revealed itself to be a social—and even a moral—one. Here’s a bit of history: When my organization, Regional Asthma Management & Prevention, started about 20 years ago, we worked to do a better job of medically managing asthma by communicating with healthcare providers, school personnel, parents, and children with asthma. It was apparent, though, that clinical management could not be successful if children were continuously exposed to asthma triggers in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods. So we started working with community health workers to identify and remove triggers in the home, and that lead us to eventually trying to get landlords to improve their rental properties. Similarly, efforts to reduce triggers in schools expanded out of the schools themselves and into the community, as well as to policymakers, like a statewide association of school board members and the state legislature. Recognizing that neighborhoods with high asthma hospitalization rates tended to have a concentration of refineries, ports, railways, and freeways with heavy truck traffic led us to collaborate with community activists, environmental justice advocates, and public health colleagues on the Ditching Dirty Diesel Collaborative to pressure regional and state air quality agencies to better monitor and regulate diesel pollution. Any thread we grabbed turned into something much larger and more complex.

Diesel is a good example. The presence of such high concentrations of diesel sources led us to more fundamental questions about why major transport corridors went through neighborhoods typically made up of people of color who were disproportionately poor. So our work expanded to better understand how land-use and transportation decisions are made. In effect, what began as an initiative focused on a single disease with an emphasis on clinical care has expanded to include policy advocacy for improved outdoor air quality, participation in land-use and transportation planning, and promoting health equity.

As our understanding of the magnitude of the asthma challenge has grown, progress has been made. California has done ground-breaking research, such as one of the largest studies linking air pollution to asthma and another study identifying racial and ethnic disparities in the quality of asthma care, helping us understand how to best manage, treat, and—importantly—prevent asthma. To keep kids out of the ER, school-based health centers, community clinics, and mobile clinics help high-risk children before they’re in a crisis. And community health workers have developed culturally competent ways to talk with families about the risks of tobacco smoke—and helped them strategize how to keep it out of the house without making family members feel bad.

We’re making progress with better healthcare policies, too. Recently a federal agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, passed a policy that state Medicaid agencies can provide reimbursement for essential services, like asthma education, when they are provided by community health workers or other qualified professionals. In-home education to reduce asthma triggers—pets, smoking, dust, and mold—has been shown to reduce ER visits and hospitalizations, but it still isn’t covered by most insurers and too many people with asthma currently lack access to these vital services because they are not reimbursed. There is an opportunity for California’s Medi-Cal program to change that.

We’re also making progress on better air-quality policies. Scientific research showing components of air pollution not only exacerbating, but causing asthma has expanded enormously, enabling advocates to push through stronger diesel regulations across the state. Research on mold has also evolved, and California just passed model legislation establishing it as a substandard housing condition, giving local enforcement agencies a clear signal to require owners to fix mold problems.

All of these things are important in the fight against asthma, but our work is not done. Until we see asthma as more than just an unfortunate but inevitable problem facing certain children and families, we will never truly make headway against this complex disease.

For example, as the California Air Resources Board develops a Sustainable Freight Initiative, it should build a healthier, fairer freight system by adopting technical solutions (like electrification) and land-use solutions (like routing trucks out of neighborhoods). The California legislature should pass additional bills to eliminate substandard housing conditions that contribute to poor indoor air quality, including controlling rats and cockroaches, both triggers. We need to ensure that families have access to affordable, safe, and healthy housing that will not make them sick.

Finally, there is climate change, which is being increasingly recognized as a public health issue. The recent drought has increased dust in some communities, while others are seeing that warmer temperatures are raising pollen counts—showing that climate change is already worsening asthma. We need to double down on efforts aimed at slowing the impacts of climate change and its accompanying effects on our air quality and health.

The fact is that asthma is profoundly unfair—and it reflects and magnifies other kinds of inequality in our society. Since asthma is a societal problem, it requires a societal response—in essence, a moral choice. While California benefits financially from having a robust system of importing and moving goods to other parts of the country, we must stand up and say that it can’t occur at the expense of our children’s health. As Silicon Valley bolsters the Bay Area economy, we can’t let that translate into families being forced into unhealthy housing conditions because they can’t afford anything else. There are numerous other examples. If we as a society keep choosing financial benefit above health, we’ll end up paying with the health of our most vulnerable residents.

California is certainly not losing the battle against asthma, but if we’re honest we’ll admit we’re not yet winning it either. We simply haven’t made enough of the choices—the policy and systems changes—that we’ll need to make. There are plenty of opportunities before us, and our efforts can make a difference for the 5 million Californians diagnosed with asthma. But it’s going to take all of us working together for the long-term.

The post Every Asthma Attack Is Its Own Perfect Storm appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Farmersville, population 10,500, is right outside Visalia. Farmersville’s problems are not the ones you hear about in coastal California cities. We have plenty of affordable housing, and we don’t suffer from sprawl or gentrification. We are young: The median age in Farmersville is 25. We also are 85 percent Latino. Water isn’t a problem: We are very fortunate to have access to a healthy aquifer. The city was even in a position to extend municipal water service to the residents of a nearby unincorporated township who were already experiencing dry wells.

I moved here with my family in 2007 because it was close to my job and it’s the kind of small town that shuts down by 8 p.m. Life is nice here: Go outside at night and you may go deaf from the lack of noise, but you’ll be too busy looking at stars you’ve never seen before. Neighbors know each other, so crime is low. You can still leave your door unlocked if you need to run to the store. We have many churches in town, including the First Methodist Church, which is over 100 years old and was built by logs hauled down from the Sierras on mules.

Environmentally, Farmersville just adopted a green energy plan that prioritizes reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. Our police department makes use of hybrid vehicles and electric patrol motorbikes, and we offer a program during the holidays in which residents can exchange their incandescent light strings for LED lights. Our landfill diversion rate is the highest in the county; we recycle 80 percent of our solid waste. From the outside, we’re a sweet little town.

So what’s missing here? Many things. Farmersville doesn’t have an electronics store, a grocery store, an institution of higher learning, or a base of local-tax-producing businesses. Our lack of fiscal health impacts our physical health too. We are the other California—not the one in the news constantly fretting about runaway growth. We are the flip side of the California explosion, the forgotten middle child left to languish and struggle with its identity, as well as obesity.

It took time for me to understand how fiscal health and physical health were connected. Soon after I moved here I attended a council meeting and asked the city council for an appointment to a commission. I felt a duty to give back. There was an opening on the planning commission. A few months later, I was selected as the vice chair and a few months after that, I was selected the chairman.

I had noticed that the council was doing little to promote the city and attract growth. Our family had to travel seven miles to Visalia to shop for groceries, clothes, and other household basics. A former city councilman used to say you couldn’t buy a hammer or a television in town. You also can’t buy a vegetable or baby formula—though you can buy beer and snack foods at the convenience stores.

The three largest employers of our residents are retail services, dairy and farming, and local governments (including the county, other cities, schools and hospitals), in that order. Lower housing costs and the fact that we’re commuting distance to Visalia, the largest city in our county, contribute to us having more residents per square mile than any other city in our county. But this close proximity also contributes to our struggles; businesses would rather be in Visalia. At one point, we had a major retailer use us as leverage when they were having difficulty expanding their existing store in Visalia. When that city allowed the retailer to build in another location, we were left in the cold.

There are three ways this lack of stores and tax base affects the health of Farmersville. First, we simply can’t sustain ourselves financially. We depend on grants from the state or federal government to maintain basic services like police, fire, and park maintenance. Our schools don’t offer the same programs that our kids enjoyed in the larger city we moved from. We have parks, but no staff. Recently we got a library, but again: no staff.

Second, we can’t grow or keep our kids in town. Last year, we graduated 100 kids from our high school, but most of them will not stay here because we don’t have enough jobs or opportunity. Last year, we grew by just seven residents. My fear is that we have remained stagnant for so long that lack of growth has become normal.

Finally, this is affecting our physical health. I didn’t understand this until I heard from a community member who had just attended our Memorial Day Parade along with a family member, a doctor who was visiting them from Denmark. This parade is epic—junior high and high school marching bands, low-rider car clubs, church groups, youth athletic leagues. And: the entire city gathers to pay respects to our fallen soldiers.

But the Danish doctor saw something other than the parade—he saw a city that was a ticking time bomb. He was referring to the level of obesity in individuals he witnessed along the parade route. That really hit home for me. It’s not just that you can’t buy a carrot in Farmersville. We also can’t afford to staff a recreation department and programs for healthy living; instead we depend on volunteer coaches and youth organizers for the sports we can offer.

That conversation gave me a new sense of purpose. I began a dialogue with convenience stores and asked them to consider stocking more vegetables. We’d like to lure in a produce store. We’re working with the Tulare County Health and Human Services Agency to make October “Rethink Your Drink” month. We’re trying to add bike lanes, more exercise trails, and more focus on resident’s physical health. We’re trying to encourage walking. We’re talking with a local non-profit, El Quinto Sol de America—an advocate for disadvantaged communities in Tulare County—to build buffer zones to prevent pesticides and crop dust from drifting into school and residential areas.

But there’s only so much a town of 10,000 people can do to change our destiny and draw jobs and tax dollars.

In California, cities like ours don’t have much recourse. We are not on the radar of the state’s legislators, many of whom have only visited the Central Valley from 30,000 feet in the air as they shuttle between Sacramento and Los Angeles. We’re not the “Cool California” or the “Hollywood California” so we don’t merit the attention. Respect in the capitol comes from numbers, and we don’t have the population to make our presence felt and bring home program dollars.

The elimination of redevelopment agencies and enterprise zones didn’t help us either. Both had their problems, but they were two of the few tools we had. While we wait for the legislature to help us with new tools, we’re able to whittle down our waistlines. It’s ironic that it may be easier to solve our obesity problem than our fiscal one.

The post The Forgotten Middle Child of California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I finish high school, I hope to move to Japan and join a famous taiko group called Kodo. But before I can do that I have to get through middle school and into high school. So I practice every day. Sometimes I work by myself, but I also have group practices with Sonoma County Taiko and another group called Oh-In Taiko in Richmond. Every other week I practice with a Japanese traditional dance troupe called Ensohza Minyoshu. All in all, I play taiko drums about 15 hours a week in addition to playing in my middle school’s band and jazz ensemble. I never go any length of time without practicing—even if I’m too sick to play, I listen to taiko on my iPod.

Taiko has made me powerful. Not to brag, but since I started hitting the drums, I’ve become one of the strongest kids in gym class. But I‘m also becoming powerful in a different way. When I stand with my legs wide and grounded, with my knees bent—in position to hit the drums—I feel confident and proud. I can display my emotions loudly through the drum. After they see me play, guys often say, “I don’t want to mess with you.” I like that! When I’m not playing, I’m short and young and I usually get ignored.

In school, I’m pretty goofy. I don’t talk about taiko because to me it’s serious, and the other kids don’t like to talk about serious things. They don’t understand how I love taiko or why I want to go to Kodo instead of college, and so I’ve lost many school friends.

But through taiko I’ve made friends outside of school, and many of them are adults. They all take music seriously. Taiko is a community that anyone can join—as long as you can play the drums and work with the group. My mother started playing taiko before me, and I joined the group when I was 9. Now we always go to practices together. When we perform, she is always behind or in front of me so our eyes never meet, but it is fun to poke her with my elbows.

Taiko originated in Japan, and we usually perform in Japanese clothes, but I don’t think of it as an exclusively Japanese thing; it’s really just music. I was born in the U.S., and my parents were born in Japan, so I speak both English and Japanese. But even if I didn’t speak either language I could still join a taiko group, because the music and the other musicians will help you learn what is important to understand.

Taiko drummers are connected to each other by the beat. Before I begin, I plant my legs, grab my sticks, and say a one-syllable word to myself to focus my energy. I remind myself that I am really happy to play the taiko at this moment because no one can ever know what will happen next. Then I raise my arms very slowly and let them fall hard toward the drum.

When you hit the drum correctly, it feels as if the drum is part of you because you use your whole body, and especially your core muscles, like the tanden, an energy center below your belly button. Playing taiko is athletic—sometimes I have to play a whole song in a sit-up position—but most of it is about learning to relax. Something funny happens when I hit the drum: It’s like I’m letting go of something and hitting that “object” into the drum, and then it bounces back at me. I have to control that, or it disappears. When I hit fast, I relax. And the more I relax, the faster I can hit. My hands seem to jiggle by themselves. The moods of a taiko song can be many things: serious, tiring, happy, jumpy, or strong. Hitting the drum and feeling all of these emotions is a lot of work: Sometimes by the end of a concert it feels as if I’ve just run three miles.

Sometimes the drummers yell to give energy to the song and the soloist, and to energize the audience. It’s usually one syllable at a time: “Ha! Yo! Sei! Sa!” Some chants have more syllables, like “Sorya! Sore! Soya!” We’re encouraging the drummers to, “Go, go, go!” Or: “Keep going, don’t give up!”

The sound of these drums connects directly to people. Taiko players want our audience’s hearts to beat to the beat of the Taiko. I have seen babies and young children—and even adults—sleep through concerts despite the fact that they are incredibly loud. They wake up when the applause starts. I think they fall asleep because the taiko reminds them of being close to their mother’s heartbeat.

After every concert, I watch myself play on video. Sometimes I see myself making mistakes. Occasionally I get mad at myself and cry. Sometimes I watch it a few times and realize it wasn’t as bad as I thought. But one thing I’ve learned is that failing makes everything better. When I fail, I can learn from my mistakes. The only way to become successful is to really fail a lot.

Achieving my dream of joining Kodo, the famous taiko group that lives on the island of Sado, will be a rough road. First, you have to apply by reading a book and writing an essay. If that is good enough, you become an apprentice for two years. As an apprentice, you wake up at 4:50 a.m. Before breakfast, you run 6.2 miles and clean the dojo where you practice taiko. Then you eat breakfast. But you don’t eat it the way you normally would, with your right hand. You eat with your left hand so that when you hit the drum, the left hand is as strong the right. Some days are spent doing skits and plays at schools, playing taiko in festivals, gardening or planting rice, or practicing until 10 p.m. In the summer, it is very hot and humid, and there is no air conditioning. In the winter, there is snow and no heat when you wake up. There are no electronics and no dating, because you need to just think about drumming and the group for those two years. In the summer of 2014, only three of the apprentices went on to become members of Kodo. The Kodo members I met warned me that the two years of apprenticeship were the hardest two years of their lives. Many of them had the same dream as I did, but they started very young, at 4 or 5 years old. Most of them said they didn’t get serious until the end of middle school or high school. So if I am going to be the first foreign woman to join Kodo, I have to start now.

The post The Drums That Bang Out the Heartbeat of My Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Santa Ana has become a first stop for immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. It is also home to many Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. The city is now about 80 percent Latino and 10 percent Southeast Asian. Fifty percent of our community is foreign-born. The downtown area, where the library is located, is a yeasty mix of trendy restaurants and businesses serving immigrants—both turbulent and exciting.

Libraries strive to reflect and enhance their communities, and the Santa Ana Public Library has moved to support our changing community, so we’re serving both the people eating at the trendy new restaurants and those eating at traditional taquerías and carnicerías. We use demographic stats to identify overall needs based on a cultural and economic picture, and we talk to individuals in the library about what they’d like to see in programming and materials.

Efforts to adapt to the changing interests of Santa Ana residents became more difficult after the Great Recession arrived in 2008, bringing fiscal crisis to the city—and the library. The per capita expenditure for our public library was already among the lowest in the state at $11.07, and it decreased even further. We didn’t have funds to buy new books or materials. We had to reduce hours at one branch. We had to contemplate reducing the number of story times and other programs for children and youth.

We didn’t want the community to feel short-changed, so we, with support from our director Gerardo Mouet, began to apply for grants. We had so many ideas for new services and programs, but we needed more funding.

Teen historians from the Santa Ana Library with Gonzalo Mendez, Jr., who was one of the children involved in a landmark 1940s lawsuit challenging the segregation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans into separate schools in Orange County.

Not really believing our application had a chance, we applied for a grant in the 2010 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. It came as a surprise to be awarded $636,000 over three years to develop bilingual librarians. Since 1996, we have required that all public desk staff be bilingual in either Spanish or Vietnamese, and translated all signs and communications. Now, with the grant, we can pay bilingual young people from the community to work in the library, support their undergraduate and graduate education, and teach them the skills they need to become librarians in a diverse community.

We like “raising our own” librarians. Three of our four managing librarians grew up in the community, and started as pages or volunteers in the library. “Locally grown” librarians understand the community and have the gift of making immigrant families feel comfortable and welcome. They also are guides and can help us to create collections and services that answer needs in the community. Our youth services librarian, who grew up in the city and has been with the library through high school, college, and graduate school, has developed a K-12 bilingual tutoring program, including a science institute and intensive math tutoring in the summer. She also has created an award-winning Dia de los Ninos, Dia de los Libros (Day of the Children, Day of the Books) program. The event—a celebration of families, literacy, and bilingualism—attracts between 1,500 and 2,000 attendees every year.

Encouraged, we’ve applied for a variety of federal grants that have allowed us to increase programming, particularly for young people. We now host programs to train at-risk youth in digital media skills, including digital music, graphic design, and web design. We have an active, after-school tutoring program that focuses on kids with learning problems, and a Teen Historian program that trains teens to collect oral histories from their immigrant parents or grandparents, while helping them to understand their families’ struggles to settle in a new country and adapt to a new culture.

Last year, we started Memories of Migration to build on the Teen Historian program. The idea is to develop cultural heritage collections based on the shared stories of human migration in America. Teens find members of the immigrant community with stories to tell, collect artifacts, and record their experiences. Techniques developed by the library will be tested in model programs operated by four libraries and agencies that serve immigrant communities in Connecticut, New York, and New Mexico.

Every day, Santa Ana Public Library staff serves a variety of people with equally varying needs. Teens and tweens hang out with friends in the TeenSpace, men and women come in to get help with resumes and job hunting, and people of all ages visit our Tech Desk to get one-on-one help with technology or to take bilingual computer classes. Hundreds of people use our computer labs to job hunt, complete job certifications, and communicate with relatives far away, supported by bilingual computer tutors. The library has become a supportive second home for Santa Ana teens (including an unusually high number of boys). It is a place where they can develop self esteem and a sense of value to their community by gaining skills, mentoring younger children, and becoming advocates for the needs of their parents and grandparents through the city’s Youth Civic Engagement program.

Recognition has followed: in 2014, were one of 12 recipients of the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. We’ve also received recognition from the city of Santa Ana, which, in addition to increasing our funding, has asked us to create an “e-library” (a kind of electronic petting zoo where people can try tablets, e-books, and 3-D printing) in a proposed community center. We are a major player in the city’s Five-Year Strategic Plan. Our task is to reach out to Santa Ana’s young people to involve them in civic life. We look forward to continuing to adapt to our community’s shifting needs.

I have enjoyed observing the changes that have come about in libraries, reveling both in the rise of technology and the persistence of the written word. Libraries remain places where everyone can find information, a calm place to hang out, a window into the past, and a path to the future.

The post How One City’s Library Adapts to Tweens, Teens, and New Families appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You can get answers to that question by visiting the central San Jose offices of EXPANDability, an agency serving workers with disabilities in Silicon Valley. When I visited this summer, several employment projects were in full swing.

In the large computer lab, jobseekers searched Internet job boards and submitted applications. In a nearby classroom, 12 deaf young adults attended a life-skills class. Near them, EXPANDability’s staffing director, Priscilla Azcueta, interviewed candidates for temporary administrative positions at a local university. In another office, EXPANDability Executive Director Maria Nicholacoudis oversaw the “Autism at Work” program, in conjunction with SAP, the international software giant. She is trying to replicate it with other employers.

Like other local employment agencies serving adults with disabilities, EXPANDability’s population has shifted considerably in the past decade from individuals with physical disabilities to a larger percentage of individuals with neurological conditions, including autism, dyslexia, ADHD and other brain-wiring differences. As a result, EXPANDability has become part of the “neurodiversity” movement in Silicon Valley and throughout California.

I first learned of this movement in the early 2000s, when I was director of California’s labor department. Part of the department’s mission involved finding jobs for the population of workers referred to as “workers with disabilities.” Neurodiversity, which contends neurological differences are normal and should be accommodated in the same way gender and ethnic differences are, was a budding movement; its growth in the past few years has been rapid and striking. There are now neurodiversity conferences, neurodiversity books, and neurodiversity professionals. In June, an overflow crowd of over 150 persons from throughout Silicon Valley gathered at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View for a “Neurodiversity in the High-Tech Workforce” conference. Researchers praised the competitive advantages for tech enterprises of employing adults with dyslexia (problem solvers, creative visual thinkers), as well as adults with autism (attention to detail, ability to concentrate).

EXPANDability workers build robots.

Mark Jessen, an EXPANDability participant with autism who is in his early 50s, could be on the poster of the neurodiversity movement. Jessen is largely self-taught in the information technology field; he spent some time after high school at a community college, but left without a degree when he discovered IT. For over a decade, Jessen was a partner in a small information technology venture, in which he handled the technical duties and his partner did the marketing. But when his partner passed away in 2010, Jessen was unable to carry on the venture. For over three years, he couldn’t find a job.

Through the volunteer adult autism group AASCEND, he was introduced to EXPANDAbility and its Autism at Work program. SAP recognized his unusual computer engineering skills and he recently was hired as a network engineer at SAP’s Palo Alto office. EXPANDability located other local adults with autism who had been unemployed for some time, and based on their technical skills they too have been hired by SAP. “Every day at SAP is a good day for me,” Jessen says after so much time without a steady job.

SAP, companywide, has become a champion of neurodiversity, committing to at least one percent of its worldwide workforce being adults with autism by the year 2020 (roughly 650 positions by its 2013 workforce). The SAP efforts are helping to push other tech companies to adopt Autism at Work, including Microsoft. EXPANDability is now recruiting adults with autism for employment in Microsoft’s Redmond offices.

This is the promise of neurodiversity; but EXPANDability’s experiences also show the gap between theory and practice that remains. Though the SAP Autism at Work program has achieved national and international press, the numbers of participants remains modest in each location. The first SAP cycle in 2014 involved nine trainees in the Bay Area, of whom seven were hired. The second cycle also involves nine trainees, of whom six are currently hired. The Microsoft Autism at Work program is starting with 10 participants.

Additionally, each placement usually requires considerable effort. Even with Jessen’s computer skills, his placement was far from smooth. It took over 400 days from the time of his first contact with SAP until he received an offer letter. During this time, he went through a lengthy battery of assessments, was shifted from a software role to one in network engineering, and waited on several reorganizations with SAP. It was mainly the persistence on the part of Jessen and the SAP Autism at Work coordinator, Jose Velasco, that resulted in his placement.

EXPANDability Executive Director Nicholacoudis is active in speaking statewide, spreading an upbeat message that neurological conditions long regarded as “disabilities” are more accurately seen as competitive advantages. But Nicholacoudis also acknowledges that today most placements are slow and difficult. In theory, EXPANDability seeks to tailor the job around the neurodiverse job seeker’s individual passions and skills. But passion and expertise are not easily translated into a specific job open at a particular time in a particular area.

Many of EXPANDability’s neurodiverse clients do not easily fit into a company structure and workplace rules. Some have issues with hoarding paper or food, and do so in their work stations; others have personal hygiene issues, or can’t seem to get to the job site or come back from breaks on time. “Placement is the first step of employment, and often the easiest one,” Nicholacoudis says. “That’s why we give a great deal of attention to retention after placement, to job coaching and supports, and to getting buy-in from throughout the company.” Providing support at the work site is labor-intensive and costly—especially the job coaches who can facilitate a transition period.

EXPANDability is constantly looking at new placement strategies for its neurodiverse clients. In recent years it has added a staffing company that allows employers to take on workers on a temporary basis, and evaluate their performances. “The staffing approach enables our workers to get in the door, which is the chief challenge in employment today, and show what they can do, and how their positive attitudes can improve the workplace,” says Azcueta, the staffing company director. One of her recent placements was an administrative assistant at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “The university had hesitations at first, but liked him so much it has led to a permanent position.”

A lively online community of autism employment practitioners and parents has grown up on sites like Autism Employment Network by Autism Speaks, Autism Innovators, and Spectrum Employment Network. We share articles with such titles as “What skills do people with autism have?”, “Where to Find an Untapped Tech Workforce: Ask Temple Grandin,” and “Self Employment for Persons with Disabilities.” The articles and comments are almost all positive, and are full of ideas for autism employment. But the number of companies actually hiring and embracing a corporate culture of neurodiversity remains small.

The post Tech Workers with Autism Try to Reboot appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then I discovered photography. It changed my life and now I feel I can change the world bit by bit. For the past year, I have been teaching kids in the housing complex where I grew up how to use cameras and what makes a good photo. I hope my work helps these kids to discover a passion for photography the way I did.

The kind of transformation that taking photos made possible was very important for me because of how I grew up. I was always worried about getting beat up. It wasn’t just that my English wasn’t great: Some of the other Laotian American kids at school made fun of me because I don’t speak Hmong. I thought if I joined a gang, I would be protected.

Luckily, I didn’t join a gang. Instead I got involved in photography when my high school yearbook was looking for a photographer. On an average day, you’ll see many smiles that aren’t genuine, but taking photos allows me to capture and see joy when people aren’t aware of themselves. People can look at a picture and see that they were happy once. They can see that change is possible.

As a young kid, I lived in an apartment near 41st Avenue and Franklin Boulevard in South Sacramento. Non-residents would come into the complex to harass and steal from people who lived there. When I was 7, my nephew and I went to the laundry room in our apartment building. A few non-residents came in after us. They held us down, checked our pockets, and threatened to beat us up because we did not have any money. It was a shocking and scary situation that I hoped to never experience again.

Participants in the Sacramento Building Healthy Communities Youth Media Team photo workshop at Lemon Hill Mutual House Apartments

My parents didn’t want that to happen again, either. When I was 9, they decided to move the family to Lemon Hill Mutual Housing near Stockton Boulevard. It was a safer environment because the gates around Lemon Hill were always locked and there was security. But there was not much to do inside the gates.

And the neighborhood outside the gates wasn’t safe. People didn’t dare walk down Stockton Boulevard at night. Even walking down the street during the day made me anxious: There were gang members, drug dealers, and prostitutes.

There was trouble when I went out on my own once. When I was 9, my friend John’s mom gave him $20 so we could go to McDonald’s for lunch. We were excited to walk there all by ourselves. It was going to be the best day ever. Once we left the apartment complex, we went the wrong way and ran into a group of gangsters who were bigger than us. They didn’t like us walking through their ‘hood. They came up into our faces and started bullying us; they made my friend give them the $20. We didn’t get beat up, but our dream of going alone to McDonald’s was shattered. We stayed home after that.

These experiences made me feel like everyone was against me. I felt that I could only trust close friends and family. My parents and older brother were really angry after I was mugged for the second time. My brother went to find the bullies to deal with the problem. When he came back, I saw that my brother had a black eye. I cried because it was my fault. I told myself: I will never go outside the apartment because of problems on the street.

That’s why discovering photography in high school was so important. It showed me a happier life was possible. I looked at those pictures of people smiling un-self-consciously, and realized that I didn’t want to see bloodshed or have to worry about bullies. Life should be peaceful. I wanted this picture of life to be real.

About that time, I had an opportunity to join the youth media team of Sacramento Building Healthy Communities, a project that brings nonprofits together in the South Sacramento area to make Stockton Street safer.

Last year, I started teaching a photography workshop to five kids, ages 6 to 14. We meet every two weeks in the community room at Lemon Hill Mutual Housing. I talk to them about proper photography techniques and we do photo scavenger hunts, where the kids compete to see who can best apply what they learn in the workshop. After they show me their photos, we talk about them. The kids are inspired by the encouragement and positive feedback.

The shy kids remind me of myself, especially a shy, quiet 8-year-old who never talks. At the third workshop, I spent all day trying to connect with him. Finally he opened up about what’s going on in his life. He told me that he didn’t feel safe in the neighborhood, so he just stays home or goes to the computer lab. It was like seeing my past self.

I’ve tried to make the workshop a place where the kids feel as if they’re in a safe, fun environment where they can relax and forget all of their worries. The kids feel as if they can go anywhere to take photos inside Lemon Hill complex. It’s become a home for them, a place where they feel comfortable.

Photography changed my life and the kids’ lives, too. Once the change started, it continued like dominoes. Now I feel that as a son, a student, and a member of my community, it is my civic duty to give back and show that there is hope.

Meanwhile, out on Stockton Boulevard, things are changing. There’s less prostitution and drug dealing than when I was a kid. The gang violence has died down. Now there is a bike lane and more streetlights. I think a 9-year-old could take a $20 bill down the street without getting mugged.

And the residents of Lemon Hill Housing have started planting gardens—tomatoes, lettuce, and Vietnamese basil. When I look around these days, I see more examples of people being nice to each other and helping out. It’s like looking at a photograph and seeing a real smile.

The post Capturing Smiles Can Change Your Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I first encountered the Salton Sea by accident on a cross-country road trip in the summer of 2005. After the trip, I tried to learn as much as I could about the sea and the people who live near it, but the available online research was unsatisfactory and outdated. Books were very expensive and hard to obtain. So I returned. Less two years after my road trip, I left London for the Salton Sea.

Since then, I’ve collected the stories and photos of my neighbors. Living here can inspire them. Jeni Bate, an artist from Salton City, paints skies and clouds from her back porch. Norm Niver, a musician now in his 80s who has worked to save the sea since the ’70s, lives in Salton City in a small house perched on the banks, a boat dock jutting out over the water with a chair in position for five o’clock martini time.

I still remember the first person I spoke with, a fisherman whom I met in Desert Shores during a fish kill back in February 2007, during my first visit. He expressed his anger with the politicians and organizations that could have done something to prevent the sea from faltering, from drying up, but haven’t. That frustration—that we have been abandoned—is a common sentiment. I’m in awe of all the residents who have sat for years in meetings, and can list all the excuses they’ve heard from governmental agencies for why their communities received so little.

A significant issue is dust. The sea is drying up and needs to be kept wet to minimize the amount of dust particles that float into our air when it’s very windy. Our fear is that, as the water levels drop, the dry playa, which contains toxic dust and chemicals, will be airborne and breathed in by residents near the sea. Wind events are frequent and cause visibility to drop dramatically. Neighbors’ houses disappear behind the walls of sand and dust. Dust tornadoes have ripped across the nearby desert, pulling up lose sand. Particulate matter, such as fertilizers, pesticides, fungi, arsenic, and other heavy metals, become airborne, entering our respiratory systems. Previous wind events have shown that particles can reach as far as Los Angeles County. Already, levels of asthma and other respiratory ailments are far above what they should be. Two out of five children have asthma in Imperial County.

Resolving the problem is complicated; scientists are figuring out how to solve some of the sea’s problems with water quality and keeping the sea from drying up and leaving behind a toxic playa. Scientists are also battling with how to contain the hydrogen sulfide, which can also make residents very sick. At risk are the lives of the residents at the sea, as well as in regions farther away, such as L.A. County, and the teeming wildlife. To do nothing would be disastrous.

So we do something—gathering to clean up. This region is prone to high winds that pick up discarded trash and blow it around the region, filling the air with plastics and paper. These items get caught in desert flora, are picked at by wildlife, and float in the Salton Sea, where fish and birds can get to them. There is a lot of illegal dumping and that needs picking up too—before the animals and wind get to it.

It’s not clear to us who should be responsible for picking up the illegally dumped material. But no one will take responsibility, so we do.

The post Saving Nature, One Plastic Bag at a Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.