Environmental Issues Plaguing The Central Valley

For multiple decades, there has been an enormous issue plaguing the Central Valley and unfortunately, there still is no resolution in sight. The issue at hand is known as pollution, specifically, air pollution and it is attributed to multiple reasons. Air pollution in this region is known to be one of the worst in the world, and due to the substantial amount of pollution there has been devastating impacts and consequences. For a long time, there has been multiple attempts to decrease the amount of air pollution and attempts to control how much of it is created, but to this day the Central Valley is still dealing with some of the worst air pollution around the United States.

There are multiple reasons why the air quality is so bad in the Central

The more the air pollution increases, the more devastating or destructive the effects will become for the central valley. Climate change has been increasing across the world and as a planet many countries have suffered or are currently suffering its consequences. For example, global warming has been very problematic for many countries around the world and has been because of air pollution. Global warming’s main cause is the greenhouse effect which traps heat in the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect is made up of gases which include Water Vapor, Nitrous Oxide, Carbon dioxide, and Methane (A blanket around the earth, 2018). Carbon dioxide is a major pollutant is mostly made up from human activities whether its from factories that are in use, cars on the road, or even breathing. In the last decade, the valley suffered a statewide drought that caused many problems agriculturally and economically. Many agricultural fields didn’t have enough water to survive and dried out. which caused a shortage of fruits and vegetables and as a result many farmers, agricultural workers, laborers, etc lost their jobs.. Prices went up on many items due to the shortages and the people living in the valley experienced first hand the unexpected results of air pollution. Whether this was a result of global warming is controversial to many people, but according

Air pollution affects people who breath the bad air quality that is infested with harsh chemicals on a daily basis.. The health impacts that come with living in areas with bad air pollution and air quality aren’t taken seriously because many individuals aren’t fully aware of the detrimental side effects of living in these horrid and life threatening conditions. There are both short term and long term effects associated with living in areas with tremendous amounts of air pollution. For example, a short term effect is that the pollutants that are commonly found in traffic emissions, like NO2, increase the risk of wheezing in kids with asthma in the city of Fresno (Mann et al. 2010). Also, according to National Geographic, some other short term effects can be respiratory diseases like pneumonia or bronchitis, and “long term effects from air pollution include heart disease, lung cancer, and respiratory diseases such as emphysema”(“air pollution,”n.d). In the San Joaquin Valley, approximately 1 out of every children have asthma which is the highest percentage in all of the state (county level statistics, 2015). Asthma is a respiratory disease with no cure and the air pollution is a big factor on why children all over the Central Valley have been diagnosed with lifelong disease. All of these health impacts that are caused by air pollution can happen to