New Air Quality Monitoring System Propels Environmental Justice in Hudson Valley

The public now has access to crucial data about air quality around Hudson Valley. Bard College has partnered with an environmental justice group, “JustAir,” to install sensors and publish the data in real time. Before this initiative, only government agencies could view the data without a formal request and it was being measured from farther away. Citizens have to file using the Freedom of Information Act to access EPA statistics, explains Eli Dueker. Dueker is the Director of the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College. He told WJFF, “We are the first publicly accessible air quality network in the Hudson Valley. The nearest ‘official’ Department of Environmental Conservation station is in Newburgh and not publicly accessible.” The program is a huge step for environmental justice and democratizing information, says Desirée Lyle, the manager of Bard’s Community Sciences Lab. The program is a “resource for the community” that isn’t vulnerable to the politicization of climate science. Lyle explains that Hudson Valley was previously part of an “air quality monitoring desert,” in which fifty million Americans still currently live. Now, however, residents are empowered to use data to investigate potential health hazards to the community: “If you have something that just happened in your neighborhood, let’s say there was a fire, and you’ve been coughing a lot for the last two weeks, and you’re wondering if that fire in your neighborhood is the cause of that, then you can go back three months ago and see what the air quality was like before you had your cough, and see if it was the same or if it was different. So that’s another way that data are helpful to individual community members, not just municipalities or hospitals or larger organizations. It could be just, you know, a person who’s sick and wanting to get more information about why they might be not feeling well.”Lyle and Dueker hope to grow the program even further by installing sensors on-the-ground. These are more accurate than those on top of roofs because gravity moves a lot of harmful particles down to where people are actually breathing. They encourage people to limit burning firewood and partaking in other activities that can hurt the air quality. Dueker says:“We as a community, we have control over our air quality… in this era of living, there’s a lot that we can’t do anything about… Our point is that air quality is not one of them. We can make decisions that affect our air quality immediately." He continued, "We also aren’t into in the business of using guilt as a way to achieve environmental excellence. We actually believe that there are a lot of decisions that everyone has to make on a daily basis and we have no business judging that. But we can, as a community, make some decisions that can help guide people around that.”Listen to the audio here for more and visit https://hvaq.wordpress.com/ to sponsor a sensor, volunteer for the program, or learn more.