STOCKTON, Calif. — For Laura Ornelas and thousands of other South Stockton residents, toxic air pollution is a fact of life.
Surrounded by highways and railroads, adjacent to heavy industry and the Port of Stockton, the region has been dubbed the “Asthma Capital” by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.
Ornelas, who rents a house in the Boggs Tract area, said she only has to wear a mask when she’s working outside or cleaning her car every few days. She said her 91-year-old mother’s mysterious cough had gotten worse since she moved in earlier this year.
“We just have to get out of here,” she said.
Boggs Tract resident Laura Ornelas reads a flyer posted in her neighborhood advertising a public meeting to discuss the GSNR wood pellet project.
(Noah Haggerty/Los Angeles Times)
For Ornelas and her neighbors, wildfire mitigation efforts are helping authorities plan a large-scale forest management and biofuels project that will harvest trees across California, process them into wood pellets and ship them at facilities in Lassen and Tuolumne counties. If approved, local air pollution could become even worse. They headed to Europe and Asia to get electricity.
All of that wood, more than 1 million tons each year, ends up in a storage facility at the Port of Stockton.
The proposals have alarmed local groups who say their communities have suffered from poor health and government neglect for too long. They question whether the proposal would actually reduce the threat of wildfires and wonder why South Stockton should bear the burden of increased pollution from trucks and ships.
Environmentalists also worry that the forest thinning portion of the project will focus on biofuel company profits over forest health and will do little to prevent wildfires.
The megaproject was proposed by Golden State Natural Resources, a nonprofit formed by a coalition of local county governments.
Heavy equipment transports logs at a site in Tuolumne County where GSNR plans to build a pellet processing plant.
(Noah Haggerty/Los Angeles Times)
GSNR leaders, and many residents from Stockton to the foothills of the Sierra, want this project to protect Californians and forests from wildfires, create renewable energy sources, and create jobs. We see this as a bold and much-needed step.
GSNR notes that although the project will release significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere through business operations and trees burned for energy, wildfire prevention and carbon flare-ups will ultimately make the project carbon neutral or carbon negative. claims that it is possible. -Absorbed into the forest after processing.
However, scientific studies show that biofuel projects often do not meet this benchmark and in some cases even perform worse than coal. However, researchers note that more sustainable harvesting practices, such as the wildfire mitigation efforts that GSNR says could help reduce carbon emissions.
“I think what makes us different is that we come from a public agency mentality,” said Patrick Blacklock, president of GSNR. “We’re here to support the community and invest in the community.”
Environmental activist Megan Fisk, Ebbets Pass Forest Warden, takes a photo of a dogwood tree in the Stanislaus National Forest.
(Noah Haggerty/Los Angeles Times)
Megan Fisk, an environmental activist with Ebbets Pass Forest Watch, 60 miles inland from Stockton, drove her black Tacoma pickup along the winding dirt roads of the Stanislaus National Forest. The understory of ponderosa and sugar pine forests was dotted with manzanita, oak trees, and yellow-leaved dogwoods, heralding the beginning of fall.
Piles of twigs, pine needles, and large logs dot the forest. The bases of many pine trunks were charred black, but the culprit was not a logging company or wildfire. It was the U.S. Forest Service.
The agency’s SERAL project is one of the Forest Service’s 10 initial projects, pioneering an ambitious national interagency plan to combat the worsening wildfire crisis and protect vulnerable communities. (SERAL stands for Social and Ecological Resilience Across the Landscape.)
GSNR hopes to use leftover material from such projects to produce more than 1 million tons of pellets annually.
Many forest health experts consider prescribed burns to be the gold standard of forest health management tools. But in many places where fires have been contained for decades, if not centuries, the vegetation is often so thick that even controlled burns can explode into large conflagrations. There is a risk of becoming
When the Forest Service performs mechanical thinning, it often leaves behind piles of logs that cannot be sold. The GSNR project hopes to utilize such logs for biofuel operations.
(Noah Haggerty/Los Angeles Times)
Therefore, forest experts must rely on other tools.
In mechanical thinning, much of the prescribed burning is done manually and methodically. Cut down small trees, remove brush, and prune the lower limbs of large trees to prevent fire from climbing into the canopy.
Once all this vegetation is chopped up, it is usually thrown into a forest pile and then burned.
GSNR would like to process this wood instead and also carry out thinning operations using its own machinery.
In 2021, a task force created by Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that in California, approximately 1 million acres of forest each year must be mechanically thinned to prevent the dangerous buildup of flammable vegetation that fuels catastrophic wildfires. It became clear that it was necessary to treat it with prescribed burns. -In fiscal year 24, California treated just over 130,000 acres.
Megan Fisk stands at a cleared logging site. She and other forest advocates fear the GSNR biofuels project could open the door to similar practices.
(Noah Haggerty/Los Angeles Times)
GSNR plans to thin up to 85,000 acres each year. But while mechanical thinning projects like SERAL are backed by decades of forest science, some activists and forest rangers worry that financial pressures could push GSNR into overreach. are.
Most forest health experts agree that trees with a diameter of approximately 16 inches at breast height are suitable for mechanical thinning operations. But while GSNR’s draft environmental impact statement directs the project to comply with the agreement, it leaves open the possibility that the nonprofit could remove trees up to 30 inches in diameter.
GSNR says it will do its best to stick to 16 inches or less, but it may be necessary to employ larger trees depending on the situation. Under what circumstances this exception is allowed is not yet clearly defined.
Activists fear that the GSNR could exploit this ambiguity to cut down larger trees in different situations if it struggles to meet production targets.
“That’s why we’re going through this process to gather feedback and get recommendations,” Blacklock said of concerns about the size of trees allowed to be removed. “Is there a way to strengthen that to alleviate those concerns?” …If so, we will absolutely consider it and incorporate it into the final “Environmental Impact Report.” .
Parts of South Stockton already have worse air quality than 99% of the state.
In the hardest-hit areas, the average life expectancy of residents is 13 years lower than the state average. They are also 60% more likely to die from respiratory disease and almost twice as likely to die from heart disease.
“Asthma is so accepted in our community that it’s like getting glasses,” he said in the city’s Filipino neighborhood, which once had the largest concentration of Filipinos outside the Philippines. said Dillon Delbo, co-founder of Little Manila Rising, an organization founded to protect the country. Killed by a bulldozer.
The air near the Port of Stockton already does not meet state and federal regulations for particulate matter, which consists of soot, metals, construction dust and smoke. GSNR’s draft environmental impact report found that the project would worsen pollution by about 2%.
According to the report, pellet facility operations will worsen air pollution from nitrous oxide (which can cause eye irritation, nausea and respiratory problems) by about 18%, violating local air quality standards. That’s what it means.
“It’s not just the fact that they’re trying to attract these industries, it’s taking a toll on the health of the residents, especially in South Stockton,” Delbo said.
In 2015, a San Joaquin County grand jury found that South Stockton, which is cut off from the north by a highway that cuts through town, had been largely ignored by city officials for years.
Throughout the early 2000s, Delbo and Little Manila Rising co-founder Dawn Mabalon were successful in getting the city to designate an 8-square-block Filipino neighborhood in South Stockton, just a few miles southeast of Boggs Tract, as a historic site. The district designation was avoided. A project to demolish homes and replace them with strip malls. But they struggled to get their environmental justice program off the ground.
Gloria Estefany Alonso Cruz, environmental justice advocacy coordinator for Little Manila Rising, remembers at the altar of co-founder Dawn Mabalon, who died of an asthma attack in 2018.
(Noah Haggerty/Los Angeles Times)
“The city refused to partner with us, which is outrageous,” Delbo said. “All the data shows that the rate of asthma-related problems is 100%. We built highways next to where families and children and schools are. I’m smoking it.”
In 2018, Mabalon suddenly passed away at the age of 46 due to an asthma attack.
“I didn’t really understand that a diagnosis at 11 years old meant a death sentence at 46 years old,” Delbo said. “It took Dawn’s death for me to understand that.”
Little Manila Rising has come a long way since then. We launched the Asthma Reduction Movement in Neighborhoods (DAWN), a program named after Mabalon that aims to help residents manage their asthma.
The city has also begun reaping millions of dollars from investments announced in 2017 aimed at cleaning air and addressing environmental inequality.
Delbo and Gloria Estefany Alonso Cruz, Little Manila’s environmental justice advocacy coordinator, see the GSNR project as a betrayal of those promises.
Although GSNR’s environmental review found that an increase in pollution in violation of current standards is inevitable, Blackrock said GSNR wants to support efforts to electrify port operations to reduce pollution. . In October, the port won a $110 million federal grant to do so.
GSNR also argues that pollution from the port pales in comparison to pollution caused by wildfires, including in the Stockton area.
PM2.5, particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in size, exists at concentrations of about 40 micrograms per cubic meter in Stockton, but the 2020 August Complex fire caused concentrations to drop to 70 micrograms per cubic meter in a few days. It rose to more than a microgram. GSNR’s project will increase pollution levels by approximately 1 microgram per cubic meter over the life of the project in the port area.
Stockton Harbor is lined with industrial buildings.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
In general, chronic exposure to PM2.5 has eight times worse health effects than short-term exposure from sources such as wildfires, said Joel Schwartz, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It is said that there is a possibility.
However, he noted that GSNR’s project has the potential to reduce short-term exposures for far more people than those who worsen chronic exposures, possibly providing a net benefit.
This is a worrying situation for local residents.
“I want the community to thrive,” Delbo said. “I’m not against economic development. I want more young people to be able to go to college and come back and get jobs here. …What we’re concerned about is , and why costs are always relevant to the health of our communities.”
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