Just outside Fresno’s southeastern border lies a road in which the urban rolls into the rural in a juxtaposition common in California’s central San Joaquin Valley.

A trucking yard sits a few dozen feet from residential homes. Children play at an elementary school flanked by farmland – tangled, empty vines and trees sprinkled with white blossoms. The snow-capped Sierra Nevada are unusually visible after February storms pushed out Valley smog.

This is Lone Star, an unincorporated community found on Fowler Avenue between Jensen and North avenues and a physical representation of the environmental challenges of the area.

The air that typically obscures the mountains is often judged as the most toxic in the country and is blamed for cutting the life expectancy of the children at Lone Star Elementary and hundreds of thousands of their neighbors. The trucking yard and farms are a prime target for environmental reform, with agriculture finding itself in a difficult spot as costly regulations and brutal market factors collide.

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The Fresno area’s struggle with pollution, clean water and climate change is well-documented.

A November study from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago noted the Fresno metropolitan area had the worst concentration of particulate pollution in the country. The amount of soot in the air was roughly twice what the World Health Organization sets as a maximum guideline, and thus residents could see up to a year of their lives reduced by related health issues.

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