Town Hall on Air Pollution Goes Digital

Today, as the EPA continues to conduct hearings and take comments on its new proposed smog standards, is it more important than ever that the public become involved in the fight for clean air. Conferences, speaker series, and town hall meetings are excellent tools for explaining the degradation caused by air pollution, but they are also relatively inaccessible. They require attendees to put aside portions of time, to register in limited numbers, and to be able to travel to the talk. However, in Los Angeles, an air pollution capital of the United States, Sierra Club organizer Aura Vasquez (at right, above) came upon a new idea: to spread the benefits of a town hall meeting online.

The “Call in for Clean Air Virtual Town Hall,” was held on December 4 by a coalition of environmental and public health groups, including the Sierra Club’s My Generation campaign. The timing of the hearing was meant to correlate with the EPA’s pending decision, and to bring attention to both the local and the national fight for clean air. Los Angeles is a fitting place to stage a hearing on clean air issues. Long a poster child for smog, L.A. has kept its hazy, asthmatic crown in 2014, when the State of the Air Report ranked the city as having the worst air pollution in the country. Los Angeles has failed to meet the EPA’s standard for ozone pollution for the last 35 years, and suffers from extremely high levels of particulate matter (tiny specks of dust that can lodge in the lungs and cause respiratory problems) as well. In addition, L.A. is such a huge and sprawling city, and has such notoriously bad traffic, that Vasquez thought the clean air message would have a more effective reach if “people can tune in from the comfort of their home.”

Teleconferences are not a new idea, nor are digitally recorded presentations and speeches. However, this is the first “virtual” town hall of its kind to come from the Sierra Club, as well as the first to be broadcasted bilingually, simultaneously live in Spanish and in English.

The communities most affected by air pollution in L.A. are often Hispanic, and many of the Sierra Club’s partners in putting together the town hall are made up of people who speak mainly Spanish, so it reaching out to a diverse audience proved vital. Some of the individual ‘viewers’ who tuned in to the Spanish version of the virtual town hall were in fact large groups watching together.

During the virtual town hall, lung specialists and environmental advocates spoke on the importance of reducing smog and other pollutants in the environment, talked about the decision faced by the EPA, and brought attention to current loopholes allowing polluters to avoid the Clean Air Act.

In all, 180 people virtually attended the town hall, a turnout that is expected only to grow in the future. “I basically did everything on my own,” says Vasquez, who also notes that, if they gained an outreach that large with just one person heading the effort, the potential reach of virtual seminars on environmental issues is practically boundless.


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