It starts with a warning. Then it’s just a matter of which way the wind blows.

In the evening, someone will go from house to house and tell the neighborhood that tomorrow will be a windy day and perhaps, a bad air day. The next afternoon—if the conditions are just wrong—a toxic dust called coal ash picks up from the landfills and slag ponds of the coal-fired Reid Gardner Power Station and heads towards the reservation like a sandstorm.

“But this is a sandstorm that burns your skin, buries in your lungs and kills your neighbors,” says Calvin Meyers, a tribal elder who lives on the reservation, the tribal home of a band of Paiute Indians that sits about 30 miles north of Las Vegas and about 300 yards from Reid Gardner.

Meyers and the remaining 310 members of his tribe are locked in a David-and-Goliath struggle against one power plant’s desire to expand and an industry’s desire to keep a dirty secret.

It’s no secret that coal is our dirtiest energy source. It’s laced with mercury, arsenic, lead and other toxics and as it’s burned it creates huge problems for our health. All across America, these contaminants billow out of smokestacks and spill out of wastewater pipes right into our lungs and drinking water.

Let’s call this the front door. Now, if this is what big coal is taking out the front door, the next logical question is what are they taking out the back?

The answer: coal ash.

Coal ash is the waste leftover at the end of the coal burning cycle. It’s laced with the same arsenic, mercury, lead and other toxics. It’s the second largest waste stream in America—15 billion tons of toxic sludge per year. And here’s the dirty little secret: it’s subject to less regulation than the garbage you take to the curb every week.

It sits in unlined pits in Moapa and unlined landfills in Alabama. It’s put behind old leaky dams in Pennsylvania. It basically goes wherever big coal says it will. And where it goes, people get sick.

“I can taste the salts of it coming into my mouth and sometimes when I sweat my skin burns,” said Meyers, who I met on my first day in Moapa. He introduced me to people who told similar stories of health problems.

“I’ve had a sore throat for six months,” said Eunice Ohte, a tribal elder who is one of several women on the reservation with hyperthyroidism

“I never had asthma until I moved here and now I have to use an inhaler,” said Deanna Domingo who moved onto the reservation a few years ago.

“I used to have an incredible memory and now I’m having trouble remembering simple things,” said former Tribal Chairman Vernon Lee.

“I’ve always been healthy, and now my heart has been constantly racing for several months,” said Vickie Simmons. “For years I didn’t even know what it was that was blowing from the plant onto the reservation,” she added. “Once we learned what coal ash was and what’s in it, well that’s when we stood up and said ‘No.’”

Simmons and I went on a hike to a mesa that overlooks the plant and some of the homes on the reservation. While we were standing there, a cloud of coal ash picked up from one of the dry slag ponds. It billowed out to about the size of a large house and then it traveled a few hundred yards before settling back down.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“That’s nothing,” Vickie told me. “That sort of stuff is pretty much constant. On the bad days, you have to run for your house because it takes over the whole place.”

Reid Gardner has announced that it wants to expand the coal ash landfill and waste ponds for the plant, and the people of the Moapa River Reservation have voiced their disapproval of the idea.

But actions often speak louder than words.

The next day I went with Simmons to her new job. Twice a week she heads into the desert about 5 miles from her house and checks a meter that measures the sun’s intensity.

The tribe is about to become the first in America to install a large-scale solar plant and Simmons is the first worker in their new “Green Energy” program.

The deep, dark irony of the Paiutes’ situation is that none of their power comes from the Reid Gardner coal plant. So they get all of the problems and none of the benefits. Rather than dwell on this sad fact, the tribe is seeking a new way forward, one that moves past dirty coal.

“What we’ve got is land and sun, and we are tired just sitting here and taking pollution from this plant,” said William Anderson, tribal chairman of the Moapa Band of Paiutes. “So we’re gonna go ahead and do something about it. To go ahead and have a solar project is to say, ‘Hey, there are alternative ways.’”

As the sun set at the future solar plant, Simmons climbed a ladder and took her readings. The shadows from the desert plants grew long and for the first time since I’d been on the reservation I couldn’t see or hear the Reid Gardner plant. Simmons climbed down from the ladder and a few minutes later we saw a hawk fly overhead. I couldn’t help but think what a brighter alternative this was.

“I just feel like the Indian people are here for a reason,” Simmons later said to me. “Maybe it’s to try to help do what we can to preserve the environment.”

We can hope.

A few months ago, Earthjustice campaign manager Kathleen Sutcliffe came to me with an interesting request—she wanted to tell an uplifting story about fracking. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a drilling technique that involves blasting chemically treated water into the earth to release oil and gas trapped in underground rock formations. Most of the stories about fracking involve stuff like gas well explosions, chemical spills, tap water catching on fire, rivers being polluted, and air quality being degraded. So needless to say, it’s not the most obvious place to find a positive story.

For the most part, oil and gas companies are fracking as they please and raking in huge profits at the expense of small communities and their local environments. But maybe, just maybe, we thought, there are some people out there who have stood up and used their voices to battle the bank accounts of the gas industry.

So we started reading and researching. And what we found surprised us.

We learned about the late Linda Bivin who organized all of the farmers in one Oklahoma county against gas company abuses. The effort succeeded in pushing the state to adopt protective regulations.

We learned about Leyana Dessauer, a16-year-old high school sophomore from Syracuse, New York who organized a march in support of a local ban on drilling. She succeeded in raising the profile of the issue in her town.

We learned about the Chapman, Pennsylvania zoning board members John P. Rathmell Jr., Alice Tarr and John Drake, who resigned in protest rather than approve a zoning permit for a drilling operation. They helped put the brakes on drilling in their area.

We learned that there are actually dozens of examples of people standing up and winning seemingly impossible fights against fracking.

One story, however, really caught our attention. Jen Slotterback was hiking in her favorite park when she discovered surveying for future gas drilling. She raced home to tell her husband Jim that the place they love—the place where they had fallen in love—might be forever changed. They had never been involved in activism, but they knew they had to save that place, an 850-acre tract of land named Rider Park.

We called up Jim and Jen and they welcomed us into their amazing story. A few weeks later, I was in in their living room, learning about the fight to save the park and how that fight had become a mission to save state forests and special places throughout Pennsylvania.

Before I came out to visit, I asked Jim if there would be anything for me to film while I was there.

“Oh there’s something going on every single day here. And it’s only speeding up,” Jim told me.

He was not mistaken. In town, there were gas drillers conferencing, community members meeting and scientists lecturing. Outside of town, there were land being surveyed, wells being fracked and groups forming to raise concern about the pace of the drilling and it’s effects on their land, water and lives.

It’s massive industrialization at an intense pace. Amid all of this, the Slotterbacks and their petition to save 850 acres may seem inconsequential, but as Confucius said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

The Slotterback’s journey began with a day hike on their favorite trail, and now, as Jim told me, “We’re prepared to spend the rest of our lives working on this issue.”

We’d like to send our sincerest thanks to the Slotterbacks, the Responsible Drilling Alliance and the good people of Williamsport for sharing their story with us. You’re an inspiration to us all. If you want to support the Slotterback’s new petition, you can sign it here, and if you want to learn more about fracking and take other actions on the issue, you can do so here.

“It’s like hell. Living in hell,” says Marti Blake, when asked about being neighbors with a coal-fired power plant. “It’s filthy, it’s dirty, it’s noisy.”

For 21 years, Blake has lived right across from the Cheswick Generating Station in Springdale, PA, a 40-year-old coal-fired power plant now owned by GenOn Energy. According to data from the Environmental Protection Agency—captured by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity—Cheswick is in the highest category for risk to human health.

Blake recounts an especially harrowing tale that happened some years back.

“All of a sudden, the whole atmosphere got black—dark—just like nighttime. You couldn’t see it was so dark. And this was in the afternoon—it was sunny before that. It lasted maybe ten minutes,” she recalls. Blake had spent most of the day cleaning the exterior of her house and as the sky cleared she looked in frustration at a previously clean building now covered in crusty, black soot.

“There was a guy across the street by the sidewalk doing something, and he walked up to me and he says ‘Oh ma’am, I’m really sorry. You were working so hard in getting your building washed down, and this had to happen.’ He said, ‘I work for Duquesne Light [the previous owner]. Now don’t you say that I mentioned anything to you, because I don’t want to get fired, but that came from the plant.’”

Since moving to the area, Blake has developed serious allergies. She now takes a shot every week to help with her symptoms. The medicine still isn’t enough though. “I feel like I have a cold all the time. I cough. I have a runny nose. I get sinus infections. It’s awful,” she says.

No one can say beyond the shadow of a doubt that Blake’s health problems are caused by the dirty air, but for Blake, it’s a no-brainer: “If I go away and I’m not near a coal plant, guess what? I don’t have any allergies. I feel great, with the clean air.”

In the Specter of a Plume

Martin Garrigan lives nearby and has similar feelings about their coal-fired neighbor. “Living next to a coal-fired power plant is sort of like the neighbor from hell moving in. They’ve just bought a huge house and put up a 750-foot tall stack that’s spewing poisons out over your head and creating so much noise that you often can’t sleep at night from it.”

The response from plant officials to Garrigan, Blake and other people frustrated with the pollution from their industrial neighbor can be summarized this way: “Move.”

But that’s easier said than done. “You tend to think, well, ‘I should not be living here,’” says Garrigan. “But then when my wife’s parents live here, my parents live here, the children have all their friends at school—they’re involved in a myriad of activities—it’s tough to just pick up and leave everything behind.”

Garrigan has advised his daughters—one of whom has asthma—not to move back into the area when they graduate from high school. He and his wife plan to move at that point as well.

Bad Neighbors

“Neighborliness doesn’t trump profits,” says Earthjustice’s Jim Pew, an attorney who has worked for more than a decade to clean up coal plants. “Until the government actually sets standards that require these big neighbors to control their pollution, it’s not going to happen.”

It needs to happen because coal plant pollution has a serious impact on health: every year, it causes exacerbated asthma, heart problems, hospital visits, days when people miss work and school, and worst of all, premature death—especially among vulnerable populations like children, the elderly and people with asthma. These problems cost society large amounts of money, but they can be dramatically reduced with pollution control technology.

“Children die of asthma,” says Pew. “I’m a parent. I just can’t imagine losing your child to asthma. I can’t imagine losing your child at all, but losing a child unnecessarily because we can’t be bothered to clean up pollution? That’s just incredible to me.”

A Knock at the Polluter Door

Thankfully, because of many years of Earthjustice’s determined litigation on behalf of community, environmental and public health groups, things are looking up. On December 21, 2011, the Obama administration released protections that will clean up toxic air emissions from power plants across the nation. When the protections go into effect in a few years, they will prevent every year up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, 6,300 cases of acute bronchitis and 130,000 cases of asthma attacks.

Jim Pew has a powerful way of looking at it: “Instead of looking at this as a cost-benefit thing, you can look at it as a cost-cost thing. There’s a cost to cleaning up the air, that’s true—that’s say one dollar. And there’s a cost to not cleaning up the air—let’s say that’s 30 dollars. Which one of those costs do you want to pay? You’re going to pay one of them.”

Now, the danger is that a polluter-friendly Congress will take the protections away.

“There’s a serious effort afoot in Congress to kill off this rule,” says Pew, “even though the benefits are overwhelmingly greater than the cost to industry. There are a bunch of our representatives who are happy to kill this rule off because they answer largely to the industry groups that simply don’t want to pay to clean up their pollution.”

This is of serious concern to Marti Blake, Martin Garrigan and many others across the country who are impacted by air pollution from coal plants—far and away the nation’s worst toxic polluters. The protections issued by the Obama administration will dramatically reduce the pollution burden placed on the neighbors of these facilities, but to be so close to real change and have elected representatives actively working to take it away to appease powerful industries is infuriating.

The Right to Breathe

Clean air should be a fundamental right. When Marti Blake thinks about this idea, it is almost overwhelming.

“That is the most wonderful idea I’ve ever heard,” she says. “The right to breathe clean air. Yes.”

“I mean, nobody is put on this earth to live in filth and to breathe the filth,” she continues. “With our technologies today? We’re not living back in the 18th century.”

After years of work by Earthjustice and other groups, the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama’s leadership has finally taken the steps to usher in a new century where coal plant pollution no longer sickens and kills. It’s our job to remain vigilant against the interests that would rather we stay right where we are, in the shadow of a smokestack and the specter of a plume.

Tom Frantz grew up in California’s central valley. The once sparse rural area is now the source of food for millions of Americans, and throughout his life Tom has seen the bucolic pastures of his childhood transform into modern-day mega-farms.

When Tom’s daughter was 10 she started to develop migraines. Then Tom started having breathing problems. His father and brother started having to use inhalers. When he talked with others in his small his community of Shafter, CA near Bakersfield he heard similar stories from his neighbors. Pollution from Big Ag was combining with other industrial sources to form a toxic soup that was wreaking havoc on local health. Tom noticed a connection between poor air quality days and the health of his family.

Around this time, a 3,000-cow dairy opened near the school where Tom taught. At first it was a nuisance. Teachers had to install fly strips in classrooms to keep students on task. Quickly though, the nuisance became a problem. Nitrate levels in the school well spiked to unsafe levels and fine particulate matter in the air skyrocketed. Eventually, some students had to stay inside during recess due to bad air conditions.

Tom, a life-long activist, had seen enough, so he took action. He organized with people in the community. He started a grassroots organization. He got involved in legal action to improve air quality. And he started taking pictures, lots of pictures.

“I realized quickly that if I had visual evidence of the things I was talking about then people could not deny that these problems exist,” Tom said.

“I believe that individuals working together can make a difference. We need an improvement in the health of our community and our environment. But that change won’t come without individuals working together towards that goal. For me the photos and videos are just part of that work.”

This year, the EPA will continue their work on the same issues that are impacting people like Tom. The agency must soon update national health standards for fine particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5), commonly referred to as soot—a major cause of premature death and a widespread threat to those who suffer from lung and heart disease. These national health standards are critical tools that drive the cleanup of soot pollution across the country in places like Tom’s backyard and yours.

Earthjustice and other organizations are working in the courts to get a deadline set for the EPA to act.

You can send a message to your congressperson that you believe in the right of all Americans to breathe clean air. And you can learn more about the potential impacts of the EPA’s fine particulate standard in a recent joint report from American Lung Association, Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice titled Sick of Soot.

Tom was kind enough to let me follow along as he documented area pollution for a few days. In the video you can see him in action and hear him talk about his passion for cleaning up the air we all share. The time for us to take action and help people like Tom is now. We hope the EPA is listening.

In the words of asthma sufferers, asthma feels:

“Like you’re in a pool of water. You can’t breathe. And when you try to breathe it don’t work.”

“Like you put a pillow over your face and pushed it. It’s horrible! You feel desperate because you can’t breathe.”

“Like you wish you could still be playing outside, where the air could be cleaner.”

There are more than 20 million asthma sufferers in the United States. These men, women and children know all too well what it feels like to have an attack. But many others have no idea. I encourage you to watch a short film we produced that explores asthma through the words of those who experience it every day.

Here’s what you can do:

This month is Asthma Awareness Month. Spread the word by on Facebook and Twitter (#right2breathe) by sharing this video with your friends.

Support the right of all people to breathe clean air. We can make the lives of asthma sufferers better by working to reduce air pollution.