dlevey's blog

This is my last day at the Merced Sun-Star and I just wanted to say thank you for the past two-and -a -half years.

I enjoyed covering arts and entertainment, food, travel and local events for our features section before moving on to write about some interesting topics in the environment. I met so many great people and experienced a lot of fun trips to art shows, plays, wildlife refuges, fish hatcheries, concerts, rivers and gardens.

Get ready to flex your creative muscles for clean air.

The San Joaquin Valley Air District is hosting a video contest to promote its Healthy Air Living program. Healthy Air Living is a new initiative to reduce emissions polluting the Valley air.

And the air district is looking for amateur filmmakers who would like the opportunity to have their winning entry on Valley television.

Answer the question "What is a healthy air life?" in a 30-second video

I'm right now riding in a heavily air conditioned bus on the way to the Everglades Agricultural Area.

I've been traveling around southern Florida to study various ecosystems and participating in seminars lead by environmental experts all week as part of the Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment fellowship. This has been a wonderful week, both fun and educational, but the stats on drought and climate change are disturbing.

In the story I wrote last week about the American Lung Association’s "State of the Air" report, quite a few California cities -- including Merced -- measured high levels of ozone. Ozone or smog is a summertime air pollution problem, extending from May through September.

Spokespeople from the lung association said those numbers would have been portrayed even higher if the Environmental Protection Agency's new, more stringent ozone scoring system had been taken into account. Now, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District has adopted that more "health-protective" scoring standard.

I started covering the Chinook salmon decline last year after it was mentioned to me in passing.

And although I knew it was bad when biologists called the situation a "crisis," it's now risen to "disaster" level -- which appears to be much worse.

Lower numbers of these fish have not just been discovered in the Merced River, but in bodies of water in or near California, Oregon and Washington. While Coho salmon stocks off Washington and northern Oregon have been reported in better shape, they are still far below normal.

Yosemite National Park is restoring one of its iconic views to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service and the 20th anniversary of the Yosemite Fund.

The park service says that restoring its Tunnel View Overlook will provide better accessibility to viewing areas for all visitors and provide better circulation patterns for both touring pedestrians and vehicles. The project will also correct safety problems at the Inspiration Point trailhead and fix some drainage issues. All this will be done with the preservation of the surrounding nature in mind, spokespeople said.