Imagine for a moment that you live in a beautiful forest. Your home is on the side of a big mountain. All around it are tall trees and elegant flowers. After a long day of work you come home. You are tired. Dinner smells delicious. You smile at your family. Everyone sits down at the dinner table. You are happy.

Suddenly there is a loud noise.

“What was that,” you wonder.

The noise rings out again. The walls begin to shake—a little at first, then a big shake. You grab your family and hold them close. The shaking continues. The cabinets open. The dishes start falling from their shelves. The sound of exploding glass and ceramics is deafening. You are terrified.

Then everything goes still and quiet.

A cloud of coal ash looms in Moapa, NV. Photo: Chris Jordan-Bloch/Earthjustice

For years, white ash has been blowing across the desert from the Reid Gardner Power Plant right into the homes on the Moapa Paiute Indian Reservation. The Paiutes claim that this ash—the waste from the power plant—is making them sick. The power plant claims that the Paiutes are wrong. This week, a 3-part investigative series from KSNV, the NBC station in Las Vegas, examines the situation in Moapa from three sides. The Paiutes and the power plant each get their say—as does science.

Marti Blake points out the window at her neighbor

"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, it's unhealthy."

For the past 21 years, Blake has lived across the street from the Cheswick Generating Station in Springdale, PA. A family situation left her trying to find a place quickly, and a simple brick home in the small town only 20 minutes from Pittsburgh seemed fine.

"I've regretted that decision ever since, because I've felt sick for the last 20 years," says Blake, who is on medication for a slew of symptoms that include coughing, sinus infections and headaches. Blake attributes these symptoms to the dirty neighbor across the street. Who else in the neighborhood, after all, has a 750-foot tall smoke stack that is spewing out toxic smoke around the clock?

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.

Today is national Bike to Work Day. In honor of all of you who rode this year, here are a few of our favorite bike videos. Hopefully they will persuade you to keep on pedaling.

The first is the wonderful story of a New York City fire fighter who bikes to work—sometimes with 60 pounds of gear on her back! This was sent to me via campaign manager Kathleen Sutcliffe.

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.

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.

The Fisk Power Plant in Chicago : Photo by swanksalot/flickr

When combined, the Fisk and Crawford coal-fired power plants are the largest source of pollution in Chicago, and local residents have been fighting for years for stronger health controls from these plants.

Recently, activists with the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO)made a huge step forward when they convinced a local politician to support stronger regulations on the plant. After nine months of constant pressure from the group, Alderman Daniel Solis decided to switch from backing coal to supporting Chicago's new Clean Power Ordinance. The law would regulate particulate and carbon dioxide emissions from all coal-fired power plants operating in Chicago. WGN TV in Chicago interviewed activists, politicians and power plant officials to produce this report on how the Fisk Power station is affecting both reisdent's health and an upcoming election.

Our kudos to PERRO for their pressure on Alderman Solis. Keep up the great work in the fight for the Right to Breathe.

For years citizens of California's central valley have been asking for help and Wednesday, if only for a few hours, one of the most influential people in the country listened. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson travelled to a church in Fresno to hear the concerns of the people of the valley and what she heard was troubling to say the least.

In Arvin, one in four children has asthma. In Kettleman City a birth defect cluster has terrified a small town. In Delano farm workers and local citizens have been exposed to dangerous pesticides. And throughout the valley huge swaths of land are out of compliance with federal air quality standards and entire towns have undrinkable water. These were just a few of the concerns raised by members of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition (CVAQ) at Wednesday's meeting.

Although the news in the valley is bad, Wednesday's meeting was a positive development. Nearly 10 years ago, affected citizens, concerned medical practitioners and environmental groups  including Earthjustice got together to form CVAQ. Since then the coalition has worked tirelessly to raise the profile of the area's environmental and health problems. The fact that the top environmental official in the land made a trip to listen to local residents is no small feat. Both the members of CVAQ as well as Administrator Jackson deserve kudos for this.