I became an environmentalist much later in life than I should have.

Born in San Francisco I grew up in Suisun, California, a small town of small, aging ranch-style houses on a slough that fed the Bay. It’s the kind of town that, usually if someone thinks they’ve heard of it, they’re actually thinking of somewhere else.

Shortly after we moved there, I developed asthma. My mother, who’d scraped and saved to move my sisters and I out of the city to a new life in the country, took me to the doctor. There, she learned that the move, the air in Suisun, was what caused my asthma – that a move she thought was a symbol of her success as a