By Ashley McClure, M.D., Special for CalMatters

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A view of Half Dome and the Yosemite Valley from the Upper Yosemite Falls Trail on July 7, 2023. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

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For nine years, I’ve practiced primary care medicine in the East Bay, taking care of people from all walks of life. Lately, I’ve noticed a troubling pattern in my exam rooms: more young people needing asthma inhalers, more middle-aged patients developing new seasonal allergies that get worse every year as temperatures rise, and more elderly patients struggling through wildfire season and heat waves. 

I’ve watched parents miss work to care for children whose asthma flares up during poor air quality days. I’ve counseled pregnant women about the risks of air pollution exposure. 

These aren’t just statistics in a medical journal. They’re my patients — real people whose health is suffering because of oil and gas-related pollution and the global warming it’s causing.  

We know that fossil fuel related air pollution is responsible for 1 out of 5 deaths worldwide each year. As a physician, I strongly oppose the Trump administration’s proposed plan to give private corporations leases for new oil and gas drilling on our public and federal lands in 17 California counties, up and down the state.

Trump’s Bureau of Land Management is preparing new resource management plans that could pave the way for expanded oil and gas drilling across more than one million acres of California public lands — from the San Joaquin Valley all the way up the Central Coast to the San Francisco Bay Area. The recent draft of the Environmental Impact Report kicked off a 30-day public comment period when the public can get involved. (It’s a Scroogey timing, to be sure).

This plan is the next front in President Donald Trump’s full-fledged assault on our public lands and the next step in his “drill, baby, drill” agenda. If approved, this plan could lock in decades of new toxic oil drilling in wild spaces that should be open to all, or near frontline communities who already live with the deadly impacts of air pollution, water contamination, and environmental injustice. 

This year California’s air quality report card shows a failing grade for many counties, with 98% of the state’s population experiencing unhealthy air at some point during the year, according to the American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” 2025 report. It will absolutely get worse if we allow the Trump administration’s land management plans to move forward.  

Public lands belong to all Americans. They should promote our health, not undermine it. These are the places families visit to breathe clean air, where watersheds begin, where ecosystems provide natural buffers against climate impacts.  

With enough political opposition we can absolutely stop Trump and his oil lobby besties from pillaging and plundering our natural public lands. Objectors just did it in the Southeast USin late October. Concerned environmentalists and some Republican stakeholders who were worried offshore drilling would harm tourism were successful in protecting their waters. 

Now it’s our turn. This is the moment for California’s elected leaders to stand up and fiercely oppose the plans Trump and his oily campaign funders before the drilling starts. 

Our public lands should be a source of health, recreation, and resilience; not another source of the dirty pollution making my patients sick. Protecting public lands from oil and gas drilling isn’t just environmental policy; it’s preventive medicine. It’s choosing a future where I spend less time treating pollution-related illness and more time helping patients thrive.  

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.