The Hudson Valley has long been known for its fresh air. People move here to escape the fetid confines of New York City. We hike mountains, tend gardens, ride rail trails, and throw open the windows when the temperature drops at night. Along with the river, the forests, and the farms, clean air is one of the region’s defining amenities—a resource so abundant that we rarely think about it.
Until the air changes.
On a July afternoon in Kingston, I stepped outside and the atmosphere felt downright chunky. Wildfire smoke had drifted south from Canada and the Upper Midwest, turning the sky a milky gray. Weather apps warned that the Air Quality Index was elevated. Suddenly, everyone was thinking about what they were breathing.
The smoke was conspicuous, but scientists and community researchers studying air quality in the Hudson Valley say the visible haze represents only one part of a much larger story. Air pollution does not always arrive as an orange sky or the smell of a distant forest fire. It can come from traffic, industry, cooking, a neighbor’s woodstove, or the fire pit burning a few backyards away. Its concentration can change from town to town, block to block, and room to room.
Yet until recently, the Hudson Valley had remarkably little information about its own air. “We’re technically in an air quality monitoring desert,” says Desiree Lyle, program director of Bard College’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities. The nearest regulatory monitors tracking PM2.5—microscopic particles small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs—are separated by a broad swath of the Mid-Hudson Valley with little official monitoring. That matters because air quality can differ substantially over relatively short distances.
For decades, the region’s environmental consciousness has been organized around water. The Hudson River is one of the nation’s most famous environmental recovery stories. Residents know about PCBs, sewage overflows, harmful algal blooms, and drinking-water contamination. We have learned to ask what is in our streams and wells.
The Other Environment
Air has received nothing like the same scrutiny. Eli Dueker, director of Bard’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities, believes that distinction is artificial. Their career (Dueker identifies as trans) has been devoted to studying the movement of contaminants between water and air—including research showing that bacteria from polluted waterways can become airborne.
“What’s in the air is in the water, and what’s in the water is also in the air,” Dueker says. Scientists and regulators have traditionally treated the two as separate environmental compartments, they say, even though contaminants move between them.
Dueker arrived at Bard in 2014 and helped develop what eventually became the college’s Community Sciences Lab. Its work rests on the principle that scientific expertise should not remain sequestered within universities. Communities often recognize environmental problems long before institutions validate them, Dueker says. Data can give residents tools to document what they already experience and press for change.
They came to that belief before becoming a scientist. While working with communities affected by oil and mineral extraction, Dueker repeatedly watched residents raise concerns about contaminated water, only to be dismissed because they lacked scientific credentials. Deuker returned to school in their late 30s, in part so they could bring scientific tools into community advocacy.
The Woman Who Started Asking Questions
That philosophy eventually connected them with Kingston resident Lorraine Farina. Farina’s interest in air quality began in the elementary schools where she worked as an English-as-a-second-language teacher. Public buildings are required to draw in and circulate outside air, but the systems do not distinguish between clean air and smoke drifting from nearby wood burning. During the final years of her 35-year career, from 2010 to 2013, Farina says that smoke repeatedly entered the schools through their ventilation systems. Students experienced asthma attacks; teachers suffered from bronchitis. Farina developed serious respiratory problems herself and retired early.
The experience sent her into more than a decade of research and advocacy. While serving on Kingston’s Conservation Advisory Council, Farina began asking a basic question: If the city wanted to improve its air, how would it know whether conditions were getting better?
The answer was to begin measuring. Working with Dueker and city officials, Farina helped establish the Kingston Air Quality Initiative and install a monitor on the roof of the Andy Murphy Midtown Neighborhood Center. That instrument provided regional data, but it also highlighted the limits of rooftop monitoring. Pollution is profoundly local, Farina says. A person exposed to smoke from a neighboring house may experience conditions entirely different from someone living several blocks away.
Farina, Dueker, Lyle, building scientist Judith Karpova, and community member Ana Teixeira went on to establish the Hudson Valley Air Quality Coalition in 2021. The coalition created a forum where residents could raise concerns about indoor and outdoor air, find scientific resources, and advocate for monitoring and policy changes.
Seeing the Invisible
The work has since expanded into the Hudson Valley Community Air Network, led by Bard’s Community Sciences Lab. In June, Ulster County announced the installation of 17 new street-level sensors at libraries, town halls, and community centers. The county described itself as the first in New York to establish a community-based network of this kind. With the expansion, the network included 22 sensors across the Hudson Valley, each providing real-time readings and alerts through the JustAir platform.
The sensors sit roughly six feet above the ground, measuring the air at breathing level rather than on rooftops. The distinction is central to the project. Regional monitors can show broad pollution events, such as wildfire smoke. Street-level sensors can begin to reveal the effects of traffic, nearby construction, local burning, and topography.
Their placement in public institutions is also deliberate. “We didn’t want community data to be controlled by private people or entities,” Lyle says. Libraries, town halls, and community centers are places where people gather, learn, and make decisions. The data, she says, should remain publicly accessible.
The network is still too new to provide definitive answers about every source of Hudson Valley pollution. Years of measurements will be needed to distinguish long-term patterns from isolated events. But scientists already know enough to identify an important regional blind spot.
The Unexpected Culprit
One of the most significant—and least publicly understood—sources is wood smoke. That revelation is difficult for many people to accept because wood fires occupy such a comforting place in the imagination. They evoke hearths, campsites, rural self-sufficiency, and evenings gathered with friends. In the Hudson Valley, fire pits and woodstoves fit comfortably within the region’s rustic self-image.
Dueker once shared that affection. A lifelong “wood-smoke aficionado,” their initial response to Farina’s warnings was one of disbelief. Then they examined the research.
“I was so embarrassed, as a scientist,” Dueker says. “People don’t know, to a level that is kind of ridiculous, how bad the wood smoke is for us.” Dueker no longer uses a backyard fire pit. In a densely settled place such as Kingston, they say, a recreational fire is not an entirely private choice because neighbors cannot prevent the smoke from entering their homes.
Wood combustion releases fine particulate matter as well as a mixture of hazardous compounds. Farina argues that public understanding of wood smoke is roughly where awareness of secondhand cigarette smoke stood decades ago. Burning is viewed as a matter of personal freedom, she says, even when the pollution crosses property lines and affects people who have no way to avoid it.
The problem is compounded by the region’s geography. During a temperature inversion, a layer of warmer air can trap cooler air—and the pollution within it—near the ground. Smoke that would ordinarily disperse instead accumulates in a valley or neighborhood. Dueker compares the effect to placing a lid over the landscape. Each additional fire adds more particulate pollution beneath the atmospheric cap.
Farina cites federal emissions inventories indicating that residential wood combustion can outweigh more familiar sources of particulate pollution in Ulster County. Those numbers require careful interpretation—emissions inventories are estimates, not direct measurements of what any individual breathes—but the scale helps explain why researchers consider wood smoke a serious regional issue.
What the Data Reveal
Independent field research offers a closer view. A 2025 peer-reviewed study led by University at Albany environmental engineer Md. Aynul Bari measured indoor and outdoor black carbon at homes in the Capital Region and Hudson Valley, including several in Kingston and Newburgh. Black carbon, commonly called soot, is produced through incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass and is a component of PM2.5. The researchers used comparatively low-cost instruments to conduct weeklong measurements at dozens of homes between late 2021 and spring 2023.
The study found substantial variation among neighborhoods and homes. Outdoor black-carbon levels were generally higher than indoor levels in urban communities, suggesting the influence of traffic and other local sources. Indoor levels also varied according to housing conditions and daily activities. In Kingston, the researchers’ source analysis identified surrounding residential wood burning as an influence during a week of winter monitoring, while also noting a possible industrial contribution from the north and northeast.
The findings resist any simple conclusion that one source is responsible for the region’s air pollution. Traffic matters. Industry matters. Airports, cooking, cigarettes, heating systems, wildfire smoke, and building conditions all play a part. That complexity is the point.
There is no single Hudson Valley atmosphere. We move through a succession of distinct air environments during an ordinary day: bedroom, kitchen, car, sidewalk, office, restaurant, backyard. Outdoor pollution enters buildings through open windows, cracks, and ventilation systems. Indoor activities can generate pollution of their own.
There Is No Single Air
Lyle’s background is in building science, the study of how structures, mechanical systems, occupants, and the surrounding environment interact. During the recent wildfire-smoke event, a sensor in the hallway of her building on the Bard campus registered conditions close to the outdoor reading because commercial ventilation systems continuously bring outside air inside. Staff members closed their office doors and ran portable air cleaners. The system was delivering “fresh air” in the technical sense, she says, but the fresh air was polluted.
Lyle recently began carrying a portable air monitor that measures particulate matter as she moves through the day. She wishes everyone could try one for 24 hours. “You would be shocked by the different number of air-quality changes that you experience within a day,” she says. People would quickly discover which spaces expose them to the cleanest air and which do not.
She imagines air monitor lending libraries. The idea neatly captures the ambition behind the entire community network: making an invisible environmental condition perceptible, local, and shared.
Air quality can feel like another overwhelming problem in an era already crowded with environmental crises. Dueker sees a reason for hope. Air can respond quickly when pollution sources are reduced. The unusually clear skies following the 2020 pandemic shutdowns offered a dramatic example of how rapidly human choices can alter atmospheric conditions. “We can make decisions as communities to protect our air,” they says. “It isn’t something that we can take for granted.”
Farina puts the issue more viscerally. We have made air nearly absent from our environmental vocabulary, she says, despite its intimacy with the body. “You take a thousand breaths an hour,” she notes
For generations, the Hudson Valley has taught its residents to look closely at the natural world—to watch the river, read the weather, test the water, and observe the forests. Now, through a growing network of scientists, advocates, public officials, librarians, and small sensors attached to civic buildings, the region is beginning to study something even more fundamental—the invisible landscape we enter with every breath.
