Today I am fasting in solidarity with all my Environmental Justice Comrades to say No to Fracking and in particular in Kern County where the political and state and county agencies have lost their minds!!! Join me at least 1 day with in the next week to show your solidarity…
News
This page features excerpts from news about environmental justice advocacy in the San Joaquin Valley and links to their original sources. Use the features on the right to sort by topic, news source, date, key word or author. You may also subscribe to receive the news by e-mail or through an rss reader. Please note that links to original sources may expire over time.
California has a dirty little secret.
Between the rocky coastline and the giant sequoias seen on TV and tourist brochures lies a sprawling agricultural valley. Though it’s sometimes called the nation’s salad bowl — it grows roughly half of all the fruits, nuts, and vegetables in the United States — the Central Valley is not healthy or green…
A serious incident involving harm to scores of children occurred on Saturday in Kern County. It happened at the Kern County Soccer Park, where the American Youth Soccer Organization held an Under-19 and Under-16 soccer tournament. On this day, dozens of games were played at a location where the stagnating air was saturated with air pollution called fine particulate matter (PM 2.5)…
In 2013, more than half of the glyphosate used in California (54 percent) was applied in the state’s eight most impoverished counties. The counties that had the highest percentage of residents living below the federal poverty line in 2013 are mostly located in the southern part of the Central Valley. They are Tulare, Fresno, Merced, Del Norte, Madera, Lake, Imperial and Kern…
Central California Environmental Justice Network is excited to kick off a project to improve the participation of community members in compliance and enforcement processes throughout the San Joaquin Valley. This project includes putting a cohort (pictured here) of residents and advocates through inspector level courses at the Cal-EPA. Through the next 8 months this group will be learning alongside government regulators about various topics including pesticide use & drift, oil & gas exploration, evidence and report writing, and visible emissions evaluations…
The Valley Air District will augment its highly successful grant program with an additional nearly $6 million in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding to replace old agricultural tractors and dirty residential wood-burning devices…
Today, Cesar Campos, Director of CCEJN is fasting in solidarity with Kern County residents. This community fast was started by residents and organizers in Kern County to protest the county’s adoption of an ordinance that serves to fast track and undermine environmental review of oil exploration projects–including fracking and other extreme well stimulation techniques…
CWC has tested 18 private domestic wells during the pilot phase of our free private well testing program for people living in disadvantaged communities. This new CWC program helps Californians understand if they have health-harming pollutants like arsenic, uranium, bacteria, or pesticide byproducts in their well water…
“Yuck” was the immediate reply from my off-at-college daughter after I recently texted her a picture of Fresno’s air quality.
Yuck is right. Her response made me reflect on a Fresno Bee opinion piece by several members of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District Board about the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent proposal to establish more stringent health-based limits on ground-level ozone (smog) – lowering those thresholds by a whopping two-thirds of 1 percent (from 75 parts per billion to 70 parts per billion) – through the Clean Air Act…