Community and environmental groups filed suit today over the expansion—orchestrated mostly in secret—of a crude oil operation in Kern County that could The newly opened Bakersfield Crude Terminal in Taft, Calif., has the capacity to receive two 100-car unit trains a day of volatile crude oil from the Bakken shale formation as well as heavier, highly toxic tar sands…
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.
The California Endowment, along with the Rural Community Assistance Corporation and Community Water Center, unveiled the first round of installations of new water bottle filling stations in South Kern that will provide safe water access for thousands of local residents…
In his inaugural speech, Gov. Jerry Brown promised to be a national leader on environmental issues. If California wants to pass big environmental policies, legislators need to look to people of color to lead the way. On Wednesday, the California Environmental Justice Alliance releases its second annual Environmental Justice Scorecard, which analyzes how legislators stood on policy measures that impact working-class communities and communities of color. The 2014 scorecard highlights a new reality for environmental policy that Brown touched on: Legislators can no longer ignore the issues that communities of color care about…
A coalition of environmental, animal rights and citizen action groups filed two lawsuits Wednesday alleging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is failing to address air pollution problems from large-scale livestock farms.
The lawsuits, filed in federal court in the District of Columbia, say the EPA has not responded to petitions filed in 2009 and 2011 by the Environmental Integrity Project and the Humane Society of the United States. Those petitions asked the agency to categorize large-scale livestock farms as sources of pollution under the Clean Air Act, set air quality standards for new and existing facilities and set health-based standards for ammonia…
As the inane “debate” over climate change drags on in the more benighted corners of our republic (Washington, D.C., included), it’s becoming abundantly clear that California is no longer the place where America’s fruits, nuts, and loose ends come to rest. I’ve been on the periphery of the stateside discussion of SB 375 for the past two years, so I know that it’s not news to say that there have been many earnest, productive discussions about it across the state. Even so, I’ll still take a moment to say how gratifying it is to witness an adult discussion on a topic that inspires temper tantrums in so many of our national leaders…
As the inane “debate” over climate change drags on in the more benighted corners of our republic (Washington, D.C., included), it’s becoming abundantly clear that California is no longer the place where America’s fruits, nuts, and loose ends come to rest…
The Fresno Regional Foundation, a link between donors and organizations investing in San Joaquin Valley improvement, has awarded $275,000 to smart growth and environmental causes, including the San Joaquin River restoration…
A lack of access to clean drinking water in rural California farm communities is leading residents to turn to sugary drinks and soda, contributing to obesity and Type 2 diabetes, researchers said in a new policy paper.
The report, from the University of California Davis Center for Poverty Research, finds that many agricultural immigrant communities in California’s Central Valley have difficulty obtaining clean, drinkable water. And even in those that do have clean water, a persistent belief in the contamination of water leads individuals to buy alternatives, including soda and other sugar-heavy drinks…
This week, California regulators ruled that the state’s farmers must restrict their use of chloropicrin, a toxic pesticide widely used to prepare soil for planting.
The new controls set by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation are intended to protect farmworkers and pesticide applicators who work closely with the tear-gas-like chemical, as well as people who live and work nearby. The state is imposing wider buffer zones around fields where the chemical is applied and smaller restrictions on how many acres can be fumigated at once. Growers also will be required to give 48 hours’ notice, instead of the usual 24 hours…
California farmers now must abide by the nation’s strictest rules for a widely used pesticide in a change designed to protect farmworkers and people who live and work near agricultural fields but is likely to raise prices on produce.
The restrictions announced Wednesday target chloropicrin, a pesticide injected into the ground before planting crops such as strawberries, tomatoes and almond orchards. In recent years, the chemical has caused hundreds of people to suffer from irritated eyes, coughing fits and headaches, state officials said…