A key scene in Ava DuVernay’s triumphant Selma shows Martin Luther King explaining to President Lyndon B. Johnson why African Americans in the South can’t wait much longer for a voting rights law. Johnson’s response: “You got one big issue, I got a hundred and one.” Put differently: Ain’t nobody got time for that civil rights stuff. African Americans, women, gay and queer Americans, and many other oppressed groups have heard this response for decades.
It’s no different in the environmental sphere, where the existing green world order says we must deal with melting polar caps, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and dying polar bears — so that justice stuff will have to wait…
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.
Here in the produce basket of the nation, the drought so dried out the farm economy that farmworkers depend on charity to fill their pantries.
These are the human faces of the diminished winter harvests: Manuel Avila, Jorge Rivera, Adriana Garcia, Jessica Yanez, Salud Santacruz and more than 17,000 others who confront hunger due to reduced hours or lost jobs in food harvesting, processing and packing…
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will hold three public hearings – one in Sacramento — on its proposed updates to the national air quality standards for ground-level ozone, also known as smog.
EPA wants to strengthen the standards to a level within a range of 65 to 70 parts per billion to, as it puts it, “better protect health and the environment.”
It’s also thinking about making it even harder to comply, perhaps taking the acceptable level down to 60 ppb.Fat chance of the San Joaquin Valley meeting the new demands, says the region’s top air pollution control officer…
As leaders in the state’s efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions gathered here Dec. 15 for the California Climate Leadership Forum, a theme running through the proceedings was the urgent need to make sure workers, working-class communities and people of color participate fully in planning and decision-making, and share fully in the benefits.
Participating were state and local elected officials and leaders of labor, faith, consumer, health, green business and environmental organizations. The gathering was organized by NextGen Climate, the political advocacy group led by billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer…
The Fresno Regional Foundation will award $275,000 to eight Valley nonprofits today to help them pursue projects that enhance the environment…
Two Tulare County environmental groups were among eight across the Central Valley on Tuesday awarded a total $275,000 from the Fresno Regional Foundation…
Nurses met up early Saturday morning at Oscar Grant plaza in Oakland for a day-long exposure and solidarity bus tour of the Central Valley to learn about the devastating impacts of fracking, the dangerous process of drilling and injecting water and chemicals into the ground at a high pressure in order to release natural gas and oil..
Cloudy tap water may have a greater effect for California’s rural immigrants than merely leaving behind a bad taste, according to a new policy brief released by the Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis.
Researchers looked at the connection between water quality and child obesity in two poor immigrant communities in California’s Central Valley — San Joaquin and Firebaugh. Poor-quality tap water, or even a perception that the water is bad, combined with environmental factors such as lack of access to healthy foods and nutrition education, likely contribute to health disparities in these communities, the study finds.
“If the tap water that comes out looks dirty or has a poor taste, they’re not going to have a lot more confidence in the drinking system here,” said Lucia Kaiser, a nutrition specialist with UC Davis Cooperative Extension and the study’s co-principal investigator…
After 8 months of living outside of their houses, residents of Nelson Ct. in Arvin, CA were able to return home this weekend. In March, 2014, elevated levels of waste gas forced an evacuation of 8 families in a neighborhood surrounded by oil production processing tanks and flares. At the time of the evacuation, a poorly mapped and largely unregulated pipeline owned by Petro Capital Resources was determined to have a leak—it is unclear how long the pipeline leaked before it’s problematic discovery, although some residents claim to have suffered from gas for years prior…
On Dec. 5, a coalition of concerned citizen groups, sportfishermen, and environmental organizations joined with the State of California in a lawsuit to defend the state’s oil spill response planning and financial responsibility requirements against a challenge by the railroads. Earthjustice filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of San Francisco Baykeeper, Communities for a Better Environment, the Sierra Club, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, Association of Irritated Residents and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network…