Rainy weather and more acres being farmed contributed to a 9% increase in pesticide use for Fresno County in 2010, state figures show.
The county applied 30 million pounds of pesticide last year, the single largest amount in the state, according to the annual pesticide-use report released Wednesday by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation.
Carol Hafner, Fresno County Agricultural Commissioner, said the wet winter and cool spring increased the use of chemicals to fight weeds and mildew among two of the region’s largest crops: cotton and grapes.
Fresno County’s cotton acreage rose 75% in 2010 to 72,000 acres. And grapes are the county’s No. 1 crop.
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We visit electronic waste recyclers to drop off, not collect.
But customers do leave these businesses with something – the glowing feeling of having done the right thing, of taking that ancient console television or brain-dead computer to be responsibly dissembled so it will never poison a river or languish in a landfill.
Records show, however, that some e-waste businesses touting their “green” virtues have struggled to comply with state regulations intended to make sure that employees and the public are kept safe, and that the environment is protected, when those devices are processed.
BRUCE MCDERMOTT TOSSES ME THE KEYS to his pickup, and I hoist his chrome walker into the truck’s bed. “You need to see this,” he tells me as he angles his torso and braced leg into the cab, then slams the door.
It’s a rainy fall day in the Central Valley town of Visalia, California, and McDermott wants to show me some of the houses of people here who’ve been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, the incurable neurodegenerative affliction that, coupled with a recent car crash, has left him unable to drive. I’ve never been at the wheel of such a behemoth truck before—or one with shotgun shells in the door well, for that matter—but I know better than to argue. McDermott was once the city’s chief of police; when he makes suggestions, people tend to say, “Yes, sir.”
The soupy fog blanketing the San Joaquin Valley this time of year is making it harder to breathe. Fine particles of soot and dust can hang in the moist winter air, and burrow deep into people’s lungs. Air quality activists have filed a federal lawsuit saying plans to clean up that pollution don’t do enough to protect public health.
Environmental justice groups sued the federal government Thursday over a plan to clean up dangerous soot and other fine particles in the San Joaquin Valley.The groups, represented by the nonprofit Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, said the plan does not legally obligate the state to approve strategies that clean up the pollution. Federal officials approved the plan in late September.The groups include Committee for a Better Arvin, Comité Residentes Organizados al Servicio del Ambient Sano and the Association of Irritated Residents.The lawsuit was filed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Safe drinking water is at the top of the holiday wish list for some Californians. For years, residents of Seville and other San Joaquin Valley communities have been forced to buy bottled water because their tap water is polluted with nitrate – a clear, odorless compound that has been linked to cancer. Juliette de Campos, policy advocate with theCommunity Water Center (CWC)says residents are spending more than 10 percent of their income on bottled drinking water, as well as paying their monthly water bill.
The CWC is suggesting that fines levied on polluters go directly to pay for nitrate treatment systems, as well as for installing home water filters or creating a free community water-vending site.
1. San Joaquín Valley’s contaminated drinking water grabs international attention
2. Poverty increases
3. School food tops the menu
4. Health reform provides benefits – and challenges
5. Residents, experts approach environmental justice seriously and scientifically
FRESNO — After boycotting a San Joaquín Valley Air Pollution Control District public hearing held in their own community, about a dozen Kettleman City residents traveled to Fresno last Thursday morning to call on members of the air board to reaffirm their commitment to environmental justice.
“Time and again, meetings are held at times that benefit the polluters, and not necessarily the public — the people who could be adversely affected,” Kettleman City resident Maricela Mares-Alatorre told the board during the public comment section of the meeting.
LAMONT — On a hazy December morning, Arvin resident Hugo Tamayo stood on the dusty easement outside a controversial composting facility and pumped air into a clear, 18-quart bucket.
Once he had captured air in a 10-liter bag inside the bucket, the sample would be shipped overnight to a lab to be tested for volatile organic compounds and sulphur compounds, as part of a two-year, community-run air-monitoring project — or “bucket brigade” — funded by The California Endowment.
Tamayo, an unemployed father of four, said taking samples of the air, so its potential health effects could be analyzed, would allow him to do something positive for his neighbors in Arvin.