TOOLEVILLE — From her living room window, Valeriana Alvarado can see the Friant-Kern Canal, where pristine snowmelt flows to farm fields.
She loves walking along the canal, knowing the sparkling water will irrigate oranges, peaches and grapes that keep her farmworker family employed.
But she wouldn’t mind getting some of that irrigation water at the drafty two-room trailer where she lives with eight family members.
“It’s much better water than we get from the tap,” she said through a Spanish interpreter. “It’s not easy for us to buy bottled water all the time.”
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’s Central Valley is where much of the nation’s produce is grown and where the greatest diversity of farmers live and work, but it is also a region where some of the most concentrated and entrenched poverty exists (Brookings Institute Report). Some of these rural communities have over 40% unemployment and the current economy is driving the fact that here in the Central Valley, the poorest congressional districts in the nation are suffering greatly from a lack of steady work. The Central Valley’s primary asset is the agriculture industry that feeds the nation and world; however, the Valley has 40% food insecurity and 67% of adults are obese, while children suffer from chronic disease, hunger and poverty.
The Air Board made a huge deal out of zero 1-hour ozone violations in August. They received headlines in the local press for “the cleanest August ever”. Unfortunately, the month of September did not go nearly as well. In fact, there is some evidence that these types of violations may be on the increase in the Southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Click the link below this chart for the details.
California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) can proceed with implementation of the state’s cap-and-trade .program, a Supreme Court judge ruled Wednesday.
The program, which was announced in November 2010 after four years of development, has been held up because of a March court ruling that requires CARB to further examine alternatives to cap-and-trade that might be better routes to reducing greenhouse gases.
CARB says it did adequately consider alternatives such as a carbon tax, and is appealing the decision in Superior Court.
Awful air quality in the month of September, 2011 had the air quality index into the highest levels of danger. When the air is “PURPLE” you don’t want to be outside doing much of anything.
Uno de cada dos latinos en el estado de California enfrenta serios problemas de salud por vivir en zonas expuestas a la contaminación ambiental.
Por si fuera poco, legisladores federales conservadores buscan aprobar leyes que restrinjan los controles a las empresas contaminantes.
En este contexto, el presidente Barack Obama ha puesto freno a sus políticas de mayor control de la contaminación por medio de la Agencia de Protección Ambiental (Environmental Protection Agency, o EPA por sus siglas en ingles).
Ante esta situación, un grupo de latinos lanzó una campaña urgiendo a funcionarios públicos a proteger el Acta del Aire Limpio de los embates políticos.
The air quality advisory notices from the San Joaquin Valley Board arrive nearly 2 hours after the fact which makes them practically useless for people trying to make health based decisions about outdoor activity. Please Click on the link below for an example.
The attempt to lift an intermediate court’s stay of the writ halting California’s Cap & Trade program has predictably failed in the California Supreme Court.
What are the results of the Arvin Bear Mtn monitor removal at the end of 2010? One of the most dramatic is how it improves the valley’s air on paper. We actually seem to have slightly improving air quality over the past five years.
Once the Arvin data is removed from the first four years we can see what is really happening to Central Valley air quality. Here we see violations are actually increasing and the air we breathe is getting worse.
As we reported earlier this week, the World Health Organization released its latest report measuring air quality in cities all over the world. The report specifically looks at the concentration of particles measuring 10 micrometers or less – those likely to get into the blood stream and cause disease.
Of the 375 U.S. cities included in the list, only 36 of them exceed the WHO’s air quality standard of 20 micrograms of particulates per cubic meter, on average. That’s pretty good. But of the ten worst performing cities, five are located in California’s Central Valley.
So what’s going on here?