If all goes according to plan, construction could begin on a surface water treatment plant in Kettleman City in as little as two years, state officials said last Wednesday night.
Once the treatment plant is completed, residents could begin drinking clean, safe water from the California Aqueduct. The community’s 1,500 residents, 88.8 percent of whom are Latino, currently rely on two old wells that offer water contaminated with naturally occurring benzene and arsenic.
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When the implementation of California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, AB32, came to a grinding halt due to San Francisco Superior Court’s March 17, 2011 ruling that it violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), it came as a shock to industry and environmentalists alike. It would not be surprising if leading-edge environmental legislation like AB32 were to draw fire from climate-change deniers and oil interests. Indeed, the most recent attempt to derail the law, last year’s Proposition 23, was pushed by two out-of-state oil companies. Voters, mobilized in large part by grassroots climate justice groups, roundly defeated that attempt.
But the lawsuit against California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) regulatory framework for AB32 was undertaken by the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment (CRPE) and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE)—two groups that advocate on behalf of “frontline and fence-line environmental justice communities.” They represent low-income people and people of color who live, work and play in the shadow of refineries in Wilmington and Richmond, in the agribusiness fields of the Central Valley, near the waste dumps of Kettleman City, and in other California communities plagued by industrial pollution.
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Yesterday one of the excellent tech masters at UC Davis uploaded the most recent addition to the 25 Stories from the Central Valley website: Teaching tools in Spanish (click the ‘en español’ icon in the upper right corner if the link pulls up the English version). The tools were designed to help college-level teachers introduce basic environmental justice concepts in the classroom, but I imagine some of them could be adapted to work in other settings as well. Three of the tools depend on English-language documents and data available online, but I decided to include them also in the hopes that others might know of Spanish-language equivalents to use. Enjoy!
The first article in this series questioned whether environmentalists will stand in the way as California gears up to meet the requirements of Assembly Bill 32, more commonly known as the Global Warming Solutions Act. With some research, it would appear that answer is “yes.”
The first round of reductions mandated by AB 32 are scheduled to be in place in slightly over six months. However, two of California’s environmental watchdog groups, or “environmental justice legal organizations” as the groups prefer to be called, sued the California Air Resources Board (CARB) over the cap-and-trade component of the Climate Change Scoping Plan to Reduce Greenhouse Gases in California.
The far-reaching legislation does not reach far enough for the liking of these environmental groups.
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A University of California at Berkeley study published this month shows a link between Latino-dominated communities and drinking water systems contaminated with nitrates.
Nitrates are chemicals that come from sewage treatments, fertilizers, decaying plants and animal waste. Such contamination, which can cause a fatal blood disease in infants, is among the biggest water-quality problems in the San Joaquin Valley.
The problem tends to be worse in small water systems among farmworker towns where there are not enough water customers to afford cleanup efforts.
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On the heels of a scathing critique by former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on Wednesday, President Obama faced pressure from a burgeoning environmental justice coalition demanding stronger action on ozone, a component of smog, in predominantly Latino communities.
Fourteen groups sent a letter to Obamaexpressing dismay at missed opportunities and delays in bringing permissible ozone levels down to between 60 and 70 parts per billion:
The first of a series of water donations took place last Friday morning in Monson, East Orosi and Seville – three unincorporated Tulare County communities with a history of contaminated drinking water.
During the first distributions – organized by the Community Water Center, Food Link, and Feeding America – about 200 families gratefully accepted 24 gallons of bottled water per household.
The 24 gallons of water each family is receiving through the donation is a very short-term solution to a long-term problem, said María Herrera, community outreach coordinator for the Community Water Center. For residents of these communities — who have lived for years with contaminated drinking water — the donated bottled water might last just one, or two, or four weeks, she said.
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The regional water quality board is recommending renewal of a permit allowing the operator of a western Kings County landfill to run its bioreactor – a facility designed to accelerate waste degradation – for another three years.
But before a formal decision is made, the Central Valley Region of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board is seeking public comment on the project proposed by Chemical Waste Management, the operator of the toxic waste facility near Kettleman City.
Research on drinking water in the United States has rarely examined disproportionate exposures to contaminants faced by low-income and minority communities. This study analyzes the relationship between nitrate concentrations in community water systems (CWSs) and the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics of customers.
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