The 80 homes that make up Tooleville nestle against the mighty Friant-Kern Canal, thousands of gallons of fresh water flowing each day past the two-street town. But none of that water can help Tooleville’s decades-old problem of contaminated water, chronicled at the start of this decade in a three-part series by The Bee on the San Joaquin Valley water crisis. Nearby Exeter might, though, giving a rise of newfound hope…
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.
From San Francisco to Sacramento, local and state governments are aggressively moving to address the devastating impacts of climate change and the fossil-fuel economy. Locally, these efforts have been recently highlighted by Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s leadership in pushing for San Francisco’s declaration of a climate emergency. In fact, this declaration specifically calls upon new policies and programs started through the climate emergency process to invest in environmental justice communities as well as focus on union career opportunities, including training and retraining for good-paying jobs in the clean economy…
In a wide-ranging interview with KQED, California’s newly confirmed top environmental regulator says ensuring safe, affordable drinking water for all Californians is one of his top priorities; China’s rejection of previously accepted waste materials is a “crisis” that requires reforming the recycling process; and that the same innovation the state has brought to addressing climate change needs to be applied to developing alternative, safer pesticides….
According to information in an Apr. 11, 2019 press release, the American Lung Association is soon to publicly release its much anticipated 2019 State of the Air report that, presumably, will once again confirm what many already know: that California’s San Joaquin Valley has America’s worst air quality where fine particulate matter pollution is concerned and is among those places in the nation with the worst ozone….
Access to clean water may be a fundamental human right, but it’s far from a reality in many towns and cities across America. Even in the wake of the Flint water crisis, which exposed around 10,000 residents in Michigan to lead-contaminated drinking water, an estimated ten of millions of Americans are still exposed to unsafe drinking water each year…
California has been deeply involved with the oil and gas business since the first wooden derricks were erected in sleepy Kern County in the 19th century. But these days California is flush with laws, regulations and goals that will likely cause the state to eventually sever its long relationship with fossil fuels. One of the flashpoints in that still-evolving association is hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—the controversial high-pressure pumping of chemicals and water into underground rock to crack it open and release oil. Former Gov. Jerry Brown declined to ban fracking despite intense pressure from anti-oil activists but signed into law a requirement that all chemicals used in the process be disclosed…
The Trump administration on Thursday issued a draft plan that would open up more than 1 million acres in California to leasing for oil companies, angering environmental groups that want to see a broad shift away from fossil fuels.
The Interior Department’s plan would end a five-year moratorium on leasing federal lands in California to fossil fuel businesses.
A federal judge in 2016 ruled that the Bureau of Land Management failed to take a “hard look” at the potential environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in its environmental impact statement for the land around Bakersfield, a city in central California. In a 2017 settlement, the agency agreed to complete a new analysis of the environmental impacts of oil leases in its plan…
Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released a new Environmental Impact Statement, outlining the impacts of fracking within its Bakersfield planning region. This proposal considers new oil and gas development on lands covering more than 1.6 million acres across Central and Southern California. The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) and Central Valley Air Quality Coalition (CVAQ) are among the organizations raising concerns of threats over the sweeping energy development proposal.
Lands neighboring Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks; Giant Sequoia, Carrizo Plain, and Cesar Chavez National Monuments, as well as several national forests and private preserves are included in the proposal. Some of these lands lie within two miles of Sequoia National Park, which prompts concerns including worsening air quality for park visitors and the natural ecosystem...
Highway 99 cuts down the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, hot and dusty. The trucks that ceaselessly crowd this road hurtle by, or ride close on my tail, as I drive a behemoth of an old borrowed car southward, past billboards and motels and fast-food places. To the right, the Diablo Range spikes high into the sky, its peaks rising steeply from an utterly flat valley floor. On my left tower the majestic Sierra Nevada….
Assemblymember Adam C. Gray (D-Merced) ripped the State Water Resources Control Board on Tuesday for arguing that the harm caused by the Bay-Delta Plan to the drinking water of disadvantaged communities is not “significant”. Gray’s comments came as his legislation, Assembly Bill 637, cleared the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee with bipartisan support….