“DPR’s study indicates that on average, Californians can expect to eat a piece of poison on our plates once a week, due to pesticide residues. That’s an unacceptable gamble, if you’re eating non-organic produce,” said Mark Weller, Co-Director of Californians for Pesticide Reform…
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.
Some of the drinking-water wells on the northeast side of Madera are being idled or abandoned because of fluctuating water levels and significant plumes of groundwater contamination by the agricultural chemical DBCP, a powerful pesticide suspected to cause sterility and cancer…
Byanka Santoyo brings her 3-year-old daughter to the Sunset Child Development Center, a day care near Arvin that is specifically for farm working families. But she doesn’t let her play on the playground much, afraid too much time outdoors may be harmful for her health…
The spring air was cool. There was the slightest breeze. The smell floated into the cabbage field about six weeks after the newly installed Trump administration brushed aside scientifically established health concerns and overturned a planned ban of one of the world’s most potent pesticides.
It was the early morning of Cinco de Mayo — May 5, 2017 — but there was no day off on this holiday. In three groups, 48 farmworkers, most of them women, were scattered around a field in the southern part of California’s vast and flat Central Valley. Some did the back-aching work of bending over and using a knife to chop the heads from the plants…
The developers of a proposed 942-acre community of homes and businesses adjacent to the town of Friant near Millerton Lake were dealt a split decision by the California Supreme Court over the fate of their would-be community – almost eight years after it was initially approved by the Fresno County Board of Supervisors.
In an opinion issued Monday, Justice Ming Chin, joined by his six colleagues on the high court, upheld part of a 2014 ruling by the 5th District Court of Appeal finding that a county-approved environmental review of the Friant Ranch project – a proposed development of about 2,500 homes and apartments as well as associated businesses, parks and other features – did not provide a sufficient analysis under the California Environmental Quality Act of air quality effects from the new community…
The Strategic Growth Council today awarded two implementation grants and four planning grants to communities around the state to encourage and assist in community-led efforts to plan for community resilience in the face of climate change.
Sacramento and Pacoima will each receive $23 million to implement community projects designed to meet residents’ needs while making their communities more sustainable and resilient, and helping them produce less greenhouse gas emissions…
Kieshaun White is doing something not even the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District does.
The 18-year-old Cambridge High School student is in the early stages of setting up PurpleAir air quality monitors on Fresno Unified high school campuses, funded by grant money.
By early next year, he plans to launch a mobile app that will monitor in real time the air quality index on each campus where there’s a monitor…
This past summer, a group of Fresno residents who are part of CCEJN’s pesticide & advocacy trainings decided to launch a campaign to ban the cancer-causing pesticide RoundUp in Fresno Unified School District’s (FUSD) schools…
Climate change denial is alive and well in the San Joaquin Valley. Most worryingly, it is the dominant opinion among politicians serving on our regional air quality board. The eight-county agency handles hundreds of millions of dollars annually in state funds dedicated to reducing greenhouse gases, and the money couldn’t be in worse hands.
At issue is our children’s survival. Not our grandchildren, this generation. The babes and toddlers around us already face an uncertain adulthood due to the latent excess heat stored in the ocean that will be warming the planet for decades to come…
Billionaire political activist Tom Steyer claimed during a town hall that corporations purposefully aimed their pollution directly at poorer communities because they lack the resources to fight back Thursday night.
“So in fact when we think about everything we’ve done in terms of working for clean water, like SB 623, or when we talk about trying to get rid of diesel exhaust engines in California or when we talk about trying to redo ‘cap and trade’ we know we have to start with economic and environmental justice and a coalition that includes peoples in low-income communities because we know they’ve been targeted for pollution,” Steyer said at the head of a group panel in Fresno…