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Getting Sandbagged by SANDAG: San Diego’s Failure of Imagination

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Last week Kevin Faulconer got some good press when, “under pressure from environmental groups,” he voted no to putting SANDAG’s deeply inadequate tax measure on the ballot citing San Diego’s Climate Action plan as one of the factors in his decision. Faulconer’s opponent, Ed Harris, was quick to point out that Faulconer’s vote was less about climate change and more about pleasing his anti-tax Republican base…

Harris is clearly right about Faulconer’s opportunism when it comes to the SANDAG plan, and he adeptly points out that the mayor had a very different position not that long ago. With regard to the SANDAG plan, however, he is way off the mark…

The real problem with this political stalemate is that the Democrats on the SANDAG board and too many other Democrats in San Diego county are satisfied to pursue business as usual and act as if they are still committed to progressive values with regard to the environment. By insisting that the current political hegemony in San Diego is unchangeable they are suffering from a profound failure of the imagination…   [Read more…]

What If We All ‘Left No Trace?’

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By Averi Melcher / San Diego UrbDeZine

As I’ve been camping and sharing my adventures, there’s one thing that keeps showing up over and over in my experiences: trash.

About 2 months ago, I was crawling through mud caves in Anza Borrego, when I looked down and found 2 Starburst wrappers illuminated by my headlight. A month ago, I was hiking a mountain in the Joshua Tree back-country and happened upon a deflated helium balloon. Then – later that night – I sat my tent down and fell asleep, just to wake up in the morning and find myself trying to maneuver out of my tent on shards of glass and plastic.

I thought to myself: why is this happening? Why am I finding trash in areas that are off the beaten path – in fact, they are so remote that the Joshua Tree trail log I found indicated I was the first human to step foot on that mountain in a month?   [Read more…]

2016 Goldman Environmental Awards Announced Under Shadow of Murder of 2015 Recipient, Berta Cáceres

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The Goldman Environmental Foundation announced Monday the six recipients of its annual Goldman Environmental Prize, the largest eco-related prize in the world. The prize, established in 1989 by the late civic philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman, is also known as the Green Nobel. Chosen to represent Earth’s different geographic zones, each prize recipient will receive $175,000, no strings attached. It’s not unusual for them to donate their award or plow it back into their environmental efforts.

The recipients this year are Edward Loure, of Tanzania; Leng Ouch, Cambodia; Zuzana Caputova, of Slovakia; Luis Jorge River Herrera, of Puerto Rico; Destiny Watford, from the United States; and Máxima Acuña, of Peru.

An invitation-only ceremony tonight in San Francisco likely will be more solemn than usual. Early last month, one of last year’s recipients of the prize, Berta Cáceres, was found shot dead in a small town in her homeland of Honduras, near the border of El Salvador. The slaying is unsolved.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Earth Fair 2016: All in for the Environment

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Sunday, April 17th. EarthFair Day.

Having heard all the warnings about trying to drive to Earth Fair–not to mention the irony–, I took the bus.

The Number 7 bus was a half hour late and it dropped me on the corner of Park & University. It wasn’t going anywhere near that mess in Balboa Park. Eventually, the Balboa Park “shuttle” appeared. After quibbling with the driver when he asked for another fare, we sped three blocks south only to get in line. Hurry up and wait.   [Read more…]

Tiny Shelter Demo at San Diego Earth Fair 2016

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Amikas / Homeless to Housed San Diego

Amikas will be providing an opportunity at Earth Fair to find out more about the tiny shelters being suggested as an alternative to the makeshift tent and tarp encampments springing up throughout San Diego. We will be demonstrating how easy it is to construct an I-Wood tiny shelter during Earth Fair on April 17, at exhibit #788 in the Pan American Plaza North in Balboa Park. It will take approximately 1 – 2 hours to construct the 8 x 12 unit, beginning around 9:30 AM.   [Read more…]

Merle Haggard and the Politics of Salmon

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By Dan Bacher / Daily Kos

During the battle to save the pristine salmon and steelhead habitat of Headwaters Forest in 1998, I got a phone call one morning from Mike Sherwood, then the California Director of the Sierra Club. He told me that country legend Merle Haggard (who passed away on his birthday, April 6, this week) and actor Woody Harrelson would be appearing at the State Capitol for a noontime rally.

“Thanks for the information,” I told Sherwood and drove from Elk Grove to the Capitol to check the event out. I arrived about a half hour early, so I went to a small circle of a dozen activists standing around and talking on the capitol lawn.   [Read more…]

Fukushima + 5: the Disaster Continues – Nuclear Shutdown News for March 2016

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On March 9, two days before the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Wall Street Journal ran this story, “Japanese Court Orders Shutdown of Nuclear Reactors.”

The paper reported that the court “issued an injunction to shut down two of the four reactors recently restarted” by Kansai Electric Co. because the utility failed to prove to the court’s satisfaction that it could operate those nukes safely.

Driving the process, the Journal reported, were organized and outspoken community members “worried about a repeat of the March 2011 Fukushima disaster.”   [Read more…]

Highways, Not Skyways Motivate Voters in SANDAG Polling for Ballot Measure

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In just a few short weeks, the Board of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) will vote on placing a half-cent sales tax increase on the November ballot. At stake are billions of additional dollars for transportation projects in coming decades.

The regional government group has released results from a just completed Competitive Edge survey of 1201 local voters, weighted for voting history, survey mode, age, party, gender, and subregion.

The ‘Good News’ is that there appears to be enough of a consensus to reach the two-thirds majority required for passage. The ‘Bad News” is that the 68% supporting the idea dwindles to 62% once arguments against it are presented. (But the trend is in the right direction if you’re an optimist.)   [Read more…]

Transportation Justice Victories: What We Have Accomplished With People Power

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By the Environmental Health Coalition

Through the process of advocating for a Regional Transportation Plan that prioritizes affordable and accessible public transit, biking and walking, our communities grew stronger and more united.

Doing much of this advocacy work in partnership with City Heights CDC and MAAC Project, we organized community support in unprecedented ways. We brought the concept of transportation justice to our neighbors, to community meetings, to City Council and SANDAG. We led bike rallies to celebrate a future where pedestrians have safe places to ride bikes and walk. We taught each other the importance of having transportation alternatives to improve our quality of life and encouraged each other to get involved in the planning process and build healthy neighborhoods.

We accomplished the following by raising our voices and spreading hope for the past two years.   [Read more…]

What San Diego Should Learn From the Country’s Best and Worst Public Transit Systems

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From Portland’s TriMet to Atlanta’s MARTA

By Hutton Marshall / SanDiego350.org

Not all public transportation systems are created equal. Across the country, there’s a huge gulf between bumper-to-bumper black holes like Los Angeles versus cities like the subway-happy New York City, which boasts 660 miles of rail transit.

Many of the cities we now see as pinnacles of functional transit became that way out of utility. New Yorkers, for example, have come to see their expansive subway system as a way to escape fierce blizzards and even fiercer rush hours.

Today, however, many cities have come to see public transit as an important tool in growing in a sustainable, environmentally conscious manner.
  [Read more…]

Why Fixing Climate Change is Women’s Work

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Natural resource scarcity and unpredictable weather affect women first, yet they’re often the last to be heard on how to combat it. That’s slowly changing.

By Kate Stringer / Yes! Magazine 

Marla Smith-Nilson has completed more than 1,500 water sanitation projects as founder and executive director of Water1st International, but there’s a moment she still anticipates at the completion of each one.

At every ribbon-cutting ceremony for new groundwater wells, a woman from the community—whether in Bangladesh, Honduras, Ethiopia, or India—stands on stage with a large pot that has served as her companion during daily, mile-long treks to the river. Sometimes the woman is young. Sometimes she’s as old as 75. She raises the pot over her head and shouts “I will never carry this again!” before smashing it to the ground where it explodes into shards.

The community laughs as the pot shatters, but it’s the women in the crowd who feel the most relief. As primary caregivers, many women in poorer countries are responsible for trekking miles to collect water and fuel. When climate change depletes water, women notice first. Water is a climate change issue, and climate change is a women’s issue.   [Read more…]

The Language of Pinyon-Juniper Trees

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After two months of struggling to write anything coherent about pinyon-juniper forests, I was on the verge of giving up.

Members of the group I am campaigning with to stop pinyon-juniper deforestation began brainstorming about applying for grants to support the campaign. Many of the grants they discovered required us to demonstrate that pinyon-juniper deforestation harmed wildlife populations, poisoned water supplies, or had a tangible effect on human populations.

Thinking that I could support our grant application process with an essay, I sat down many times to write about the countless beings that call pinyon-juniper forests home. But, I never wrote anything worth reading.

It took me a long time to figure out why.   [Read more…]

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