Lawmakers want to spend $700 million to build new parks as part of a $4 billion bond proposal, but many parks promised under the last bond in 2006 still aren't finished.
East Porterville was the hardest-hit community during the drought, when nearly 1,000 people were without water. Efforts to find a long-term fix have been successful but came with a big price tag and some important lessons.
Electric cars and smartphones of the future could be powered by supervolcanoes like Yellowstone after scientists discovered that ancient deposits within them contain huge reservoirs of lithium—a chemical element used to make lithium-ore batteries, supplies of which are increasingly dwindling.
Los Angeles is woefully park poor. Less than half of L.A. County residents have easy access to a park, and three-quarters of the public spaces we do have are falling apart.
Sunscreen contains a chemical called oxybenzone to deflect UV rays which will cause about six and a half Olympic-size swimming pool to be deadly with one single drop.
The small Louisiana town of Cameron could be the first in the US to be fully submerged by rising sea levels – and yet locals, 90% of whom voted for Trump, still aren’t convinced about climate change.
California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra plans to announce a lawsuit on behalf of the state that will challenge President Trump’s proposal to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, a project Becerra has called “medieval.”
UN Environment and Think Beyond Plastic, an innovation accelerator organization, have launched a worldwide innovation challenge for university students to fight plastic waste in oceans.
One of the hardest parts of building Nomadix has been reminding ourselves to slow down. We really want to be able to make the right decisions that align with our values, not just growth rates or profit margins.
And because it is nearly impossible to carve out more Central Parks in dense cities across the country, linear parks are an excellent way to add green space to urban areas. Their long and winding shape can provide greater access to parks for more residents.
As the United States confronts global warming in the decades ahead, not all states will suffer equally. Maine may benefit from milder winters. Florida, by contrast, could face major losses.
The Environmental Protection Agency has so far found perchlorate in 45 states, tainting water supplies of roughly 16 million Americans. Yet, there is no mandate that water utilities outside of California and Massachusetts test for the toxic chemical or let residents know when it’s in their tap water.
Global warming is already here. A growing number of leaders see that in order to address it, we need not only more renewable energy and cleaner transport. We must also harness the power of nature.
In 2006, California voters approved Proposition 84, a bond measure authorizing $5.4 billion in spending on projects to improve parks, natural resource protection, and water quality, safety, and supply. Most of that money has now been spent.
Henderson Island is particularly hit by the plastic pollution because it’s located at the edge of the South Pacific gyre, an ocean current that tends to pick up trash.
Biodiversity also exists in many other places. More than half of the people on Earth live in cities, and that number is growing, so it is especially important to understand how biodiversity patterns occur in our man-made environments.
Without oceans, there would be no life on earth as we know it. But they are under more stress than ever, thanks to overfishing, pollution, and climate change. This World Oceans Day, here are six things you can do to save the seas.
As parents, we know that our first duty is to keep our children safe. We must all do our part to make sure that drinking water at California schools is safe and healthy for our children.
The U.S. economy probably would lose about 0.7 percent of its GDP for each 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in global temperatures. But that financial pain won’t play out evenly.
Harvey and Irma are sad reminders that policy matters. At a time when damage from climate change is escalating, we need sensible policy in Washington to protect the citizens of this country, both by reducing future climate change and preparing for its consequences.
With millions of tons of plastic waste being dumped into the sea every year and barely any ocean area free of such pollutants, the environmental impact on marine life and species is tremendous. Take a look at the hazardous effects of plastic pollution on our oceans.
Drought conditions continue for thousands of rural residents in the San Joaquin valley who rely on groundwater. And the race to dig deeper wells is a losing game for small communities and those on private wells.
Coral nitrogen analysis offers an independent measure of the effects of human activity on the ecosystem. Changes in nitrogen runoff are reflected in coral reef growth.
Climate change may not have “caused” Hurricane Harvey, but it seems likely that warming temperatures — the consequence of man-made greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere — exacerbated the storm conditions.
In the two minutes it took you to read this article, more than 60,000 pounds of plastic were dumped into our oceans. That plastic could very well have profound health consequences for you and the ones you love.
Printed on a notepad with an “Rx” symbol in the top-left corner, a park prescription instructs a patient to take one free day at “any South Dakota state park or recreation area.”
Rita Sudman is longtime observer of the California water, and even led the Water Education Foundation. In 2016, she co-authored "Water: More or Less." In an interview with ABC10, Sudman talked about her book and the future of California's water policy.
More than 1 million people in the region have been exposed to unsafe drinking water in recent years from pesticides, arsenic, nitrate and uranium. And many communities also face multiple environmental health threats.
A team of writers and researchers led by American environmentalist Paul Hawken has just published Drawdown, a comprehensive plan to scale back the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The book offers hope that real solutions within reach.
How do voters of color perceive climate change in California? They see it as a major threat to the future generations and an issue we must address before it’s too late.
How do voters of color perceive climate change in California? They see it as a major threat to the future generations and an issue we must address before it’s too late.
In a state that prides itself as a global leader in protecting the environment, recycling rates for beverage containers have dropped to their lowest point amid the continued closure of centers that pay for bottles and cans and the fallout from changes to California's recycling program.
Plastics recycling, ocean pollution and program investments were among the sustainability topics at the first Plasticity Forum in California. While noting that the U.S. is far from ideal on plastics recycling, California is so far ahead of other areas.
As for the ways seniors interact with parks, parks are not simply a place with trees and grass, they are powerful spaces that can support gathering and mobility.
Would you like a side of plastic with your fish dish? Well, you might get it whether you like it or not. Ocean plastic pollution is pervasive. Scientists are trying to figure out the impact on human health.
Climate change policy is about saving the planet through making better choices. We will always come up short if we fail to include solutions for the people we wish to save.
It’s too risky for tens of thousands of children in the San Joaquin Valley to drink water at their schools due to chronic contamination by chemicals, pesticides and other toxins.
Working to expand water supplies for California’s next drought, a coalition of 12 Bay Area water agencies took a significant step toward an $800 million expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir.
According to a research report by the Forestry Commission, investments in green space have a positive impact on constituent components such as job creation, new business start-ups and private investment.
While it's true the oceans can provide us with some amazing eco-solutions like alternative energy, they are undergoing some serious stress factors. Here are the seven biggest problems, plus some light at the end of the tunnel.
The discovery of microplastics in deep water means scientists may have underestimated the extent to which plastic trash is contaminating the ocean – and its impact on fish, marine mammals and seabed dwellers.
Every year, billions of pounds of plastic waste pour into our oceans. Used by humanity for a few minutes at most, these single-use plastics will likely stick around for decades, or longer.
Do people only care about water during extreme drought, like California’s recent one? It turns out most Americans care a lot about water and have strong feelings on infrastructure spending and other water-related issues.
Climate change is tied to government policies, but it’s also the combination of so many of us using things we don’t need. We can’t afford to not think this is a problem.
Exposure to natural environments lowers stress, including its physiological correlates the “stress hormone” cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure, and even just the sounds of nature trigger a relaxation response in the brain.
All life on Earth is connected to the ocean and its inhabitants. The more you learn about the issues facing this vital system, the more you’ll want to help ensure its health.
A new approach for identifying the impacts of climate change and extreme weather on the variability of wheat production has been proposed. The study analyzed the effect of heat and water anomalies on crop losses over a 30-year period.
The epicenter of the state’s drinking water catastrophe is in the San Joaquin Valley, where 200,000 people have struggled to obtain clean, safe water for decades.
Plastic fibers are now showing up in fish and shellfish sold in in California and Indonesia for human consumption. And one paper showed that microfibers are responsible for 85 percent of shoreline pollution across the globe. How can we stop this pollution?
There is so much water in the state’s vast plumbing system that for weeks, the big government water projects have reduced exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Yet there is more room than ever in one of the state’s most capacious storage spaces: the San Joaquin Valley aquifer.
Industry has made more than 9.1 billion tons of plastic since 1950 and there’s enough left over to bury Manhattan under more than two miles of trash, according to a new cradle-to-grave global study.
Disposable plastic waste has gotten way out of hand, and recycling programs don’t appear to be solving the problem. The conditions are ripe for another attempt to enact a statewide restriction on polystyrene takeout containers. Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) has written one, and lawmakers should pass it.
In the Central Valley of California, hundreds of wells that provide water to a million people are tainted with a chemical that some experts say is one of the most powerful cancer-causing agents in the world. The state is poised to take the first step Tuesday to regulate the substance — called 1,2,3, TCP — but test data compiled by an activist group show it's also been detected by utilities across the country.
Yet the ocean is still home to treasure troves of biodiversity, and evidence is mounting that protecting such significant local areas builds resilience to climate change—and can even help regenerate what has been lost.
California would be the second state, after Hawaii, to establish a threshold for the former pesticide ingredient and industrial solvent known as TCP (1,2,3-trichloropropane) in drinking water.
California has much more potential to store water underground in aquifers than in surface reservoirs. The state should be focused on this opportunity for future years, writes scientist Mohammad Safeeq.
Without human intervention, many of the region’s beautiful beaches may disappear by 2100 as sea levels rise. If the Golden State wants to save its golden shores, it will have to add sand to them—and lots of it.
Raven-Ellison’s home isn’t the mountains—it’s London, a city founded in 43 AD, a metropolis today of almost nine million people, with 14,000 of them, on average, living in each square mile. Raven-Ellison is lobbying for the entire city to be declared a National Park.
The Ocean Cleanup's technology uses long floating rubber barriers with nets below the surface that act as a sort of artificial coastline, passively catching and concentrating debris using the power of the ocean's natural currents.
“We’ve done a lot for this global environment, but we’ve done very little for the needs of these communities,” said Garcia, a Mexican-American who heads the Assembly Natural Resources Committee.
In 2015, the U.N. Refugee Agency counted 65.3 million people around the world as “forcibly displaced,” including about 40 million within their home countries. Wars, ethnic conflicts, economic stresses, famines and disasters are among the reasons people leave their homes.
Even in large, gritty cities such as New York and Berlin, these urban commons connect us to each other and to the land, water, plants, and animal life of our home. We experience what it means to belong to something larger, to be welcome simply because we are alive.
The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach is teaming up with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and others to reduce or eliminate single-use plastics like straws and beverage bottles from their cafes and gift shops.
The rapid decline of ancient ice sheets could help scientists predict the impact of modern-day climate and sea-level change, according to research by the universities of Stirling in Scotland and Tromsø in Norway.
In Santa Monica, a flat, sprawling 7.4-acre parking lot became a green park with meadows and rolling hills. In Chicago, an unused parking lot next to a former movie theater will become a park. In the nearby suburb of Aurora, overflow parking for a shopping mall may also become a park. In Washington D.C., parking lots next to the unused RFK Stadium may become sports fields and a food market.
Air pollution — not just climate-warming greenhouse gases — would be melded into the complex cap-and-trade program under Assembly Bill 378, by Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia. Garcia heads the Assembly’s Committee on Natural Resources, which passed the proposal.
The 5 Gyres Institute has published a report called “The Plastics BAN List.” Its purpose is to assess which plastics are most damaging to human health and the environment. Plastic waste was collected and analyzed to see in which form it’s most commonly found, which toxic chemicals are used to create the plastics, and what recovery systems (i.e. recycling, composting, reuse) exist, if any.
