Fresno Bee

Sunday, November 18, 2001

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Bradley Angel Greenaction

(415) 248-5010

100 attend environmental meeting

Issues include pesticide drift, water, air pollution.

By Barbara Anderson
The Fresno Bee

Environmentalists and community activists concerned about pesticide drift, water contamination and polluted air gathered Saturday in Fresno to share ideas and strategies for cleaning up the San Joaquin Valley.

"All of the these people coming together is what we're going to need if we achieve environmental justice in the Valley," said Luke Cole, director of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, or CRPE. CRPE helps rural residents in low-income communities to address environmental and health problems.

About 100 people from throughout the Valley, and from as far away as San Francisco, attended the "Striving for a Healthier Central Valley" conference. The event was the first held by the Central California Environmental Justice Network, an offshoot organization of the CRPE.

Teresa DeAnda of Earlimart in southern Tulare County came to encourage Valley residents to get involved. Her biggest concern: air quality. "We've got to make noise. We've got to make change because if we don't, our kids will have to wear oxygen tanks to breathe," said the leader of the Comite para el Bienestar de Earlimart.

Change is possible if people unite, said Linda MacKay, another conference speaker and a member of the environmental network. MacKay was part of a successful community fight in 1992 to block the construction of a toxic waste incinerator plant in the Tulare County town of Alpaugh. "Alpaugh remains incinerator-free," MacKay said, "because working with others really paid off."

Ruth Wilson Gilmore of Oakland was impressed by the grass-roots
organizations represented. Gilmore is a member of the California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, organizations working to stop the building of prisons in low-income communities in California. "The people aren't daunted by the complexity of the issues," Gilmore said of the 40 people who attended a two-hour workshop on pesticides.

A goal of the conference was to create a coalition of people to work on pollution problems, Cole said. But another objective was to educate. About 15 children and young adults learned about air and water quality at workshops designed for youth.

"That is the future of the environmental justice movement, right there," Cole said, pointing to children being led in an outdoor excursion around the Hope Lutheran Church, where the conference was based. "You plant the seed now and they grow into these amazing activists later."