Leo Hindery Jr. remembers the call he got the night before he was to testify before Congress, in September of 2007, to close a tax loophole...
On April 25 state Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) presented her case in Sacramento for the Repeal Ineffective Sentencing Enhancement (RISE) Act, a bill to roll...
Within the next 20 years, the number of Californians beyond retirement age will increase by two-thirds, to 12 million. Many of them — half, by some...
Four years ago, Robin Kutchai lost her husband to cancer. “We got the diagnosis that his body was full of tumors two weeks before he died,”...
Seven years ago local officials in Marin County, California organized to form a nonprofit electricity company with the noblest intentions. Buying and selling electricity allowed the...
Bad enough that the climate is changing and humans are causing it; worse, most of us don’t even want to talk about it. “Where are the...
For some people, renting a house or apartment in San Francisco is easy. If your gross pay adds up to $200,000 a year, for example, you...
Vivian Thorp was 28 years old when she ripped a ligament in her knee lifting heavy freight at Walmart in Vallejo, California. Until then, she’d...
Here’s something you probably didn’t know happened in California in the last few years, and maybe it’s something you never imagined could happen: In 2011, two...
On Wednesday, May 20, the day after a Santa Barbara County fire inspector discovered a stream of contaminated crude oil flowing onto a pristine segment of...
A common refrain among opponents of clean air, water and endangered species is that environmental regulation kills jobs. From some perspectives, they’re occasionally right: Go talk...
At some point during the last decade, as various plans have been floated to avert climate change, it struck me that we’re focusing on the wrong...
To the five members of the Long Beach Harbor Commission, the decision to renew an old lease for a coal-export terminal was an easy one. Metropolitan...
(This article first appeared in the Sierra Club journal Sierra and is republished with permission.) The late-June weekend heat wave comes on as predicted. By 10...
What do weather and women’s bodies have in common? Both figured dramatically this election season, forcing debate on issues candidates would have preferred to skitter right...
This month Frying Pan News is presenting personal stories of the April 29-May 4, 1992 explosion, an event that has been called everything from a riot...
Last May, at a public meeting the National Park Service held in Oxnard to gather stories about the farmworkers movement, a man in his 50s came...