Environment
Our Best Stories of 2016: Part One
Stories that survey a California whose residents are forced to drive for Uber or live in rooms with cardboard walls.

Anastasia Flores photo by David Bacon
Today we begin looking back at Capital & Main’s best stories of the year. They survey a California whose middle class professionals are forced to drive for Uber, while, in one of the state’s wealthiest counties, those hardest hit by the economy find themselves living in rooms with cardboard walls.
Rex Weiner’s account of what happens when right-wing business money + New Age/Burning Man good vibes combine to take over land whose natives eke out a living fishing and farming in a challenging eco-system.
Danny Feingold followed political commentator Robert Reich on one leg of a promotional tour for his book, Saving Capitalism, and produced a two-part account of this fascinating man who believes America’s future lies in saving capitalism from itself.
Judith Lewis Mernit looked at neighborhoods thrown into turmoil by a natural gas disaster — and on the civic paralysis that followed.
David Bacon’s two-part series reported on an inflexible retirement system and how it affects aging farm workers who cannot apply for Social Security benefits. They are unable to retire from the grinding physical labor of picking our crops.

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