Environment
Every September, the Alameda County Community Food Bank joins a network of 200 food banks nationwide for Hunger Action Month to promote volunteering, social media activity and advocacy to raise awareness about food insecurity, a term food bank staffers, activists and the government organizations use to mean that people lack access to enough safe, nutritious food to be healthy.
The Richmond City Council will soon consider an ordinance that would restrict the handling of coal and petcoke, a byproduct of oil refining, on port terminals in Richmond. A draft of the ordinance, introduced in December, has been approved by the city attorney, and it is expected to go to the council for a vote, although according to that office, a date has not been set yet. The ordinance, authored by Councilmember Eduardo Martinez, calls for “the prohibition on the…
Based out of Counter Culture Labs, a community-owned lab in Oakland, Real Vegan Cheese is working on making a cheese that would have less of an environmental effect than making traditional cheese, which requires collecting milk from cows. They are using yeast and E. Coli to create the cheese proteins. In this video, scientists at UC Berkeley discuss whether or not the lab-grown cheese will be sustainable and if people will want to eat it.
The Port of Oakland is the fifth busiest in the United States, and one of the biggest contributors to the poor air quality in West Oakland, which is among the worst in the Bay Area. According to Michael Murphy, an advanced project advisor for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), “The port represents at this time 30 percent of the contributing factors of the bad air quality in West Oakland.” But over the past 10 years, officials at…
Oakland activists Lead to Life melt guns into shovels and use them to plant trees.
Each year, thousands of monarch butterflies from across the west make their way to the California coast where they spend their winter, including making migratory stops at East Bay parks. For the past two decades, volunteer citizen scientists have been counting them during the Annual Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count, organized by the Xerces Society. Christina Garcia, a naturalist at the East Bay Regional Park District, has been counting butterflies at Ardenwood Historic Farm in Fremont for over 20 years. This…
At a flower farm in West Oakland, former foster youth are set to begin an internship program to learn about urban farming and running a small flower business.
East and West Oakland have an air quality problem. In fact, children living there are diagnosed with asthma at twice the national rate. But a first-of-it’s-kind legislation for environmental justice, AB 617, is trying to fix this.
Bay Area Swap-O-Rama-Rama teaches people how to repurpose their used clothing through sewing in order to make clothes last longer and keep them out of landfills.