It’s the season of giving thanks, and Friendsgiving celebrations are the highlight of my calendar. These opportunities to gather with close friends are a Thanksgiving tradition my husband and I adopted when we first moved to the Bay Area—when our family was far away, our friends were here for us.
In a trifecta of appreciation this week, we’ll be celebrating the season with a traditional feast with dear friends in Napa, a vegetarian cornucopia with close friends in the East Bay, and a festive Indian meal with family at home.
When you think of the holidays, Bay pollution probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But every year, celebratory meals worsen sewage pollution in San Francisco Bay.
Holiday cooking tends to generate a lot of fatty waste in the form of leftover cooking oils and greasy pans. When dumped down the sink or garbage disposal, fats harden in the wastewater pipes running between Bay Area homes and sewage facilities.
The Bay Area is experiencing a desperate housing crisis. But instead of building safe, dense housing on infill sites, as many experts recommend, yet another city is attempting to build on a toxic flood-zone.
The proposed “Mowry Village” site in Newark lies in a designated FEMA floodplain with a high risk of liquefaction on a known toxic site containing heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and volatile organic compounds. There could hardly be a worse place for people to live.
When I was little and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my immediate answer was “a dancer!” I loved to dance and took ballet, jazz, tap, and modern dance classes for many years, aspiring to one day dance backup for Janet Jackson. And even though I danced through college—adding swing and salsa to my repertoire—I realized that was one dream that wouldn’t come true.
Today SF Baykeeper, Sierra Club, Public Justice, and several other environmental and public health organizations filed a petition for rulemaking with the EPA, calling upon the agency to stop harmful coal pollution from open-top trains carrying coal by requiring coal train operators to obtain a permit for their water pollution.
As multiple California fish species teeter on the brink of extinction, and both commercial and recreational fisheries face imminent collapse, a new project threatens to push them over the edge.
The proposed Sites dams project—a series of diversions and dams in the Sacramento Valley—would divert more water from the Sacramento River, reducing fresh water flowing to San Francisco Bay.
