California is being inundated with calamities. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to sicken and kill thousands. Wildfires exacerbated by the climate crisis rage and cause unhealthy levels of air pollution, displacing families across the state. A tidal wave of evictions looms due to an economic crisis in a housing environment with longstanding affordability problems. Numerous instances of anti-Blackness and state-sanctioned violence continue to occur. Death Valley reached the highest temperature on record.
This is just to name a few of our ongoing problems.
The challenges are many and mighty, and those of us who live and work in the Central Valley know that these mounting issues will take extraordinary effort and focus to overcome, especially after the year we have had. We need bold leadership to navigate us through these crises. We need candidates here in the valley who care about these issues and the health of our communities first and foremost to run for office.
As founding board members of Valley Voters for the Environment and Health Political Action Committee, our mission is to do just that. We are working to elect environmental justice and public health champions for local offices in the Central Valley. With election season in full swing, we look forward to building community support for candidates that center environmental justice in communities across the valley.
Our region has much to be proud of, like our cultural diversity and abundance of resources. And yet, we face many challenges as one of the most polluted places in the US, with some of the highest concentrations of poverty anywhere in the country. The time to counteract the public health crisis caused by an unhealthy environment is long overdue.
We saw the need for elected champions again this California legislative session. In the midst of the calamities described above, Central Valley advocates and residents were failed by their elected officials when key public land and public health protection bills (AB 3030 and AB 345) were killed.
Despite years of tireless advocacy, our elected leaders sided with extractive industries. They continued to take thousands of dollars from these extractive industries that damage our health and our environment. From Fresno to Kern County, oil and gas industries have contributed tons of money to county supervisors, assembly members, senators and other down ballot races. Campaign donations have carried more weight than community health for far too long.
We need decision-makers who represent the progressive, climate-centered platform Central Valley communities have demanded for so long, putting public health and environmental justice front and center. We urgently need leadership that prioritizes Black, indigenous, people of color and will fight the deep-pocketed power players that are major polluters: the oil and gas industry, industrialized agriculture and sprawling infrastructure related to freight and goods movement. We need elected officials who won’t take a dime from fossil fuel companies, and leaders who will help shape the Central Valley toward a future that is filled with abundance, equity and deep care for its communities.
So many of us across the valley faced daily challenges to our very existence, even pre-pandemic. To achieve an equitable and just recovery from these multilayered crises, we must center public health and sustainability, particularly in disproportionately impacted communities of color and low-income communities. It is moments like these that define true leadership. Each of us are called not just to think of our survival, but to have a longterm, transformative vision that creates a future more worthy and prosperous.Â
Andrew Escamilla and Catherine Garoupa White are founding board members of Valley Voters for the Environment and Health Political Action Committee.
