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Wetlands vs. Oil

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Wetlands vs. Oil

This article was updated on 4/22 to reflect the fact that Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals has not committed to restoring the full 150 acres that were transferred to the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority. While all wells across this site will be plugged and abandoned, the restoration effort is focused on enhancing the portion known as Steamshovel Slough and about 30 acres directly adjacent to it.

A High-Stakes Gamble in Long Beach’s Forgotten Marsh

By Emma Rault, Community Reporter

The Los Cerritos Wetlands are full of contradictions. Great egrets proudly stand guard in front of nodding pumpjacks in a historic landscape that, despite a century of heavy industrial use, is still teeming with resilient life.

These wetlands were once part of a sprawling marsh at the mouth of the San Gabriel River that totaled more than 2,400 acres. Following Euro-American arrival, large swaths were drained and filled for development and agriculture. Today, some 500 acres remain.

Like many other waterways in the American West, the river was channelized — encased in concrete — for flood control in the early 20th century. Along with the discovery of crude oil reserves around the same time, this dramatically changed and degraded a once-pristine ecosystem.

Last month, the California Coastal Commission approved a plan to restore the southern area of the wetlands.

The restoration has been decades in the making. It is spearheaded by the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority (LCWA), a government entity made up of the Cities of Long Beach and Seal Beach, the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, and the State Coastal Conservancy — which last year earmarked $32 million in funding for the project.

At the Coastal Commission hearing, the LCWA — and various supporters, such as Long Beach District 3 Councilmember Kristina Duggan, Friends of Ballona Wetlands, and the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust — celebrated the plan as an exciting step forward.

But other wetland advocates — the Sierra Club’s Los Cerritos Wetlands Task Force, Puvunga Wetlands Protectors, and several tribal leaders — are concerned about the project, describing it as “greenwashing” due to the relationship between the restoration efforts and ongoing oil extraction.

Trading increased oil production for wetlands protection
In recent years, wetlands have gained growing appreciation. These rare and vital ecosystems house endangered species, filter pollutants, provide flood and erosion control, offer valuable open space to city dwellers, and combat climate change by being particularly good at storing and capturing carbon.

The Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority was formed in 2006 and took on the mission of restoring the wetlands, a cause first championed by grassroots community organizations.

Then, in 2015, a company called Synergy Oil got involved.

Synergy Oil had bought a property in the northern part of Los Cerritos Wetlands from the Bixby Land Company after its heir, Mark Bixby — along with local developers Tom Dean and Jeff Berger, who owned part of the wetlands — died in a plane crash in 2011.

Synergy’s CEO, John McKeown, proposed an idea: the company would combine the restoration of some of the wetlands with relocated and increased oil production elsewhere on the site.

To be more precise: Synergy sought to retire 74 old wells on its large parcel in the northern wetlands in exchange for 120 new wells at two nearby plots totaling 12 acres. This would increase oil production from 300 to 24,000 barrels daily and produce 70,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

At the time, there was talk of a China-based equity fund financing the restoration effort.

One of the two plots — seven acres known locally as the Pumpkin Patch — was owned by Lyon Communities. The other was a site owned by the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority.

Years passed. Synergy partnered with Lyon Communities to form Beach Oil Minerals. In 2018, Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals and the LCWA agreed on a land swap: Synergy’s original, northern site — 150 acres — in exchange for the LCWA’s five-acre plot.

Puvunga Wetlands Protectors and its director, Anna Christensen, sued the California Coastal Commission over its approval of the land swap but lost. Last year, the deal was finalized, with some tweaks. (Most importantly: No new wells on the LCWA plot, just on the Pumpkin Patch.)Meanwhile, Synergy haspartnered with global insurer Munich Re to fund the restoration of a portion of the 150-acre site that it deeded to the LCWA. The restoration effort is restricted to Steamshovel Slough (about 45 acres) and approximately 30 acres adjacent to it.

The LCWA’s restoration efforts, then, have hinged on agreements with oil companies from the outset. To the project’s opponents, the net increase in oil production onsite calls for alarm, not celebration.

Dr. Charles Lester, who served as executive director of the Coastal Commission until 2016, was worried too. “We need to think about … not putting ourselves in the position to have to make those tradeoffs when the planet is in such a dire situation in terms of CO2 and petroleum development,” he said in 2020.

Risks to the surrounding community
Beach Oil Minerals plans to use techniques such as “directional drilling,” a method allowing horizontal drilling paths that could extend for miles under the wetlands.

FINAL Los Cerritos Wetlands Ownership Map
Ownership of the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Source: Updated from the 2021 Los Cerritos Wetlands Habitat Restoration Plan by Coastal Restoration Consultants.



In addition to Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals’ activity on the Pumpkin Patch, Hellman Properties still operates a 45-acre oil field in the wetlands’ southern half, next to the LCWA site greenlit for restoration.

Eric Zahn, the principal restoration ecologist at Tidal Influence — a consulting firm that played a key role in designing the areas to be restored — says that having oil extraction continue next door is “not ideal.” But just like having PCH nearby, he sees it as part of the confines that it’s his job to work around.

To Zahn’s knowledge, the LCWA trying to buy out the oil companies is “not [on the table] at this stage.” A more realistic scenario, he says, might be a similar arrangement to the one reached at Banning Ranch in Newport Beach, where the “mineral rights” are owned by one party and the “surface rights” by another.

But to the project’s opponents, such deals are just too risky. Advocates have pointed to the Newport–Inglewood fault line that runs through the wetlands.

And there’s also the direct impact on the surrounding community. Studies have found people living near oil wells are at greater risk of cancer, asthma, respiratory disease, and premature birth.

This is especially relevant since several high-density residential developments are planned directly adjacent to the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Three apartment buildings on Pacific Coast Highway, totaling more than 1,200 units, have cleared the Long Beach Planning Commission.

California’s Senate Bill 1137, signed into law last year, bans new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes and schools. But it doesn’t prevent developers from building new homes near existing wells.

A sacred Indigenous site
In addition to their ecological role, the Los Cerritos Wetlands also have profound importance to the Gabrielino/Tongva and Acjachemen nations indigenous to present-day LA and Orange County.

The wetlands lie within the village sites of Motuucheyngna and Puvungna, with a history going back more than 10,000 years. Puvungna is central to the creation story, held sacred as the place where a deity called Chinigchinich emerged and told the people how to live.

The LCWA worked with tribal groups to understand the location’s significance, which it plans to feature prominently in onsite signage, according to Zahn. But some — such as the Gabrieleno/Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians — vocally oppose the planned earthwork due to the likelihood of disturbing human burials.

It wouldn’t be the first time this happened. In 2001, Hellman Properties began work on a gated community named Heron Pointe on the eastern end of the wetlands, farther east of its current oil field. The Coastal Commission ended up issuing a cease-and-desist order when contractor John Laing continued grading work after human remains had been found.

Like the project’s other critics, Native advocates also worry about the risk of oil spills contaminating groundwater — crucial in Long Beach, which gets 60 percent of its water supply from wells.

“This is our Standing Rock,” Acjachemen elder Rebecca Robles wrote in a 2020 letter to the Coastal Conservancy, referring to the 2016 anti-oil-pipeline movement on Dakota and Lakota land.

Ann Cantrell, co-chair of the Sierra Club Los Cerritos Wetlands Task Force, is concerned that, with the constant arrival of new technologies to optimize oil extraction, there’s no telling when the companies will decide to abandon operations.

She feels that local and state authorities are being unassertive.

“From the beginning, nobody ever said, ‘Well, can we use some muscle to end oil drilling on the wetlands?’”

She also considers the planned restoration too drastic. According to Zahn, the grading work is necessary for the legally mandated buffers around the oil fields and to create a sloped landscape that can adapt to sea-level rise.

Zahn says that giving the tide greater access to the wetlands will improve biodiversity. Cantrell and her co-chair, Anna Christensen, are worried about the earthwork and increased flooding displacing existing animal and plant life.

“This idea of ‘erase and replace’… This is how we do redevelopment with people, too,” Christensen said. “We erased the low-income people of color from downtown, and now we’re building giant apartment houses for people who can spend $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom.”

The restoration of the southern area will begin this fall and wrap up in 2027. In the meantime, people interested in seeing the wetlands for themselves can join a guided walk with the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust or El Dorado Audubon, or explore the trails at the previously restored 10-acre Zedler Marsh on Fridays and Saturdays from 9 am to 2 pm.

When the Ocean Sends a Cry for Help

Reporters Desk
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When the Ocean Sends a Cry for Help

Answering Looks Like This

By Evelyn McDonnell

I never imagined I would be here, kneeling astride a juvenile California sea lion. I’m trying carefully to keep her still while the animal hospital staff conducts an intake evaluation of their newest patient. The poor pinniped wants to thrash with fear, understandably. She’s less than a year old, probably recently separated from her mom, and was found — like the heroine of a Patti Smith song — washed up on Redondo Beach, tired and hungry. Our rescue team brought her to the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, where I’m now sitting on top of her, trying not to crush her.

She may be stressed but she’s a fighter, and my bad ankle is starting to ache by the time the staff performs the final task: shaving her identification number into the brown fur on her side. I ache more when I hear the digits. In a typical year, MMCC receives a total of about 300 animals. This is not a typical year. It’s only April 8, and I’m already restraining the 247th marine mammal brought to the center in 2025.

An unusually early and toxic algae bloom has caused a massive domoic acid poisoning event affecting pinnipeds, dolphins and seabirds all along the Southern California coast. While there have been other serious outbreaks in the 24 years since DA was first identified on the West Coast — the summer of 2023 was also harrowing — the early arrival and the morbid intensity of this event are straining local resources. Ash and runoff from the fires may be exacerbating the natural phenomenon, leading to heartbreaking scenes of dolphins stranding on public beaches, gasping for breath.

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Evelyn McDonnell restraining a juvenile sea lion during intake evaluation.This pup was not afflicted with domoic acid but was found weak and hungry on Redondo Beach. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

This is why MMCC, the International Bird Rescue Center, and other coastal wildlife centers have an immediate need for more folks like me: volunteers who can help feed, clean, input data, make gruel, wash dishes and educate. I work full-time as a university professor and writer. I came to animal care with little training besides a lifelong love of nature. But from my first visit to MMCC, when I discovered the people I was watching throw herring into pools of leaping sea lions were civilians like me, I was hooked. I realized I needed to learn from a “form of life that has much to teach us about … vulnerability, collaboration, and adaptation,” as Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes in her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.

So for the last eight and a half years, on Tuesday mornings, I join the crew of staff and volunteers who have become a kind of family. It’s grueling, sometimes disgusting work. But I get to go home and feel like maybe I helped save a life that day, like I did something to try to remedy the mess my species is making of this planet.

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MMCC volunteers teresa Johnson, right and Francene Miyake, left , taking a break. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

“We couldn’t do what we are doing without volunteers,” says Dave Bader, chief operations and education officer at MMCC. “From care and feeding to response and rescue, to education, volunteers help us with all of these things.”

Mutual aid has become a buzzphrase of our times, as people provide the material, moral, and spiritual resources for each other that our government has abandoned. With President Trump also cutting funds and personnel at earth-protecting institutions such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, humans need to extend our support to the other life forms with whom we share the planet. Marine mammals particularly compel attention, because they are like us in so many ways — we are the same breastfeeding, warm-blooded, live-birthing family — and yet here we stand rooted to the land, and there they go, hunting and feeding and playing and thriving in the water.

And sometimes not thriving.

 

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Sea lions sick from domoic acid poisoning at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

FEBRUARY STRANDINGS

The first inklings of the current DA event were detected back in December in Baja California, according to Dr. Clarissa Anderson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The cold-water upwellings were indicative of La Nina, a cyclical weather event that has caused DA outbreaks in the past. It takes a while for Pseudo-nitzschia plankton blooms to work their way up the food chain to marine animals. Sea lions, dolphins and seabirds began stranding in February. It looks likely that the 2025 dolphin and bird strandings will surpass those of the past three years. “This is just larger numbers than we’re used to,” Anderson says.

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Evelyn McDonnell on meal prep for MMCC patients. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

DA particularly affects adult female sea lions who have consumed large numbers of fish to feed the fetuses they are carrying inside. This year, numerous adult males have also been affected. At MMCC, that means our animal rescue team netted and transported dozens of XXL sea lions — I’m talking hundreds of pounds here — to our facility tucked between Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, Fort MacArthur and the John Olguin campus of San Pedro High School. Many come in so weak they barely move. The mothers may miscarry, or give birth to pups that they are too sick to nurse. With fluids and medicine delivered subcutaneously or orally until they can eat on their own again, less than half of sea lions recover enough to be released. The rest die or are euthanized. DA is fatal for dolphins.

Patients are brought to MMCC year-round with injuries and illnesses that we can’t always save them from — many of them human-caused, including fish-net entanglements, gunshot wounds and cancers likely triggered by human poisons such as dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT. Late winter is always the start of our busy season when pinniped pups separate from their mothers and sometimes wind up in our care. Rehabbing juvenile elephant seals, sea lions and harbor seals generally just takes our highly nutritious fish gruel, daily vitamins, and maybe some medicine. Helping an elephant seal, with its round Keane eyes and ridiculous braying laugh, go from being tube-fed gruel to hand-fed fish to hunting for live fish on its own is a deeply rewarding experience. We are careful to not let the patients bond with us — we avoid eye contact, or talking to them. If they are to be released back to the ocean — the ultimate and usual goal — they must stay wild.

But it’s impossible not to have a soft spot for certain flippered beings. I will never forget the first sea lion neonate — just a day or two old when he came in — whom I got to help bottle feed one summer. I wrapped him in a blanket and held him while the veterinarian made sure he sucked down his special infant formula.

ASHES TO ALGAE

But you can’t restrain and tube-feed a 700-pound sea lion. There is little romance in treating large pinnipeds being ravaged by domoic acid poisoning. With good care and luck, they revive, but the neurotoxin wracks their brains, and then, as they come to their senses, they understandably want out of these cement pens and to return to the sea. They are angry, scary, sad, difficult. And plentiful. From Feb. 20 to March 28, MMCC responded to 191 live animal strandings, compared to 51 for the same period in 2024. Our rescue hotline receives an average of 4,000 calls a year. We had 2,120 calls just in March.

The intensity of the bloom is also indicated by the Pseudo-nitzschia counts from samples taken at the Santa Monica Pier. “We’re seeing high cell abundances — like, really high, higher than I’m used to seeing in general in coastal California … like, millions of cells per liter,” says Anderson, who directs the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System. “Our bloom threshold is 10,000 cells per liter. So seeing those kinds of numbers at Santa Monica Pier in particular really stood out to me. I haven’t seen that maybe ever at that pier.”

Santa Monica Pier is less than two miles from the Palisades Fire burn site. While there is no definitive proof that nutrient runoff from the fire has exacerbated the bloom, previous studies have shown that nitrate from ash can stimulate plankton production. “It stands to reason there could certainly be local stimulation,” Anderson says in the measured tones of a scientist.

Bader is certain other factors are exacerbating the fourth year in a row of DA crises. “Climate change, ocean acidification, nitrification — we’re changing ocean conditions to favor the formation of harmful algal blooms,” he says. “These are naturally occurring algae that are blooming with greater frequency and intensity because of the aforementioned factors.”

Anderson says oceanographic data shows that the Pacific Ocean’s water has been changing, though researchers are still trying to understand why. “From the long-term time series we’ve looked at from data off the California coast, from these deep waters that fuel upwelling, those waters have changed in nutrient composition over the last 20-plus years,” she says. “Why? Is that climate change? Is that something else? Well, it’s happening at a very big basin scale, and the way that the nutrients are changing in that water is exactly the way you need it to be to stimulate domoic acid production.”

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A sea lion enjoying a meal at the MMCC. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

RESOURCES SLASHED

Unfortunately, scientists’ ability to monitor and track data to help us understand what is happening to the oceans and the animals who depend on them is under attack. According to NPR, Trump plans to eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, that conducts vital research on our oceans and climate. “The monitoring that we do, which is mostly NOAA funded, is reliant on instruments and personnel that exist because of NOAA funding, and then if we suddenly cannot continue to operate them, that will be pretty devastating,” Anderson says.

Cuts and layoffs this year have directly impacted our ability to understand the current DA crisis, according to Anderson. Tissues from impacted animals “typically go to a NOAA lab in the Pacific Northwest, and that lab cannot spend a dime there,” she says. “They’re not able to process any samples right now and may have to even get rid of their lab technician who does all of these samples for the West Coast and Alaska. So that is a big problem, and that’s hampering our ability to say much about what’s happening to these animals.”

“We are strong partners of NOAA and rely on them for our support,” Bader says.

The slashing and burning of the agencies tasked with studying and saving our slashed and burned planet directly impacts human beings and their own ocean-based activities. There are statistical indications that DA could be related to high incidences of Alzheimer’s, but without labs to process those samples, we may never know. DA is not the only poison out there; Saxitoxin is causing paralytic shellfish poisoning, which can sicken and kill creatures who eat mussels, clams and oysters, including people.

Saving our oceans and their inhabitants from the harm humans have already caused them is just the right thing to do: for us and them. Among the many tasks the MMCC needs volunteers to do, the most critical is education: Teaching people who these close human relatives are, and how we can help them.

Animal releases — watching a rehabilitated being return to the body of water that is his home, that he might not have seen for months, or maybe never swam in — are my favorite volunteer task. Almost one year after I got to help feed that first neonate sea lion, I watched him jump off a boat near San Miguel Island and swim away with a handful of other yearlings. He porpoised happily through the waves and never looked back.

Visit https://marinemammalcare.org/ to find out more about the Marine Mammal Care Center, sign up to volunteer, or donate. If you see a stranded marine mammal, stay 50 feet away and call 800 39 WHALE. If you see a politician, gently restrain them and explain why institutions such as NOAA, NASA, MMCC, and IBR need our support, now more than ever.

Evelyn McDonnell writes the series Bodies of Water — portraits of lives aquatic — for Random Lengths. She is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University. Her most recent book is The World According to Joan Didion.

AOC, Sanders Lead Massive LA Rally Against Oligarchy

Mark Friedman
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AOC, Sanders Lead Massive LA Rally Against Oligarchy

By Mark Friedman, Member International Association of Machinists

Nearly 40,000 people joined labor unions to fill downtown Los Angeles’ calling all in earshot to fight oligarchy on April 12. This was a labor rally, but it was also for anyone looking for an opportunity to push back against the Trump administration and its anti-democratic, anti-labor, and anti-civil liberties policies.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one-half of the headliner for the rally channeled deep concern over the growing concentration of power, corruption, and wealth inequality in the U.S., attributing it to a political system increasingly dominated by billionaires and corporate interests.

Ocasio-Cortez highlighted disturbing events, including the targeting and harassment of marginalized groups, unlawful detentions of activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, and attempts by ICE to access children in schools under false pretenses.

She argued that democracy is being eroded not only by authoritarian actions but also by economic systems designed to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class. The message calls for solidarity, especially across class lines, and urges collective resistance — not just through political institutions, but through everyday people standing up for one another — emphasizing that only through unity and sustained grassroots action can democracy and justice be preserved.

April 12 Protesta Contra Trump Por Los Derenchos De Los Trabajadores Inmigrantes Mujeres 1
Thousands gathered in downtown Los Angeles to protest Trump’s actions. Photo by Mark Friedman

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders called for a mass, working-class movement to confront rising authoritarianism, corporate dominance, and extreme wealth inequality in America. Noting the rally organizers, supported by labor unions and prominent musicians, Sanders emphasized that millions of workers seek union representation for better wages and dignity while denouncing billionaires like Elon Musk and politicians, both Republican and complicit Democrats, for undermining democracy and enabling systemic injustice.

Sanders criticized Donald Trump for fostering a cult-like, authoritarian government that disrespects the Constitution, attacks public institutions, and supports violent foreign policies — especially in Gaza — favoring elite interests over human rights. Domestically, Sanders condemned the gutting of social safety nets, corporate tax breaks and growing economic disparities that leave millions living paycheck to paycheck or in poverty.

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Rep. Alexandria Cortez with Sen. Bernie Sanders during a moment of levity at the April 12 rally. Photo by Rueben Garcia

They demand fair wages, affordable housing, universal healthcare and education as basic rights, insisting the path forward lies in solidarity, collective resistance, and economic justice for all — not just the wealthy few.

But this wasn’t just a Sanders and AOC show. Prominent labor speakers included Local 13, ILWU Vice President Brandi Good and UNITE-HERE’s Aida Briceno. Local and state politicians also spoke.

California AFL-CIO President Lorena Gonzalez exhorted the mass of humanity in downtown LA by asking, “Which side are you on? “Are you with working people or the greedy corporations like SpaceX, and Amazon, making billions off our labor and who are now trying to take away our rights?”

Gonzalez followed that powerful start with, “When they come for us, we respond: I am sticking with the union. Are you on the side of workers fighting to organize unions? When we exercise our power, use it collectively in our workplaces and our country. When we fight we win.”

Union delegations from the Garment and Restaurant Workers Union (UNITE-HERE), the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the National Nurses Union (NNU), United Autoworkers (UAW), United Teachers of LA (UTLA) and members of several Hollywood unions that were on strike this past year joined the rally.

One of the best-received speakers was April Verrett, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) representing two million workers who keep this country running hospitals, schools, airports and city halls.

Verrett delivered a powerful call to collective action, urging people to unite across lines of division to confront the interconnected forces of corporate greed, systemic racism and political corruption. Emphasizing that billionaires and oligarchs fear the organized power of the people, Verrett highlighted economic injustice — from workers struggling while corporations profit, to courts stripping away rights in favor of the wealthy.

She spotlighted the fight of Uber and Lyft drivers in California for union rights, calling it part of a broader movement to dismantle exploitation and rewrite the rules of a rigged system. Through solidarity disruption, and mobilization, they argue, transformative change is possible — just as it was in past labor struggles — insisting that when people fight together, they win together.

All Governments Lie

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All Governments Lie

Why We Need a Radical and Independent Free Press Now

If the Government makes a mistake, the newspapers will find out and the problem may then be fixed. But if freedom of the press were lost, the country would soon go to pieces.
— I.F. Stone

By Mickey Huff

https://www.projectcensored.org/governments-radical-independent-free-press/?doing_wp_cron=1744051460.4863109588623046875000

Media scholar Carl Jensen was deeply influenced by the independent muckraking journalists of the 20th century — so much so that he founded Project Censored at Sonoma State University, in 1976, in the wake of the Richard Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as a watchdog organization focused on exposing “the news that didn’t make the news.” Project Censored began in a sociology course Jensen taught at Sonoma State, but quickly evolved into a national effort to promote independent journalism and news literacy. The project produced an annual list of the most important investigative news reports, which attracted attention — and praise — from some of Jensen’s best-known contemporaries, including broadcast journalists Walter Cronkite and Hugh Downs, reform activist Ralph Nader, and a contemporary muckraker, investigative journalist I.F. “Izzy” Stone.

Jensen’s purpose was not to tear down so-called “mainstream” media outlets, but to constructively criticize their news judgment. By showing what the major media missed, or even “censored,” he hoped to improve what he saw as the lifeblood of democracy: a truly free press. Industry professionals didn’t always take kindly to such criticism, which led Jensen to turn his critique into a systematic study of what they did cover. He discovered a morass of fluff, sensationalism, and pap — what used to be called “yellow journalism” in the early 1900s. Jensen called it Junk Food News in 1983. He saw that the public would ultimately pay the price for the major media outlets’ myopic focus and critical omissions, in the form of accelerating civic decay. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong.

Today, we are awash in 21st-century versions of junk food news, as produced by corporate media and propagated on social media. Worse, we are also subject to ’round-the-clock infotainment and propaganda masquerading as journalism, what Jensen’s successor, sociologist Peter Phillips, called ”news abuse” in the early 2000s (now also referred to as malinformation). Of course, numerous media critics and scholars — including Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Ben Bagdikian, Neil Postman and Robert McChesney — have long warned against rising levels of mis- and disinformation, increased consolidation of media ownership, and their combined toll on press freedom and a well-informed public. In the last decade, with the moral panic around the weaponized epithet of “fake news,” these challenges have spawned a cottage industry of so-called fact-checkers — supposedly objective third parties trying to reverse the troublesome trend of declining public trust in the Fourth Estate.

However, most of those efforts have been exposed as Trojan horses for re-establishing corporate media dominance in a digital era of podcasts, TikTok, Instagram reels and “tweets” (or “posts” as they are now called on X). As Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker bemoaned last year at the World Economic Forum or WEF in Davos, news industry leaders are losing control of the narrative (emphasis added):

If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well. If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news, and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying. So, it’s no longer good enough for us just to say, this is what happened, or this is the news. We have to explain — almost like explain our working. So, readers expect to understand how we source stories. They want to know how we go about getting stories. We have to sort of lift the bonnet, as it were, and in a way that newspapers aren’t used to doing and explain to people what we’re doing. We need to be much more transparent about how we go about collecting the news.

“Lift the bonnet.” “Explain to people what we’re doing.” It’s almost as if the public wants more fact-based, transparently sourced reporting in their news, not partisan propaganda. And, go figure, in a rabidly consumerist culture, they want receipts too. Tucker seems to agree, though the corporate media and their advertisers/investors from Big Pharma, Big Tech, the military-industrial complex, and other powerful institutions whose narratives the public is questioning, likely do not. For Tucker and other gatekeepers, this public scrutiny is inconvenient, perhaps even impertinent, but also a market reality news organizations must now at least pay lip service to addressing. Perhaps this is what has contributed to record-low levels of approval and trust of the news media among the public.

Indy Journalism Can Build Public Trust While Fighting Fake News
Media scholars have described this conundrum as an epistemic one, the ushering in of a “post-truth” world “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The mis- and disinformation ecosystem that has emerged in this post-truth climate has establishment institutions from the WEF to Congress and the mass media themselves clutching pearls. Even the American public has come to believe that the lack of trustworthy information is a greater threat than terrorism. With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, these concerns, along with increasing existential attacks on journalists and the news media itself, including ABC, CBS, NPR/PBS, and even the Associated Press as “enemies of the American people,” are growing rapidly and in unprecedented ways.

There certainly are major issues with corporate media and establishment outlets, which we at Project Censored have documented for nearly half a century. However, our critiques are not meant to undermine major media for partisan gain. Instead, the project’s criticisms of corporate news expose systemic gaps and slant in coverage, in order to pressure the nation’s most prominent news outlets to use their massive budgets and influence to serve the public good, rather than private interests, by holding corporate and government abusers of power accountable. Given the well-documented limitations of corporate media, we support a robust, independent, and public media system, because a commercial, for-profit model cannot “tell the people what is really going on,” as George Seldes once put it. The solution to our present journalistic woes does not lie with industry leaders, biased fact-checkers, or Big Tech content moderators. It rests on critical media literacy and a fiercely independent free press.

In support of this proposed solution, Project Censored advocates for a healthy democracy by promoting news literacy education, especially by providing hands-on training in critical media literacy for students, through our curriculum, student internships, and Campus Affiliates Program, each of which distinguishes Project Censored from other news watch organizations and press freedom groups. Further, each year, Project Censored also recognizes some of the best independent journalists, reporting factually, transparently and ethically in the public interest, pointing out that these are among the best advocates of news literacy, literally teaching by example. So, ironically, the very solutions to the revitalization of our failing Fourth Estate are its most radical independent practitioners, not their owners/employers or meddling partisan outsiders. History shows this to be the case, and we should listen to what the past can teach us.

“All Governments Lie”
Among the many books Jensen published, one of the most significant might be Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century. In it, he collected exemplary work by nearly two dozen legendary journalists, his selection of the previous century’s most significant truth-tellers, including excerpts from decisive reports by Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company), Lincoln Steffans (The Shame of the Cities), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle and The Brass Check), George Seldes (In Fact), Edward R. Murrow (In Search of Light), and I.F. Stone (I.F. Stone’s Weekly). As Jensen wrote, “Their words led to a nationwide public revolt against social evils and [decades] of reforms in antitrust legislation, the electoral process, banking regulations, and a host of other social programs.” The reporting Jensen collected in Stories That Changed America continues to inspire those of us who believe journalism can make a difference.

“All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out,” the iconic muckraker “Izzy” Stone once wrote. But Stone had great faith in the power of the press to expose and counter those lies. We need brave, independent journalists and newsrooms to tackle the most controversial and suppressed issues of our era. Stone relentlessly exposed governmental prevarications and injustices throughout his career. He also saw the shortcomings of his own profession, to the point of resigning from the National Press Club in 1941, rather than kowtowing to its racism and political sycophancy. After realizing he had limited influence in the establishment press, he started I.F. Stone’s Weekly and dared to report the truth on his own. He took on McCarthyism at a time when his peers were being attacked, arrested, deported and disappeared. He fought for truth and peace in the face of the unjust, murderous conflicts of the Cold War, especially in Vietnam. Sound familiar?

Governments lie. Stone’s insight is timeless, but it seems more relevant than ever in 2025. The Trump administration and its enablers bombard us daily with lies and half-truths, what Reporters Without Borders has characterized as “a monumental assault on freedom of information.” At best, the establishment press seems capable of little more than chronicling the barrage; at worst, they capitulate to it.

The notion of a press “watchdog” on a governmental leash did not begin with the current administration — as Jensen and his students at Sonoma State noted in 1976 looking back on the eve of Richard Nixon’s re-election, no major news outlet even mentioned the Watergate scandal — and the roots of a subservient press reach back to the earliest history of American journalism on the presidency. But the return of Trump to power is a nadir for many of our cherished freedoms, including those of the First Amendment, which links freedom of speech and press with the rights to assemble and petition — and the public, our democracy, needs journalism that can help us awaken from what historian Timothy Snyder has described as a “self-induced intellectual coma” that is characteristic of “the politics of inevitability.”

The Izzys Are Coming!
Calling out counter-democratic measures is one way to resist the onslaught of authoritarianism. A free press provides the means for this, but people need to act in response. Rather than complain that “the left” needs a media power like Rupert Murdoch’s to “compete,” we should open our eyes and support the amazing people and organizations doing this invaluable work already. Project Censored highlights the most important but under-reported independent news stories each year, promoting the work of independent journalists, news outlets, and press freedom organizations that exemplify “media democracy in action.” Their work embodies the very spirit of resistance and amplifies the voices of those trammeled by oligarchs and would-be despots.

The Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College shares this ethos, supporting independent media as a bulwark against everyday injustices and creeping tyranny. Among the only academic centers of journalism in the United States focused solely on independent media, each year, PCIM honors the leading independent journalists of our time with its Izzy Award, named in honor of I.F. “Izzy” Stone. April 30 marks the 17th annual award ceremony, which will also be the occasion for numerous muckraking journalists and free press organizations to convene and build coalitions, strengthen solidarity and fight to protect our democratic republic from anyone, whether they bat for team red or team blue, who would subvert it for their own private gain.
The Izzy Award celebrates the practice of radical muckraking journalism in the public interest, and its continuing relevance in our current Gilded Age of Big Tech plutocracy. The work at PCIM and Project Censored reminds us that we cannot wait for change to simply emerge; we must create it ourselves. If past is prologue, we also have much to learn from and pass on to the next generation, whose experiences and voices will inform and express the stories that change America again, to paraphrase Jensen.
Now is not a time for cowering; it is a time to exhibit what political activist and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg called civil courage, regardless of the odds. Or, as Izzy noted, it is time “to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; and to seek, as best I can to bring healing perspectives to bear on the terrible hates and fears of [humankind], in the hope of someday bringing about one world, in which [people] will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.”

Hear, hear. Let’s not get lost in the smoke of the hashish blown in our faces by elite media and government actors. Let’s instead recognize and support the reportorial canaries in the coal mines, from the climate crisis and Kafkaesque raids on the vulnerable among us to the dismantling of education, attacks on the arts, and an ongoing genocide. Let’s act on the information independent journalists share at their own risk, for we ignore them at our own.

Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation. He joined Ithaca College in 2024 as distinguished director of the Park Center for Independent Media and professor of journalism. Since 2009, he has coedited the annual Censored book series and has co-authored several works on media literacy and critical thinking, including The Media and Me and United States of Distraction.

Artful Metamorphosis

Melina Paris
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Artful Metamorphosis

 

A Survey of Jan Govaerts’ Work Across the Decades

Jan Govaerts: Through the Years, A Survey of Work, showcases the evolution of Govaerts’ artistic journey. It is a joyful exhibition, spanning decades. Through the Years explores the artist’s career from painting to sculpture, revealing a deep connection to nature, memory and transformation.

Govaerts, along with artist Sam Arno in 1996, founded The Loft Galleries, the 1913 building in San Pedro, now called Los Angeles Harbor Arts or LAHA. The two came to the Lofts with artists Muriel Oguin, Ann Marie Rawlinson and Bob Doughty. Govaerts said that it was really nice to see how interested the landlord was in the program they were starting at the Lofts — and he still is, she noted.

Govaerts began her painting career drawing inspiration from her childhood memories of the Nebraska prairie. Early works captured the vast landscape of her upbringing before transitioning into dream imagery.

Her painting, Reflections, depicts a pond in Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp in Owens Valley, California. A tree of undulating branches and gold leaves sits in a pond of glassy blue water. The saturated color and light emanating from this beautiful painting envelope the scene inviting closer exploration.

Braided River, a painting in three panels, is from a photograph Govaerts took when she visited Alaska. She explained the river channels through the land, and there are little islands in the middle of the river, which provide many different climates along the water body. The tributary exemplifies any braided river, such as the one that was flowing next to the Nebraska town she grew up in.

Braided River’s serene, aqua hues emit light from within the painting. A horizon scene places the viewer at the edge of a fertile riverbank. The river resembles a soft, pale seafoam green pillow where, through Govaerts’ skilled hand, the water’s depth is palpable in this meditative piece.

In a series of four paintings on display, Govaerts made discoveries both of an artistic and mythic nature.

“As I was finishing the day of painting, I would take the leftover paints from my palette and smear them onto another board,” Govaerts said. “Eventually, the board was filled with colors, and I started scraping through the layers … The images just revealed themselves and I brought the figures forward by pushing the background back. Then I would add from there to reveal figures.”

Govaerts said she got this idea from Muriel Olguin (1923-2017) whose method was to simply pour the paint onto the canvas and turn the canvas. The paintings in the series are titled: Dance; The Gaze; They Turn Away; and Hand of the Banshee. Govaerts explained that the Banshee helps you across the veil when you die. She said this painting symbolizes her youngest daughter when she died and is the first in this series.

These are tactile works that one could gaze upon extensively while still discovering new forms. A common factor throughout Govaerts’ paintings is the light that emanates from within them. She said because of the way she developed these works, they were a real adventure to paint.

“It actually turned into a little story,” Govaerts said.

This story was inspired by a book titled Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language by Mary Daly and Jane Caputi.

A Children’s Story for Grown Women

“She offers herself in all her beauty, they turn away. Finding her strength, she purposely walks toward her own future. She walks in the verdancy and lushness of Earth, drawing up her strength. Alone, she celebrates her connection with the sea, the ebb and flow of life, absorbing the power of the wave. She dances her own dance, sings her own song, celebrating the fire, energy and ecstasy of life. She opens to the powers of air: new dawn beginning. She soars with inspiration, dreaming of her flight with Fox Woman. Circling with her sisters, she increases her powers three times three. Recognizing her strength, in respect he makes his offering.”

The artist wrote to the authors of ‘Wickedary’ sharing her inspiration with them. She discussed how she struggled to name the paintings until their book sitting on her shelf “pulled her eyes” and “woven within were the words for her paintings.” She wrote that being pulled in by the book was a very magical experience which increased the mystery and wonder of making those paintings.

“First came the inner journey of discovering the imagery, then the fun and synchronicity of discovering their ‘tidals,’” she wrote.

In 1999, Govaerts shifted her focus to sculpture, working primarily with clay. Her sculptures explore the extraordinary within the ordinary, finding beauty in overlooked aspects of nature. Govaerts got into making her seed pods after a moment of awe.

“I was driving along and I saw a tree and it was dropping seed pods, so I stopped to look at this little seed pod that caught my attention. I looked at it and it was so intricate, so beautiful, something we don’t really even look at.”

Fascinated by its intricate form, texture and organic symmetry, she translated this inspiration into sculpted forms. These enlarged seed pods transcend their physical beauty, evoking presence and wonder. Her recent Stone series follows this pattern in her creations of cairns, or small pebbles as references for larger works.

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Jan Govaerts approaches her “Seed Pod Boats.” Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

While sculpting her Seed Pod Boats, Govaerts recalled that she wondered if Indigenous people saw the pods floating downstream and got the idea to make boats. Her Seed Pod Boats, which are 7 feet long, 20 inches wide and 18 inches deep, are made of paper clay (liquid clay) that has processed cellulose fibers (like paper pulp) added to it, and slip fabric on a wooden armature, so they are not fired. They did not take long to make — as big as they are, she noted, once she built the armature.

“Those are my favorite,” Govaerts said. “I [made] it one time in the studio and I had slip everywhere … It was worth it to do these pieces, but never again.”

Her Guardian Towers 1, 2 and 3, Govaerts said, remind her of the hoodoos, which are tall, slender rock spires formed by erosion, located in the Bryce Canyon area of Utah. She built her towers in sections that were only fired one time, and with no glaze, “and they last perfectly.”

Indeed, Govaerts’ calm ‘Guardians” epitomize the hoodoo’s statuesque, jagged and protruding terra rossa formations. She meticulously constructs her towers by layering 500 to 600 hand-formed clay coils, creating towering structures up to six feet tall.

Her inspiration for the ‘Guardians’ came after Govaerts enrolled in a ceramics class at Los Angeles Harbor College.

“I got started, but I really started doing it full time when I had a little vision of these [towers], she said. “I had an idea for them … and I think that bubbled up from the memories of the hoodoos.”

She began her Guardian Towers series in 2007 and has 21 towers in total.

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Jan Govaerts poses alongside her piece Wings. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

Govaerts’ Wings is made of two pieces. This earth-colored sculpture resembles something one might see as part of an avatar’s anatomy in a sci-fi film, with its repeating stripe pattern within its biomorphic shape. At the same time, this extraordinary piece has a fossilized appearance.

“There are so many processes in making clay,” Govaerts said. “They all take different amounts of time. My pieces are single-fired with no glaze; they have different stains and underglazes. Sometimes I polish them. People see all kinds of things in the seed pod pieces from something that came out of the ocean to something from outer space.”

The most joyful piece in this retrospective Singing Bowls is just what it sounds like; a collection of small ceramic bowls, of all different colors, strung in rows and hung from the ceiling on a large frame. It’s a big mobile of sorts (you can actually, but carefully, walk within) which Govaerts gladly provided chopsticks to play the bowls.

 

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A joyous Jan Govaerts poses in front of her painting “Prairie River.” Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

A dedicated artist and educator, Govaerts earned her bachelor of arts in Studio Art in 1991. She served as president of Angels Gate Cultural Center and taught ceramics for many years. In 2018, she and her partners established Blue Water Clay, a full-service ceramics studio where she taught until her second retirement in 2023. Today, she continues to create in her studio.

Join two more events around this exhibition:

Artist reception from 2 to 5 p.m., April 19

Closing reception, from 2 to 5 p.m., May 10

Details: 310-547-3624; https://www.laharborarts.org

Venue: LA Harbor Arts, 401 S Mesa St., San Pedro

A Prophet for Change

James Preston Allen
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A Prophet for Change

 

And why I don’t trust the establishment media, or the Orange Felon

It was the weekend before Easter, and 36,000 people gathered in front of the citadel of power, in downtown Los Angeles, to protest the American oligarchy that has taken over our government. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to preach the message of resistance, and change and hope. The crowd, thirsty for that ray of hope, lent to a festival-like atmosphere against a backdrop of daily dread-scrolling for peace through the daily news cycle. But there’s no peace in Gaza, none in Ukraine, a roller coaster of tariffs and trade war, the abduction and rendition of people off our streets to a gulag in El Salvador, and then like a cherry on top, the administration ignores theUS Supreme Court and its 9-0 decision telling the Orange Felon in the Oval Office, “No.”

This is what American fascism looks like: when ICE agents show up at our schools to apprehend children without notification to their parents, when our universities are threatened financially because of student protests. When the president silences the news media with threats when they dare to ask uncomfortable questions.

The establishment news media deserve only so much sympathy, given that in too many cases, when it has been bullied and threatened, it has chosen self-censorship out of fear of financial losses. CBS News Magazine’s 60 Minutes is being sued by the Orange Felon because of the way they edited the interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in the last election. Were they supposed to run the final edit past him before it aired? This is absolutely ludicrous, as he turned down the invitation for the same kind of segment, but no, he didn’t trust them. “They are fake news!” he said.

The problem with most establishment press is that they have lost their way of reporting the news people really need. They are chasing ratings with infotainment, not so real “reality TV” shows, lots of weather reports, spectacle, and sports. Where’s the next Edward R. Murrow when we need him?

On the very night of the Sanders/AOC “Fight the Oligarchy” rally, none of the evening news stations carried any mention that the biggest event in LA had happened, or even why it was happening, or what was said! It wasn’t until the next morning that KTLA news reported that Sanders had shown up at the Coachella Music and Arts festival and warned the young people, “This country faces some very difficult challenges. The future of what happens to America is dependent upon your generation,” he announced. “You can turn away and ignore what goes on, but if you do, you do it at your own peril.”

There was no report of Sanders’ list of grievances against the Oval Office’s lies and deceit. In the following Monday edition of the LA Times, a rather clueless pair of reporters barely scratched the surface of the growing list of anti-democratic actions the Orange leader has taken in just the first 100 days in office. This kind of self-silencing is like a virus that chills free speech and the freedom of the press, all out of fear of reprisals. It takes guts to stand up and speak truth to power, and the more insanely brutish the power is, the more courage it takes. And it doesn’t encourage such when the Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong himself along with some others are intimidated, if not willing collaborators.

Not very many of the pretty faces on TV news were trained for this. Occasionally, there’s a lone CNN reporter who asks the obvious but impertinent questions, like the one who questioned the illegally deported man before being verbally attacked by the Orange Felon himself in the middle of a news conference. Does he have no decency?

It would seem to this reporter that nearly every day, with every new executive order, he is breaking his oath of office, which, if the Republican majority in Congress had any spine, would be grounds for his third and final impeachment. Would the Democrats do more if they regained the majority? Would a bi-partisan Senate actually vote to convict this time, realizing the courts couldn’t do the job of putting him away?

We are told that it’s up to us to resist, as the last line of defense of the Constitution but how many of us actually would? Every time I hear the Orange Felon say that the “radical Democrats” want to do such and such, my hands tighten, and I want to scream. This idiot is trying to turn back the clock 100 years to when workers didn’t have a right to organize; when there were fewer civil rights; when there were no child labor laws; when public schools were few; and when the wealthy ruled America with impunity. He has turned DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and CRT (Critical Race Theory) into bad words and twisted their meanings and then made scapegoats out of transgendered or undocumented immigrants.

All of this wrapped up in the pretense of the American flag and a kind of bigoted religious idolatry that even Jesus Christ would denounce. And while we are on the topic of religion, and this is Easter and Passover, it may be time to reclaim the revolutionary Jesus. Roman imperialism crucified him for his courage and his revolutionary act of defiance for showing the people a liberatory path. His resurrection is his people’s hope (he was a Palestinian Jew)― rising against oppression, from Palestine to the US-Mexico border.

If there actually is a second coming of Christ today, he’d probably end up in an ICE prison (if not in Panama) and be prosecuted and persecuted for exactly the same principles he died for the first time. And the Orange Felon would play the role of a modern-day Pontius Pilate. Something to meditate on, whether you pray or not, this week.

Why Rice Is the Unsung Hero of Seasonal Cooking

Reporters Desk
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Why Rice Is the Unsung Hero of Seasonal Cooking

Forget the Grocery StoreLet Rice Meet Your Harvest Halfway

By Ari LeVaux

As we approach the growing season, and the kaleidoscope of fresh produce it brings, this is a good time to discuss rice, the ultimate blank slate of cooking. I say this because a rice dish is likely to be more compatible with whatever is in the garden, CSA box, or that cloth bag you brought home from farmers. Thus, rice is less likely to send you to the grocery store than any other carb. A pasta meal, by contrast, will typically have a more narrow list of ingredients, such as tomatoes, garlic, and basil. But carrots, squash, corn, peas… not so much. With an entire growing season of diversity ahead of us, flexibility will be key to consuming as much earthly bounty as possible. And rice is more flexible than most yoga instructors.

When it comes to cooking rice, I consider myself something of a less muscular version of John Henry, the steel-driving man who could out-pound a steam driver. I may be nothing special with a sledgehammer, but I can cook rice better than any rice cooker. I don’t even measure the amounts of rice or water I add to the pot. I just pour the rice from a 25-pound sack until it looks like enough. And then I stick my finger in it. Based on what my finger tells me, I might add more water or pour off excess.

My rice finger senses its environment like a blind person’s cane, comparing the relative depths of rice and water, and then notifying me if I need to add more water or pour some off. I realize that you, dear reader, might need a bit more to work with than simply “stick your finger in the rice pot and listen to what your finger reports.” Alas, I have been doing this for so long that I didn’t really know what my finger was sensing, so I grabbed a tape measure and reverse-engineered my technique, to be able to translate into English what my submerged digit is looking for.

But first, a few words about rice varieties. There is a bewildering number of them, each with different flavors, textures, colors and cooking needs. The beauty of my technique is it works with any rice, even if you don’t know what kind it is. White jasmine is my favorite rice. It has a mesmerizing fragrance that fills the house as it cooks. I also like white basmati, the flavor of which is a bit more nutty, less floral, but just as intoxicating. Supposedly brown rice is healthier, but I prefer the flavor and texture of white rice. The only problem is that my preferred types of white rice are coated in a starchy powder. I rinse the starch off so the rice will be more fluffy and less sticky.

As you read the following instructions, they may strike you as more complicated than just measuring out your rice and water. That might be an easier way to make one meal, but in the long run, the finger technique will save time and guesswork from your future rice-based meals. My method helps you vibe with whatever rice is on hand. So if you hang in there and push through the learning curve, you will come out the other side as a legit rice master.

Add two or three-ish cups of rice to a small pot that has a tight-fitting lid, preferably a glass lid so you can monitor progress. Fill it the rest of the way with water and stir it around. If the water turns cloudy, you’ve got starch. Dump the cloudy water and add more, stirring again. Repeat this process until the water stays clear. Then stick your finger in it. According to my tape measure the water depth should exceed the rice level by about 3/4 of an inch.

Put the lid on and turn the heat to high. When it reaches the boil, turn the heat down to medium. After about ten minutes, the water will drop below the rice level, and the rice will puff up and begin to look done. At this point, remove the lid and pluck a grain from the top. If the grain tastes done, simply replace the lid, turn off the heat, and let the rice peacefully come in for a landing. If it’s just a little crunchy, stick a spoon straight down and gently create a gap so you can see how much water is left. If it’s almost gone, add just a little more, like a half cup, and turn off the heat. The rice will still be plenty hot enough to absorb that water and finish cooking. If it’s a lot crunchier, add maybe a cup, replace the lid, and cook a few more minutes on low. I’m being vague on the quantities because I have no way of knowing what you see in front of you. But the more you do this, the easier it will be to taste the rice, look in the pot, and decide how much water to add. Whatever you do, don’t let it run out of water while the heat is on or the rice will burn.

A perfectly cooked batch of rice needs little else. A dash of seaweed sprinkles or a splash of soy sauce will make a simple but satisfying meal. Or serve it alongside the cooked veggies of your choice. Or make a little sauce. I’m gonna give you a recipe for a shoulder season stir-fry.

Although spring is here, we remain on a winter diet because it’s still too early for the new growth. If we are eating locally then we are still in the root cellar zone dominated by storage crops like carrots, onions, garlic and squash.

I’m leaving this recipe loose because I don’t want to micromanage. As with the rice cooking, my goal here is to set you free, not boss you around. I am here to teach you how to fish, so to speak, rather than simply hand you a fish. I don’t want to send you to the store. Rather, I want you to be able to create a rice-based meal with whatever you happen to have on hand. This will help build the flexibility to make new dishes as the season evolves from radishes to peas to zucchini, corn, peppers, tomatoes and so on.

Since the squash harvested last fall is still readily available, I decided to serve my rice with a carnival squash, which is basically a delicata squash that’s shaped like an acorn squash. I like delicata and carnival squashes because they are so easy to pan-fry. The thin skin is edible, so you don’t need to peel it. The small seeds get crispy in the pan, adding texture to the dish.

Pan-fried squash chunks on rice

2 servings

Ingredients

1 lb carnival or delicata squash

3 tablespoons of your choice of fat: I like olive oil, butter, bacon and or sesame oil. Or a combination of any or these

1/4 medium onion, minced

1 clove of garlic, minced

2 tablespoons oyster sauce. If you don’t have it, use fish sauce or soy sauce

White pepper if you have it, otherwise black pepper

Juice of a 1/4 lemon or a tablespoon of rice wine, for acid

Procedure

Cut the squash into 1/2-inch slices. Lay the slices on the cutting board and chop them into chunks.

Turn the heat to medium below a heavy bottomed pan. Add the oil and squash, including the skin and seeds, and fry in the oil until the seeds begin to pop.

Add the onion, stir it up and cook until the onion bits become translucent.

Deglaze the pan with the lemon juice or cooking wine.

Add the garlic, stir it around and as soon as you smell the magical aroma of garlic cooking, add the oyster sauce and ground white or black pepper.

Stir it all together and serve with you-know-what. (Hint: it rhymes with “nice”)

Climate Refusal, Not Just Denial

Paul Rosenberg
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Climate Refusal, Not Just Denial

 

Trump’s War on Truth and the Fight to Make Polluters Pay

Trump’s embrace of climate denial—calling the climate crisis “a hoax”— echoes his embrace of birtherism: He makes broad, sweeping statements without the slightest effort to learn the underlying lies, much less the truth. But he can only do so because of what he’s trying to hide.

This helps explain why some environmental activists—like Peter Warren, with Indivisible San Pedro since its beginning—have shifted focus to fighting him and his allies on whatever front seems most promising, while others have stayed focused on more specific battles. Sherry Lear, with 350.org Southland Legislative Alliance, has focused on state-level policies, seeking to make California live up to its self-image of environmental leadership. “It’s hard enough to get stuff done with the Democrats that are supposed to be the good environmentalists, so I ain’t gonna put Trump’s issues on top of that,” Lear said. “That is way overwhelming.”

Lear referenced the Sierra Club’s 7-page legislative Priority List, which covers more than 30 bills, including 3 directly responding to the wildfires and seven that seek to undermine CEQA, the state’s premier environmental protection law. There’s a lot to be concerned about, she warned. But there’s also the “Make Polluters Pay Bill,” which “will basically look at the greenhouse gas emissions of companies that create the most pollution and then create a climate Superfund,” she explained. “So it’s literally what it says. It’d make polluters pay.” It’s supported by a big coalition but requires a two-thirds majority for it to pass. So it will be a major battle.

Here in the San Pedro Harbor, both ports are eagerly welcoming green transition grants on one hand, while fighting against pollution limits in a prospective Independent Source Rule from the South Coast Air Quality Management District. And so activists are fighting back. While the ports have non-binding goals under their Clean Air Action Plan, an ISR could require mandatory reductions, which they’ve long opposed.

“The draft rule doesn’t go far enough, because it’s really just asking ports to do the planning that they should be doing anyways,” said Fern Uennatornwaranggoon, with Pacific Environment. “It’s not actually looking to set emissions reductions targets, to really get ports to, in concrete ways, start reducing emissions.” The rule reflected the recognition that “while emissions have decreased in the 2000s, they have stagnated for about a decade now,” she said.

“They got all the low-hanging fruit in the first eight years,” Warren noted, and in addition, “They refused to set periodic goals,” he said. “There were no way stations along the way, metrics to say ‘here’s how far we’ve come in five years, we better move a little faster,’ ‘here’s how far we’ve come in 10 years, we better do more.’”

 

The National Battle: Trump As A Climate Menace

But mostly Warren’s focus has been national since 2017. He calls Trump “a menace” on climate, but it goes even deeper, to “Trump doesn’t believe in the truth,” he said. “He believes if you can hide the truth, if you don’t look at the truth, you can proceed as if everything is fine. So on that level, he’s a menace.”

As an example, Warren pointed to the recently announced cuts for funding the once-every-four-year National Climate Assessment. That same day, Science magazine reported an even more sweeping cut planned in Trump’s budget proposal: The virtual elimination of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which “would send the United States back to the 1950s,” according to one expert.

And the day before that, ProPublica reported that Trump’s EPA plans to stop collecting greenhouse gas pollution data from most sources—thousands of them, “including oil refineries, power plants, and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron, and steel.”

Climate denial has been around for decades, but this is climate refusal: refusing to even collect evidence, much less look at it.

This comes just three months after Britain’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries warned that the global economy could face a 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, along with billions of deaths, and just days after a top insurer warned that “At 3C of global heating…. capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.”

In short, a renewable energy transition is a basic economic requirement.

 

Port Zero-Emissions Grant Seems Safe, But…

Just days before the November election, the Biden administration announced a $412 million EPA grant for zero-emissions investments at the Port of LA. But given Trump’s ongoing efforts to take back $20 billion in EPA funding in another funding stream, there was initial trepidation that funding could be in trouble. But the port says that has passed. “We’ve had a virtual meeting with EPA officials and as of today, the grant is moving forward as planned,” port spokesman Phillip Sanfield told Random Lengths. “The Port has received one small reimbursement thus far and we plan to begin moving forward with projects later this year.”

While most of the funds go to five terminals ( nearly 425 pieces of cargo-handling equipment, 300 charging ports and related infrastructure, and 250 drayage trucks) there is also a significant community grant that would be administered by the Harbor Community Benefits Foundation. “There is up to $50 million as part of this program to be used for a community workforce development program, a community benefits zero emissions grant program, and a community engagement program to inform the community about what’s going on with all this,” HCBF board chair Ed Avol told Random Lengths. They’re in negotiations with the city attorney, and expect it to go through, but aren’t taking any steps yet that rely on it.

After nine funding rounds, they were about to close down when another $3.2 million became available from Trapac, and “our intent is to get these funds out as quickly as we can,” Avol said. But, “In the past year, we’ve had some difficulty” getting the Port Of LA board to sign off on some grants, with back-and-forth discussions dragging on for months. There’s even one last grant funding the community garden which was turned down because the city attorney said it conflicts with a city statute.

“But that was confusing to us,” Avol said, since “we have funded the community garden on at least two previous occasions, and the port has approved and funded that.” They’ve pushed back and the city attorney is currently reviewing the matter.

If the EPA grant comes through — “there is some skepticism,” Avol cautions — but “That would be a dramatic increase upon what even done over the last decade of our existence.” In that case, they would have to expand their staff, starting with a new executive director. It’s quite a turn-around since the end of last year when they were looking at closing up shop.

But even with the EPA grants coming through, and the substantial ZE equipment purchases, Trump’s recent tariff war tantrum — with up to 145% tariffs on Chinese goods — has introduced dramatic uncertainty.

“If I were an investor I’d be sitting there on pins and needles…. I would hold back,” said June Smith, former chairperson of the Port Community Advisory Committee. A life-long environmental activist, she also has a business background as a buyer for Macy’s before going into academia. “I don’t see how these investors can be assured that they’re not going to lose their money,” she said.

Uennatornwaranggoon agreed about the potential decline in port climate investments and added another concern: Trump’s stop-and-go antics “just creates more uncertainty, and supply chain uncertainty creates inefficiency at ports,” quite possibly leading to waves of waves of congestion when tariff conditions seem favorable, and slack when they don’t. In addition, Longshore workers would be impacted directly, but communities would suffer as well since more congestion means more pollution.

Still, with POLA’s EPA grants seemingly secure, “They now have over about $1 billion to really lead the nation on investing in modernization to reduce emissions from port sources, and so I feel like maybe that would leave room for other ports to go after the state grants,” she said. One example is the $57.4 million grant to the Port of Long Beach announced on Feb 28, evenly divided between zero-emissions cargo-handling equipment and ‘cleaner’ harbor craft. California’s state budget can still sustain that, but in Washington state—which has no income tax—“they have a huge state budget deficit,” and “really don’t have as much state investments for ports,” she warned.

But, “There are a lot of things that ports can still do…. The nice thing about ports being part of the global trade system is they can still work with other countries to make progress on environmental issues because there’s a lot of voluntary actions.”

But POLA’s record is not encouraging, Warren noted. He quoted from the judge in the most recent China Shipping case: “The port of Los Angeles prioritizes the profits of its shipping customers over the health and well-being of the workers and the people in the community,” Judge Timothy Taylor wrote.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Warren said. “You can make money. It’s a profitable industry. They put a container fee on each container of $10. Their container held millions of dollars worth of goods,” so a fraction of a sales tax could raise thousands per container.

Much could be done, Smith said, “If if they would make the necessary investments now–which aren’t huge they really aren’t that big compared to the volume.” Above all, “I wish their denials would stop, and I wish their attitude would change,” she said. “I wish that they would take that long-term perspective and not just a short bottom-line perspective so that we could all work together to bring about a healthier, better day,”

State Level Battles

At the state level, a multitude of environmental fights lie ahead this year. As examples, Lear cited three bills that would limit environmental review under CEQA.

“There’s SB 607 from Sen. Weiner, he’s from Northern California, that will limit CEQA rules,” Lear began. “There is AB 295 from Macedo, that bill will streamline environmental review processes for large dams, and things like that, and large water projects, which as you can imagine large water projects usually raise the ire of environmentalists — for example, the Delta conveyance project, I mean the delta’s been under attack for decades,” she said. Finally, SB 252 by Valladares will remove environmental oversight for undergrounding projects, for underground wires under CEQA.”

Responding to the wildfires is another top concern — one that requires considerable rethinking that’s long overdue.

“The fires that happened in Altadena and the Palisades and into Malibu, those were completely foreseeable,” Lear lamented. “There are things we could have done years ago, from the utility side to the infrastructure side, to minimize the way that these fires spread and the lack of ability to respond to them. She and other environmentalists are pushing for changes “that will address the problems that cause the catastrophes that we’ve experienced, that will strengthen our electric grid, make it more resilient and make property and real estate, business, homes safer.”

An underlying problem is the rate-setting model for investor-owned utilities, put into place by the California Public Utilities Commission in the early 1900s, when they wanted to incentivize the infrastructure build-out, and did so with a guaranteed 10% profit.

“We still have the same model and that’s part of the reason why our utility rates are so incredibly high,” Lear said. “It’s also part of the reason why we’re building transmission lines instead of building local solar farms or putting or punishing people who have solar on their homes, and making them pay utility bills while they’re generating electricity for the grid,” she explained.

“If we turn around and incentivize investor-owned utilities to do things that make the grid more reliable, are better for customers with lower rates, I mean, that’s a win-win. That’s something that’s being worked on right now.”

 

Longer Shadows

These state-level battles have immediate impacts on people’s lives. But the national battles cast longer shadows — not just the damage to the environment and trade relations, but also to the scientific and academic establishment, Smith noted. “Even if you stopped everything that’s been going on with the tariff dangers, and the firings, and everything else — even if you stop that tomorrow — you’re not going to get that scientific research back,” she said. “You’re not going to recover that scientific advance that the United States had, and which is one of the best economic drivers of the country — you’re not going to get that back right away. It’s going to take years.”

Looking back, “Those of us who are old like me, remember World War II,” Smith said, when a similar dynamic brought a flood of German scientists and intellectuals to America, fleeing Hitler and the Holocaust. “So us gray heads are really worried because we remember,” she said. “We remember, but the young people don’t have that firsthand knowledge. And so they don’t think it can happen here. But it is happening here.”

The growing resistance—such as the April 5 Hands Off! Demonstrations — give her hope, “But they’ve gotta keep at it. We’ve gotta keep at it every single day and every single week and not give up.”

From Courtrooms to Coastlines: California Battles Tariffs and Boosts Park Staff

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From Courtrooms to Coastlines: California Battles Tariffs and Boosts Park Staff

California Files Lawsuit to End President Trump’s Tariffs

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta April 16 filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging President Trump’s use of emergency powers to enact broad-sweeping tariffs that hurt states, consumers and businesses. The lawsuit argues that President Trump lacks the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs through the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, creating immediate and irreparable harm to California, the largest economy, manufacturing, and agriculture state in the nation.

These tariffs have disrupted supply chains, inflated costs for the state and Californians, and inflicted billions in damages on California’s economy, the fifth largest in the world.

The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, requests the court to declare the tariffs imposed by President Trump void and enjoin their implementation.

The President lacks authority to enact unilateral tariffs

The lawsuit argues that President Trump lacks the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs against Mexico, China, and Canada or create an across-the-board 10% tariff. The president’s use of the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) to enact tariffs is unlawful and unprecedented.

The IEEPA gives the President authority to take certain actions if he declares a national emergency in response to a foreign national security, foreign policy, or economic threat. The law, which was enacted by Congress in 1977, specifies many different actions the president can take, but tariffs aren’t one of them. In fact, this is the first time a president has attempted to rely on this law to impose tariffs.

Supreme Court precedent

The lawsuit invokes the U.S. Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine, which holds that in novel matters of vast economic and political significance, federal agencies and the executive branch must have clear and specific authorization from Congress. In recent years, the Court has applied this standard to strike down major initiatives, including President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, ruling that novel executive actions with broad impacts on the national economy cannot rest on vague statutory authority.

It is difficult to imagine a more economically significant set of actions than the one Trump is taking on tariffs, which have inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses on a whim, using a statute that doesn’t mention tariffs. The Court, applying this doctrine even-handedly, will find that such expansive action absent congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.

California is the backbone of the nation’s economy

California’s gross domestic product was $3.9 trillion in 2023, making it 50% bigger than the GDP of the nation’s next-largest state, Texas. The state drives national economic growth and also sends over $83 billion more to the federal government than it receives in federal funding. California is the leading agricultural producer in the country and is also the center for manufacturing output in the United States, with over 36,000 manufacturing firms employing over 1.1 million Californians. The Golden State’s manufacturing firms have created new industries and supplied the world with manufactured goods spanning aerospace, computers and electronics, and, most recently, zero-emission vehicles.

The Golden State is global leader in two-way trade

California engaged in nearly $675 billion in two-way trade in 2024, supporting millions of jobs throughout the state. California’s economy and workers rely heavily on this trade activity, particularly with Mexico, Canada, and China – our top three trade partners. Over 40% of California imports come from these countries, totaling $203 billion of the more than $491 billion in goods imported by California in 2024. These countries are also our top three export destinations, buying nearly $67 billion in California exports, which was over one-third of the state’s $183 billion in exported goods in 2024.

Tariffs irreparably harm California businesses and consumers

As the largest economy in the nation, the largest agriculture state in the nation, and the largest U.S. trading partner, the harm of the tariffs on the state of California is immense. President Trump’s policies have already inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses.

Tariffs have an outsized impact on California businesses, including its more than 60,000 small business exporters.

 

 

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Assigned locations for the 32 new state park rangers and lifeguards.

California Welcomes 32 New State Park Rangers, Lifeguards at Graduation Ceremony

PARADISE — While the federal government cuts staffing for national parks, Gov. Gavin Newsom April 16 celebrated the addition of 32 new state park rangers and lifeguards. These dedicated individuals recently graduated from a rigorous eight-month training program and now join the nation’s largest state park system as peace officers and lifeguards.

The graduation ceremony marked the culmination of a 32-week Basic Visitor Service Training (BVST) Academy. The graduates officially received their badges in front of their family, friends, and department staff. With this milestone, they now embark on careers dedicated to serving, protecting, and educating visitors across California’s 280 state parks.

This year’s graduating BVST 50 class includes 27 rangers and five lifeguards, selected from a competitive pool of approximately 830 applicants. Their assignments span the state, from the North Coast Redwoods to the Central Valley, Santa Cruz, Orange Coast, and Inland Empire districts.

Those interested in a career with California State Parks can go to https://www.parks.ca.gov/jobs.

From the program’s start in September 2024, the cadets have shown unwavering commitment to protecting California’s natural and cultural treasures. Their journey exemplifies this year’s motto: “Water and Land, Together We Stand,” reflecting their dedication to safeguarding the state’s diverse landscapes and waterways for future generations.

“We welcome 32 new guardians of California’s most cherished places,” said State Parks Director Armando Quintero. “These men and women have not only trained hard, but they have chosen a life of service, of standing in the gap between preservation and destruction, between safety and danger. They will be the steady hands guiding lost hikers home, the first responders in times of crisis, and the storytellers who connect us to our past. Their duty is not just a job, but a promise to protect the lands and waters that define who we are as Californians.”

The cadets’ training was extensive, ensuring they are prepared for the challenges ahead. Key areas of instruction included:

  • Strategic communication and de-escalation techniques
  • Physical arrests and defensive tactics
  • Search and rescue operations
  • Investigation techniques
  • Visitor services, public education and interpretation
  • Park resource protection and management
  • Firearms training and first aid

The program’s rigorous curriculum also prepared the cadets for the next stage of their journey: a 13-week Field Training Officer Program, where they will gain hands-on, on-the-job training.

Explore the New Dashboard: Stay Informed on Environmental and Health Impacts from January Wildfires

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Explore the New Dashboard: Stay Informed on Environmental and Health Impacts from January Wildfires

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has launched an interactive online dashboard that provides the public with access to environmental and health monitoring data collected in response to the January 2025 wildfires. Developed in collaboration with regional and state partners, the dashboard includes data results and analysis from multiple agencies to support a coordinated and transparent post-fire response.

This dashboard offers a visual overview of monitoring locations across Los Angeles County, including areas where assessments are being conducted for air, surface, water and human health impacts.

While the map showcases key monitoring sites, it does not yet represent all locations, including paths from mobile monitoring units. Additional monitoring sites will be added as new data becomes available.

Monitoring efforts are grouped into four primary focus areas:

  • Air: Evaluation of indoor and outdoor air quality to detect pollutants that may affect respiratory health.
  • Surface: Testing for contaminants on indoor surfaces, soil, coastal sand, and wildfire debris like ash and soot to assess exposure risks.
  • Water: Sampling of coastal waters, freshwater sources, and pools to monitor for wildfire-related contamination.
  • Human Health: Voluntary blood lead testing to determine potential exposure, particularly for children and other vulnerable populations.

This dashboard is part of Los Angeles County’s commitment to transparency, public engagement, and community well-being. By making this information accessible, the Department of Public Health aims to empower residents with timely, science-based insights into the potential environmental and health impacts of the recent wildfires.

The data collected and shared through this platform will continue to inform recovery efforts, guide public health recommendations, and support long-term response efforts across impacted communities.

Details: https://tinyurl.com/Post-fire-assessment

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