Eloy Ortiz, special-projects manager for Regeneración Pajaro Valley Climate Action, has tried to help farmworkers and others in Pajaro recover after disastrous flooding forced thousands to evacuate and left a yet-unknown number of people and families homeless. He recently walked through Pajaro, talking to people and trying to assess their needs. Here, he recreates that walk for us and helps us see the need, the disenfranchisement and the disconnect in aid. “Farmworkers are humble and don’t advocate for themselves and that’s why we at Regeneración do the work,” he writes.
Community Voices
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Mental illness is not a crime; let’s stop criminalizing it in Santa Cruz County
The Santa Cruz Main Jail is the largest mental health provider in the county. “Let that sink in,” writes Ricki Lee Stautz, a social worker and substance use counselor, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and spent time in jail in 2016. The jail is not a place for healing, she says. The environment exacerbates mental health symptoms and feeds a dangerous cycle of recidivism. She thinks Santa Cruz County can do better and explains how restorative justice and diversion programs work. The programs, many of which already exist in the county, are little known and don’t get the public or financial support they need, she says. She wants to change that.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Don’t let your plants drown in all this rain — you can save them if you try
Martin Quigley, director of the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanic Garden, offers tips and tricks to help save gardens inundated with water during these historic storms.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
‘It’s undignified’: Pajaro residents march to voice frustration, call for more help
Close to 200 people marched through Pajaro on Thursday to the bridge separating the Monterey County agricultural town from Watsonville, on the Santa Cruz County side of the Pajaro River. They voiced frustrations at what they say is a slow response and lack of help after the March 11 failure of the river’s levee flooded Pajaro and left many homes damaged or uninhabitable. Here’s what Lookout’s Kevin Painchaud saw and heard.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
I will no longer help bankroll climate destruction; seniors, join me and pull money from big banks
Santa Cruz lawyer Brian Unitt admits he has “benefited from the fossil fuel economy” in his 65 years. That’s why he now wants to do his part for the future and is pulling his money from big banks — which have loaned or underwritten more than $800 billion in fossil fuel financing since 2015, he says. He closed his checking and savings and credit card accounts with companies like Chase and Bank of America and moved his money to more climate-friendly institutions. He challenges all people over 60 — who he says control up to 70% of the money in the U.S. — to do the same.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
The California Coastal Commission: It’s critically important, but it increasingly overreaches
The California Coastal Commission keeps our beaches and scenic views accessible to all, and that is a good thing, writes Lookout political columnist Mike Rotkin, who fought to pass the 1976 Coastal Act that followed the commission’s establishment. But Rotkin does wonder why the commission is weighing in on so many recent issues in Santa Cruz — from hotels to oversized vehicle parking — and suggests commissioners might be setting rules in Santa Cruz that don’t apply to other communities, including Carmel and Monterey.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
On Jack O’Neill’s 100th birthday, let’s celebrate ocean protection and education
People associate Jack O’Neill, who died in 2017 at the age of 94, with inventing the wetsuit, which allowed him and other surfers to spend more time in cold water. As we approach what would have been his 100th birthday on Monday, Tracey Weiss, executive director of O’Neill Sea Odyssey, encourages us to celebrate Jack’s role in ocean protection and education. Jack called the program, which focuses on educating youth about the ocean, his “greatest achievement.”
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Letter to the editor: Don’t change Cabrillo College name
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here. To the editor: Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when the crack cocaine epidemic became known to the general population, we all came to realize what the scourge of coke was about. At the same time, Coca Cola’s primary […]
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Letter to the editor: More government ‘push and pull’ needed to make climate-friendly choices easier and cheaper
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here. To the editor: I attended the climate change event hosted by the Democratic Women’s Club of Santa Cruz and described in Max Chun’s March 17 article. Representatives from organizations that are doing important work to address local environmental […]
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Climate injustice is happening in Pajaro: It’s our moral obligation to fix the system
Climate change is here and it’s our moral obligation to act, says Sarah Newkirk, executive director of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County. We need to adapt faster to climate change, speed up federal responses, including funding and — most critically — help people affected, she says. That means assisting the people of Pajaro who have lost homes and also future income, since many are farmworkers and fields are now too flooded to work.