Santa Cruz County Environment Articles

The conservation director of Land Trust of Santa Cruz talks about the highlights of his work, and some of the issues he sees in maintaining California’s parks.

Dianne Feinstein, California’s longtime senior U.S. senator, has died at age 90, after a legendary career in public life that began in 1961 and took off amidst the turbulent, violent era of San Francisco in the 1970s.

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara unveils a plan to shore up the California insurance market for homeowners. Insurers would return to wildfire zones, but would have an easier path to rate increases.

Legislators weren’t able to reach a compromise that helps insurers with wildfire risk while also protecting homeowners. Interest groups hope to find one in meetings this fall.

Now that electric cars are mainstream, higher-income Californians will no longer qualify for state subsidies. Lower-income buyers could get up to $12,000.

California Forever, the company backed by billionaire Silicon Valley investors that wants to build a new city in Solano County, has posted a new website in an attempt to start a "conversation" about the massive project.

As four aging hydroelectric dams are demolished, tribes and communities along the Klamath River wait anxiously to see what the future holds. “Once a river is dammed, is it damned forever?” experts ask.

The mysterious buyers of $1 billion worth of Solano County land have been revealed as a consortium of Silicon Valley billionaires who want to build a new city from scratch.

This year, a series of extreme events in California and around the country have wreaked havoc, driven by climate change. How prepared are we for things to get worse?

At 118 years old, The Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History is still evolving

Neighbors to one of California’s biggest hazardous waste recyclers say they’re unfairly exposed to pollution, but can California afford to lose one of the few facilities that still takes toxic waste?

Since the Gold Rush era, land reclamation projects have helped to build California, but they are also damaging the state’s environment for people, plants and animals by eliminating essential wetlands.

Climate change has warmed Pacific Ocean waters, causing storms to rapidly intensify, leading to the first tropical storm watch in Southern California ever as Hurricane Hilary prepares to make landfall.

Two different state courts have ruled recently that the human noise created by future tenants in housing projects are a form of pollution that cities must address. Lawmakers and the governor are working to reverse that novel interpretation of environmental …

California has used reclamation districts to turn millions of acres of unusable swamps into fertile agricultural land, starting in the earliest days of the Gold Rush. Here’s how it happened.

Three fossil fuel plants will stand by to provide emergency power for three more years despite California's mandate to switch to clean energy by 2045.

By channeling funds to a number of nonprofits working on various issues in a given region, community foundations help solve big problems throughout California.

A conversation with Stacy Caldwell, CEO of Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation

A discrimination complaint filed by Native American tribes and environmental justice groups alleges that California has failed to protect water quality in the Bay-Delta. The EPA is investigating.

Waste would undergo extensive treatment and testing before it’s piped directly to taps, providing a new, costly but renewable water supply. The state’s new draft rules are more than a decade in the making.