What do people from California have in common with people from Chiapas?  Read Jeff Conant’s latest article on AlterNet today to find out!  Be sure to check out the slideshow that accompanies it too – it includes some of my photos from the San Joaquin Valley.  Some of them have already been published elsewhere and some are new (like the one below).  All were chosen by the author to help readers visualize some of the toxicity problems in the San Joaquin Valley so they might better understand why some Valley residents participated in the recent lawsuit against California’s Global Warming Solutions Act.  See my other post on this topic here.

Jeff used to be my boss at the Hesperian Foundation when we worked on this book together (Spanish translation coming soon!).  He came to Hesperian after getting booted out of Mexico for, as I understand it, the crime of volunteering on small scale water distribution systems in Zapatista communities in Chiapas.  I left Hesperian to get a master’s degree at UC Davis, where I researched the Central Valley environmental justice movement.  Through the twists and turns of current events, our working lives have crossed paths again, this time through concerns about how a policy designed to slow climate change might negatively impact poor people in both California and Chiapas.

In our past life together, Jeff’s job was to write a book and mine was to get it illustrated, so providing photos for his article this week was a fun twist on an old theme.