Summer 2003

Calpine, the energy corporation that wants to build a geothermal plant on sacred land at Medicine Lake [see Terrain Summer 2000, Winter 2002], is now proposing a liquified natural gas (LNG) storage facility and 2,200-megawatt power plant on the site of a defunct pulp mill on Humboldt Bay.

San Francisco may become the first major US city to challenge corporate personhood — a 117-year-old concept that gives corporations the same constitutional rights as human beings. Matt Gonzalez, president of the city’s Board of Supervisors, has agreed to introduce a board resolution that makes the case for ending corporations’ legal status as “persons” through a US Supreme Court decision or a constitutional amendment.

Edelmira Alcazar was cooking salsa on the day that people in Earlimart — a California town of about 6,000 in Tulare County — would come to call “el dia de la quimica,” the day of the chemical.

During planting season, a Sacramento Valley rice farmer’s fields are hardly fields at all. They are still, square lakes separated by dikes and occupied by white egrets.

The World Bank estimates that by 2025, two thirds of the world’s population will not have safe water. In the United States, aquifers are rapidly declining; the entire Colorado River disappears into aqueducts before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico.