Every month, Gianna Patchen, our Chapter Coordinator, and Andrew Christie, a volunteer member of the chapter’s Conservation Committee and Chapter Director from 2004-2023, publish an opinion column in New Times. Here are summaries of their most recent articles.
The state's new CEQA reforms will not fix California's housing crisis
Published in New Times on July 17, 2025
The July installment focuses on the bill passed by the state legislature the previous month to exempt a significant portion of development projects from environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), based on the popular but false notion that CEQA is to blame for California’s affordable housing crisis. Due to the overreach of those rollbacks, environmental groups are now working the phones in Sacramento to clean up the mess made by CEQA “reform” via amendments to the bill that will restore protection from toxic byproducts for communities adjacent to industrially zoned land and specify that the bill's definition of "natural and protected lands" should include habitat for species protected under the Endangered Species Acts and California's Native Plant Protection Act.
A fabricated 'emergency' aims to reduce environmental protections
Published in New Times on August 14, 2025
The August installment summarizes the response of the Sierra Club and many other environmental groups to the Bureau of Land Management's plan to open more than 100,000 acres of public lands in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties to oil and gas drilling, despite a large national surplus in unused drilling permits. It’s part of Trump’s strategy to declare an "energy emergency" to justify gutting environmental standards for oil and gas production as a pretext for boosting fossil fuels and cutting renewable energy. The article points out the fundamental purpose of our state and national environmental laws: Assuring adequate public input to avoid bad outcomes for communities and the environment.