Food & Water Watch

Food & Water Watch’s California team works with local communities and a broad range of environmental and social justice groups statewide to ban fracking and other destructive oil and gas drilling, and to stop corporations from controlling and exploiting our water and agriculture. Our organizers are active throughout Los Angeles and Ventura, Santa Barbara, Monterey and  Butte Counties along with the San Francisco Bay Area.

Fighting Fracking and Oil and Gas Drilling

California is the nation’s third-largest oil producer. Unfortunately, Governor Jerry Brown continues to allow the industry to threaten the environment and public health by supporting dangerous drilling, including fracking. The California team of Food & Water Watch is working to ban fracking in the state. We’ve helped win fracking bans in San Benito, Santa Cruz, Butte and Alameda counties and the city of Beverley Hills.  These bans will protect local aquifers from toxic chemicals used in fracking.  On Nov. 8, voters in Monterey County will decide on a ban on fracking, in the biggest local environmental issue of the 2016 election. 

We also work with community groups to end drilling in South Los Angeles and other urban areas to safeguard residents from the serious health impacts affecting those communities.

In addition, we helped break the news of the massive Aliso Canyon gas storage leak, and have been working alongside Save Porter Ranch to close the facility for good.

As a founding member of Californians Against Fracking, a statewide coalition calling for a ban, Food & Water Watch works to protect all Californians from dangerous oil and gas extraction and to advocate for a just transition to 100% renewable energy.

Protecting Water

California grows most of the nation’s produce, and agriculture accounts for eighty percent of water use in the state. As the state continues to face a historic drought, it also  bears the consequences of a century of water mismanagement. Major giveaways of public water to agencies that serve the powerful corporate agriculture interests that are literally sucking the state’s aquifers dry. Food & Water Watch’s California team fights for an overhaul of the state’s water management water to ensure Californians – not corporations – have the water they need.

Protecting Our Food

Food & Water Watch works with Protect California Food to end the use of oil wastewater to irrigate crops in the Central Valley.  Although consumers are only now becoming aware of it, for years oil companies like Chevron have been selling their minimally treated wastewater to local water districts, which provide it to agricultural producers to potentially irrigate their crops. Farmers, who are competing with oil companies for scarce water in a drought have little choice but to take the water, which is not regularly tested for toxic chemicals used in oil production. Food & Water Watch along with our partners have called on Governor Brown and the State Water Board to halt the practice unless it can be proven safe.