Center News and Notes

& the West

For wildland firefighters, another battle looms: for pay and mental health care to match their growing workload

October 31, 2023

Advocates for improved working conditions for firefighters argue that in this particular career, pay and mental health care are sub-standard.

& the West

Transmission, transmission, transmission

August 31, 2023

What it takes to put renewable power on the West’s electrical grids.

& the West

'Despair and complacency are equally unwarranted:' Q&A with Amory Lovins, energy visionary

August 4, 2023

Amory Lovins, a physicist who co-founded RMI (formerly called Rocky Mountain Institute), is an adjunct engineering professor at Stanford and a visiting scholar at the Precourt Institute for Energy. For five decades, he has been a prominent…

& the West

Paradise’s recovery from the Camp Fire became harder when the only hospital left

July 20, 2023

California’s most devastating fire meant a massive loss of lives and homes and, for Paradise residents, the end of any sense of security from natural disaster.

Sycamore Street in the Mission Fields neighborhood of Carmel in January 1995. Orville Myers/The Monterey Herald

& the West

Winter storms exposed the unfairness of California’s flood protections. Are marginalized areas closing the gap?

May 4, 2023

The floods driven by winter storms are nothing new in Monterey County, but the early March catastrophe that swelled the Pajaro and Salinas rivers and drowned farmworker communities exposes the extreme inequality built into flood-control systems.