Central Valley

Nancy and Bryan Lara, ages 10 and 8, knew something was wrong when they saw a tractor surrounded by white clouds near their school bus stop in Caruthers. "I know that clouds are not on the ground, they're in the sky," Bryan said. The children hid behind a row of grapevines, but they could taste the noxious blend of liquid sulfur, gibberellic acid, insecticide and fertilizer as the rig rolled past them, billowing out its chemical cargo. Moments earlier, the mist had enveloped 17-year-old Carina at another stop about two blocks away.

Adecade ago, Lindsay was the Central Valley town that the middle class had abandoned. Its farm economy was in tatters and its downtown looked tired and deserted. An influx of immigrant farm laborers, combined with white flight, made it one of the poorest cities in Tulare County. But the forgotten city of 10,500, located off state Highway 65 southeast of Visalia, is undergoing something of a rebirth. A large downtown plaza has been redesigned and lushly landscaped, drawing 5,000 people for a Friday night farmers market.

In a blow to the state's producers of almonds and other crops, federal officials announced Friday that they may not be able to provide water for the upcoming growing season in parts of the Central Valley. To cope with the continuing drought, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will not provide water for agriculture beginning in March to at least 200 local water districts in that region, agency spokeswoman Lynnette Wirth said.

In the belly of the Central Valley, hard times have hit harder than just about anywhere else in America. But it's also a stronghold of Republicans ready to shrink the safety net. One in five Merced County adults are out of work, home foreclosures run rampant and anti-poverty programs are stretched to the limit. The county welfare chief calls it California's Appalachia.

The Environmental Protection Agency is focusing on the effect of hazardous waste recycling plants on minorities and low-income communities. The move hearkens back to a Clinton-era executive order that required federal agencies to consider the effect of their policies on disadvantaged communities. Although the Bush administration largely ignored the mandate, Obama-appointed EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson has promised to analyze those effects.

In a bow to a summer of angry complaints about water cutbacks to Central Valley farms, the Obama administration said Wednesday it would invite the National Academy of Sciences to examine the environmental measures restricting some water shipments from Northern California. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he would ask the academy to conduct an independent review of the science underpinning federal pumping limits imposed under the Endangered Species Act to protect smelt and salmon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Last week's Los Angeles Times/USC poll spilled a flood of pessimism from California voters about their state: They're troubled by its direction, upset at its politicians and sure that nothing will wrest California from the abyss. That was about it, when it came to agreement. One always presumes a fair amount of communal thought in a state, even one this large. But apart from a shared disdain for the governor and the Legislature, there is hardly anything communal anymore in California politics.

There are poets who show us the exterior world and poets who ferry news of their inner turmoil. Yet very few possess the double vision required to do both. Sylvia Plath surveyed and stoked the fires within her; Gary Snyder is far happier scouting for forest blazes in the Sierras. Until he began publishing the wickedly well-tuned work collected in "Chronic," D.A. Powell seemed of the Plath school: fierce, inward and wrapped in tongues of camp. To read his poems was to watch a man blow on the embers of erotic memory.

Public health groups have filed suit against the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to force stricter rules against fumigants that contribute to air pollution. The suit, filed last week in Sacramento County Superior Court, says state regulators failed to analyze reasonable alternatives to the chemicals or to minimize the effect of volatile organic compounds from treating strawberries and other crops. "Pesticides rank among the largest contributors to California's notoriously smoggy air," said Brent Newell, legal director of the San Francisco-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, which filed the suit on behalf of affected residents in Ventura County and the Central Valley.

Re "The California Fix: Start from scratch," Editorial, Aug. 16 They say newspapers are dying. As an 83-year-old native Southern Californian and former Republican, now independent, I can tell you that The Times has identified an exciting mission for your paper and other major papers within the state. Your editorial initiates a critical series of editorials best undertaken by newspapers. Perhaps a consortium built among the key papers in San Diego, the Central Valley and the Bay Area can exert the necessary impetus and collective wisdom to come up with an intelligent bipartisan blueprint of action, supported by the dominating business and money interests that must want a revival of the state's economy.