On the part of the community of Rock Haven that received forest thinning treatments, the Creek Fire lost enough intensity to spare mature trees and historic homes.

In many ways, climate change has already hit home here in the San Joaquin Valley—especially for the agricultural industry, which produces as much as a third of the nation’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts and brings in billions of dollars each year to the local economy.

TED Talks, the popular videos about “ideas worth spreading,” invited Fresno’s Irma Olguin Jr. to take the stage this year to share her ideas about how to connect people from marginalized communities to training and jobs in the tech industry. It’s work she champions as a co-founder of Bitwise Industries, and from the TED stage she shared its formula for success. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke to Olguin Jr. about her experience telling the story of Bitwise to a global audience.

Clovis native Chris Colfer found fame as an actor on the hit show Glee, and as a New York Times best-selling author of young adult novels like the "Land of Stories" series. But this weekend Colfer will come back to his roots, hosting and performing in a fundraiser for Good Company Players, the Fresno theatre company where he got his start. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with Colfer about the event and what inspired his latest book.

In 2014, California’s state legislature passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a sweeping law with the goal of balancing the amount of water pumped out of underground aquifers with the amount returned through recharge. How that balancing act would actually work was left up to hundreds of locally governed water agencies, which are now beginning to receive feedback from the state Department of Water Resources on the sustainability plans they submitted in late 2019 and early 2020.

The clock is ticking to redraw legislative boundaries following the 2020 census. This week California’s redistricting commission released a preliminary map of what the state’s congressional districts could look like. If finalized the new map could make it a lot more difficult for some incumbent representatives like Devin Nunes to hold on to their seats. To learn more about this process and its timeline Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock checked in with the non-profit California Common Cause. She spoke with the organization’s executive director Jonathan Mehta Stein and Central Valley redistricting organizer Luis Huerta-Silva.

Fresno poet Mai Der Vang looks back on a dark chapter of history in her new collection “Yellow Rain.” Hmong refugees fleeing Laos at the end of the Vietnam war reported being attacked with chemical and biological weapons that led to thousands of deaths, but American scientists dismissed refugee accounts, claiming that the mysterious substance raining down on them was the feces of honeybees. Through exhaustive research of once classified documents, Vang reveals the truth of what happened, giving voice to the victims of the attacks. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke to Vang about how she uncovered their forgotten stories.

For more than two decades the small Tulare County community of Tooleville has been without a secure supply of safe drinking water. The simplest solution would be to connect the town’s water system to that of its neighbor, the City of Exeter. It would take less than a mile of pipe to get it done. But years of red tape and failed negotiations have kept the consolidation from taking place. Now the state has stepped in with a new law, SB 403, which could bring safe drinking water to Tooleville and hundreds of communities like it throughout the Central Valley. To learn more, Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke to Michael Claiborne, directing attorney for the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability.

The tricolored blackbird, native almost exclusively to Central California, gained protection under the state’s Endangered Species Act in 2018. Since then, the most at-risk colonies have successfully been protected, thanks in large part to San Joaquin Valley dairies.

The California Reporting Project has been gathering police misconduct files from departments around the state, including Bakersfield. The collaboration, which includes dozens of newsrooms including KVPR, is developing a web tool that will allow community members to explore misconduct files. They are also seeking feedback from the public to enhance that tool. To learn more about the project, Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with Lezla Gooden, a reporter and engagement producer for the California Reporting Project.

The physical and emotional toll of treating COVID-19 patients is driving many nurses to leave the profession, and it's raising alarms about the state’s capacity to educate their replacements. To learn more about why nursing programs are so impacted, and how to fix them, Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with Catherine Kennedy, a registered nurse and a president of the California Nurses Association, Ashley A. Smith, a reporter with EdSource, and Keisha Lewis Nesbitt, director of nursing at Fresno City College.

Photojournalist Ryan Christopher Jones spent five years documenting one Fresno family’s transition from poverty into the middle class. His images were recently published in “The Atlantic.” Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke to Jones about how the project evolved from its initial concept of exploring the growing tech scene in Fresno, into an examination of social mobility.

The first thing you notice in the livestock pavilion at the Big Fresno Fair is the sound. There are the animals, of course: The cows and goats being steered to their enclosures, the squeals of hogs less than excited about being bathed, and the blow dryers fluffing up freshly shorn sheep.

If there’s one thing Leland Decker will teach you, it’s this. People who love to be around horses, they really love to be around horses. There’s no gray area.

Drought and climate change are presenting big challenges to California farmers.

While working as an elementary school teacher in the Central Valley, Marie Casao was disturbed by how her fellow educators taught indengous history to their students. So after earning a master’s degree in education from Fresno State, she curated a curriculum of resources for teachers looking to challenge stereotypes about Native Americans in their classrooms. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with Casao about the project.

Since 1989, October has been designated as Domestic Violence Awareness Month. But misperceptions about domestic violence continue to permeate our culture. To learn more, Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with Tracey Salisbury, assistant professor of interdisciplinary and ethnic studies at California State University, Bakersfield.

Margarita Engle, the celebrated author and poet who calls the Central Valley home, published two new books in 2021. The first, “Your Heart, My Sky,” is a young adult novel written in verse. The second is a children’s picture book titled “A Song of Frutas.” Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with her about how both books were inspired by her Cuban-American heritage.

A University of North Carolina study found that roughly 1,800 newspapers have closed in the United States since 2004, the vast majority of which were weekly publications that served small communities. But here in Central California, the Mariposa Gazette, is still going strong. In fact, it’s the state’s oldest weekly newspaper. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock talked to the paper’s editor and co-owner Greg Little about the book he recently wrote and the future of small-town newspapers.

The Central Valley’s reputation as an affordable place to live has been challenged by skyrocketing housing prices. To learn what is behind the sharp increase in home and rental prices, and what this means for the ongoing affordable housing crisis, Valley Edition host Kathleen Schock spoke with Amber Crowell, associate professor of sociology at Fresno State; Manuela Tobias, housing reporter for CalMatters; Emma De La Rosa, policy advocate with the Leadership Council; and Ian Sharples, housing program manager for the Community Action Partnership of Kern.