North Bay Report: Plastic Bag Ban Continued

Single use shopping bags, whether made of plastic or paper, are being targeted for extinction across California, a campaign that ratcheted up its local activism with a public symposium on the subject in Santa Rosa Feb. 2.

The underlying goal of the bag bills is to redirect consumer behavior toward much greater, regular use of reusable bags, whether made of plastic, cloth or canvas, says Green Cities California coordinator Carol Misseldine, even if that agenda is not overt.

San Francisco did not set out to enact a ban on plastic bags, explained Kevin Drew, the city's Zero Waste Coordinator. But the opposition they faced ultimately pushed them in that direction.

You'll find a concise analysis of the various measures that have been enacted in California here, along with a brief history of the issue. The agenda of the Santa Rosa forum and suggestions for ways to wean your own use of single use shopping bags can both be found at the Reduce Single Use website.

Check Rohnert Park Patch's video on the plastic bag ban , and listen to KRCB's full report here.

Regardless of the weather, this is the Season of Nonviolence, the roughly nine-week interval between the anniversaries of the deaths of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The first in a series of events to observe the season will focus on the subject of "Building Compassionate Community."

Michael Nagler is also the founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence, which has just relocated to a new home in Petaluma.

Michael Nagler will be speaking at the Santa Rosa main library on Monday, Feb. 7, at 6 pm. The free event is being sponsored by a coalition of local non-profits seeking to help us all move beyond adversarial communication toward a compassionate community.

Listen to the full report from KRCB's News Director Bruce Robinson here.

A disgraced pathologist from a notorious Sonoma County murder case is just one example of how little his profession is monitored or regulated. The checkered history of Dr. Thomas Gill is part of a broad investigation into the profession of forensic pathology breaking today under the heading of "Post Mortem."

As the team of reporters working on the "Post Mortem" stories turned their attention to California,Ryan Gabrielson found to his surprise that a single company--the Fairfield-based Forensic Medical Group--was contracting to provide autopsy services for much of the northern part of the state.

Dr. Gill was banned from further practice in Sonoma County following the Pelfini debacle, but Gabrielson reports, that Gill continued to work for Forensic Medical Group in other counties who know nothing of the doctor's troubled past.

See the full California Watch report here. Watch the full Frontline Report, "Post Mortem" and listen to the full story on KRCB here.

Editor's note: This story was reported and produced by KRCB, and written for Rohnert Park Patch with the permission of KRCB News Director Bruce Robinson.