Poll Finds Latinos Concerned About California’s Oceans and Beaches
New America Media, News Report, Peter Micek, Posted: Mar 03, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO -- While nearly all Californians value the state’s oceans and beaches, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), Latinos more directly link the care of state coasts to their votes in the upcoming gubernatorial election.
Latinos often suffer the consequences of bad environmental policies first-hand, says pollster Mark Baldassare, who runs the PPIC’s statewide surveys.
Even though they use beaches at the same rate, Latinos clearly outpoll non-Hispanic whites in concerns over beach access and conditions. They support more harsh restrictions on fishing and coastal development and see storm drain and street pollution in a worse light. Results from African-American and Asian communities were not large enough to include separate statistics on them, pollsters said.
Latinos, 30 percent of the state’s population and growing, could take their environmental concerns to the polls.
Sixty percent of Latinos, compared to 44 percent of non-Hispanic whites, call the environmental positions of gubernatorial candidates very important to them.
“Californians treasure the ocean and the state’s beaches,” says pollster Baldassare. “These attitudes run deep and wide across political parties, coastal and inland areas, and in the growing Latino population -- to ignore them could be politically perilous.”
Latinos threw cold water on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s environmental stance. Only 20 percent support him on the issue, while 46 percent of non-Hispanic whites do.
President Bush’s environmental policy receives almost equal support from Latinos and non-Hispanic whites, at just under 30 percent.
As far as marine life goes, 54 percent of Latinos worry about contamination of fish and other seafood, whereas 38 percent of non-Hispanic whites register concerns. More Latinos than non-Hispanic whites label overfishing, by both commercial and recreational interests, a big problem.
However, Latinos, a mostly immigrant community in California, do not believe ocean conditions for marine life worsened over the last 20 years as much as non-Hispanic whites do.
Conducted from Feb. 8th to 15th, the bilingual (English-Spanish) telephone poll used a random, computer-generated list of phone numbers to reach 2,003 adults from all parts of the state. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation backed this, the seventh in the Special Survey on Californians and the Environment series of polls begun in 2000.
Photo by David Pham, Online Director for New America Media.
Page
1 of 1
|
