The Unintended Consequences of Well-Meaning Activism in Chico, California

It started as just another podcast episode - a ride-along with Chico, California police officer Cesar Sandoval, part of the Chico PD Target Team at the time. I was producing a series about homelessness in Chico and wanted to get closer to the issue, talk to people on the ground, and tell their stories with empathy.

But empathy doesn’t always mean understanding.

We pulled up to the edge of the pavement near the Lindo Channel Trestle and stepped out. Sandoval explained that we’d be hiking down into the dry creek bed to do wellness checks and let people know they’d need to move. At the trailhead, I noticed a small stack of unopened Lunchables sitting neatly on the ground. I pointed to them.

“Activists,” he said. “They stop by once a day to drop off food for the folks camping below. Part of a route they do around town.”

I didn’t think much of it. We headed down the path into the encampment beneath the Esplanade overpass. Six tents, maybe ten people. A few still asleep. A recliner, some soiled mattresses, and piles of trash. Scattered through the brush were dozens of empty Lunchable containers - the same kind I’d just seen stacked at the entrance - tossed everywhere like plastic breadcrumbs.

At that time, I was in my fourth year of producing The Barbless Fly Fishing Podcast, a local show about fishing and conservation in and around Chico. We’d done countless episodes on water quality, featuring NOAA scientists, CDFW staff, NGO reps, and fisheries biologists. Clean water - for people and for salmon, trout, and everything downstream - had become personal to me. That background shaped how I saw what happened next.

A sickness hit me as I stood there. The food those activists had dropped off at the trailhead had become a field of plastic - wrappers, trays, half-eaten sandwiches, juice boxes. The creek below glittered with it like confetti after a parade. And I knew that once the first spring runoff hit, all of it would wash through the Lindo Channel, down to the Sacramento River, through the Delta, and out to the Bay - maybe even the Pacific.

That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t compassion. It was pollution mistaken for virtue.

I realized how often “help” - especially the kind that makes the helper feel good - ignores the second and third-order effects. Sure, hunger was eased for a moment. But the aftermath - the trash, the dependency, the environmental and financial toll - became someone else’s problem. Everyone lost: the homeless, the fish, the residents, the taxpayers, the city itself.

Watching those drop-offs later, I couldn’t shake the thought that the people doing it were getting a dopamine hit from the act itself - from feeling good rather than doing good. It was compassion without accountability, a kind of moral self-medication that looked kind but created harm.

Up to that point, I’d believed people just needed more empathy and more funding. But that day cracked something open. I started to see that good intentions without responsibility were just another form of negligence. The irony was impossible to miss - many of the same people who railed against corporations for polluting the planet were, in their own way, feeding the same chain of cause and effect.

The ride-along didn’t radicalize me - it woke me up. It made me look harder at the systems, incentives, and narratives that shape how we “help” and who actually benefits. I began to see how moral vanity - the urge to look good instead of do good - had seeped into policy, culture, and journalism alike.

I didn’t stop caring. I just stopped confusing emotion for evidence.

That day by the creek was my first wake-up moment - not political, but perceptual. It’s when I realized that fixing the world starts with seeing it clearly, even when what you see makes you uncomfortable.

I don’t agree with every part of the Republican platform, but right now, they seem to be the only ones still grounded in cause and effect.

A note on Officer Sandoval:

Having recently moved back to Chico, I learned that Officer Cesar Sandoval has passed away. My time with him left a strong impression - he genuinely cared about the people he served and he loved Chico deeply. My condolences go out to his family, friends, and colleagues. He was one of the good ones.