Eric Nolan

Eric Nolan is the Senior Correspondent for Food, Water & Environmental Health at Just Right News and the lead voice behind the feature series Earth on the Table. From fertilizer costs to drinking water standards, he tracks how environmental policy shows up on the grocery bill and the monthly budget. His reporting is rooted in a conservative newsroom’s priorities: stewardship without excess, accountability without theatrics, and a clear-eyed look at how rules made far from the farm gate affect the families who feed and fuel the country. Raised in Fresno, California, Nolan came of age in the Central Valley’s grid of orchards, canals, and two-lane farm roads. The rhythms of planting, harvest, and drought were not abstractions; they were the calendar. That upbringing taught him that water policy is ultimately about people—growers, packers, and farmworkers—trying to make a living in a place where a single allocation decision can make or break a season. It also shaped his approach to journalism: measure ideas by whether they work in the real world, and test lofty claims against the dust, data, and dollars of daily life. Now based in Eugene, Oregon, Nolan reports from a region where environmental debates are constant and consequential. He spends time in mill towns, on irrigation districts’ ditch banks, and along rivers where habitat goals collide with hydropower and irrigation demands. From county commission meetings to hatchery tours, he treats expertise broadly—listening to loggers and biologists, ranchers and toxicologists, fishermen and local health officials. His field reporting is matched by deep document work, using public records, budget analyses, and mapping to follow the money and quantify tradeoffs. Nolan’s beat covers the full arc of food and water policy: drought planning and groundwater rules, forest management and wildfire smoke, drinking water standards, PFAS and pesticide oversight, meat processing capacity, and the supply-chain bottlenecks that ripple into meat, dairy, and produce prices. He is skeptical of one-size-fits-all mandates and carbon targets that skip the math on reliability or cost, and he brings the same scrutiny to corporate sustainability claims and activist talking points. In his work, stewardship means caring for land and water while keeping rural economies alive; public health means weighing risks honestly and communicating them without fear-mongering. With close to two decades of reporting in Western communities, Nolan started in community newsrooms and built a career translating technical policy into plain language. He has studied environmental policy and reporting, but credits his best lessons to farmers watching the sky and water managers watching the gauges. At Just Right News, he aims to keep readers ahead of the story: what a new drinking water rule will add to a utility bill, how salmon recovery plans change irrigation schedules, why a wildfire season’s fuel loads start with winter thinning decisions. Earth on the Table embodies that mission. Each installment follows a single policy from committee room to kitchen table—tracking costs, winners and losers, and the practical alternatives policymakers overlook. Whether he’s unpacking a dam relicensing battle, a school lunch nutrition shift, or a timber sale challenged in court, Nolan writes with a reporter’s discipline and a conservative’s instinct for local control, property rights, and prosperity grounded in responsible use of resources.