Eric Nolan

Eric Nolan is the Senior Correspondent: Food, Water & Environmental Health at Just Right News, where he covers the systems that feed families, sustain communities, and shape the land. He also leads Earth on the Table, a series that brings policy down to the plate—tracing how decisions made in boardrooms and hearing rooms show up in grocery aisles, on restaurant menus, and at the family dinner table. Born on 2/2/1976 in Fresno, California and now based in Eugene, Oregon, Eric reports with a distinctly Western, hands-on sensibility grounded in work, stewardship, and common sense. Eric grew up in the Central Valley’s patchwork of orchards and fields, where water is never an abstraction. As a kid who learned to read seasons by the dust on the pickup and the depth of the irrigation ditch, he saw droughts tighten belts and regulations ripple through rural towns. Those early years taught him to ask hard questions: Who gets a say when water is scarce? What really keeps food affordable? How do we protect the land without punishing the people who care for it? That practical curiosity—shaped by years of early mornings, calloused hands, and kitchen-table budget math—anchors his reporting to the realities of families, farmers, and small businesses. In his twenties and thirties, Eric split his time between fieldwork and the food world, from pruning rows and checking drip lines to hauling produce, cutting meat, canning tomatoes, and learning what it takes to get dinner on the table when prices rise and shelves run thin. He moved north to Oregon for the promise of rain and trees, and found new stories in forests and watersheds: wildfire smoke that settles into valleys, river controversies that pit neighbor against neighbor, fisheries management that can lift or sink coastal towns, and the constant balancing act between conservation and livelihoods. At Just Right News—a conservative newsroom that believes policy should answer to people, not the other way around—Eric brings a citizen-first perspective to food, water, and environmental health. He follows the money, reads the studies, and checks claims against what he sees on the ground. His work spotlights how one-size-fits-all rules can backfire, how local knowledge can solve problems faster than distant bureaucracy, and how markets and innovation can be powerful tools for stewardship. He is skeptical of fashionable narratives that ignore tradeoffs, and he insists on measurable outcomes: cleaner water, safer food, healthier forests, and communities that can actually afford to live where they work. Earth on the Table extends that mission, putting producers, anglers, doctors, water managers, and everyday shoppers around the same figurative table. The series blends reporting with practical takeaways—how to source responsibly without breaking the bank, what labels really mean, and which risks matter most in environmental health. Eric writes under the pen name “Eric Nolan” to keep the focus on the issues and the people who live them, not on personality. From Fresno roots to Oregon rain, Eric brings respect for hard work, a bias toward facts you can verify, and a belief that conservation and prosperity belong together. His beat is where land meets livelihood—and where good policy becomes real life.