Analyze

California’s Central Valley is arguably the most productive agricultural region in the world. Despite making up only 1% of all farmland in the United States, it produces 250 different crops that make up a quarter of all food consumed in the U.S., including close to half of all fruit, nuts, and table foods. The map included below shows the variety and intensity of this kind of cultivation. This level of agricultural production has been made possible by the dominance of industrial agriculture interests at all levels of government, resulting in one of the most physically altered landscapes in the world. These alterations focused in large part on water, the biggest limiting factor for industrial agriculture in a region technically classified as a desert. Over the course of the 20th century, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi–Tulare Lake–was drained to make more land available, the Central Valley Project and State Water Project built thousands of miles of canals and tens of dams to control the supply of water for irrigation, and massive groundwater aquifers were pumped nearly dry during drought years. These transformations were accomplished through the utilization of rhetoric that emphasizes the centrality of the farmer identity to the American political imaginary (despite the massive distance between Californian industrial agriculture and the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal) and the unique importance of providing the nation’s food. This kind of exceptionalism has characterized agriculture across the United States since its inception and has repeatedly produced other forms of social injustice (e.g., the exclusion of agricultural laborers from U.S. labor protections) that compound the hazardous effects of its environmental injustices.

Source

Vo, Katie, Taranjot Bhari and Margaret Tebbe. 2023. Industrial Agriculture in California's Central Valley. In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

California’s Central Valley is arguably the most productive agricultural region in the world. Despite making up only 1% of all farmland in the United States, it produces 250 different crops that make up a quarter of all food consumed in the U.S., including close to half of all fruit, nuts, and table foods. The map included below shows the variety and intensity of this kind of cultivation. This level of agricultural production has been made possible by the dominance of industrial agriculture interests at all levels of government, resulting in one of the most physically altered landscapes in the world. These alterations focused in large part on water, the biggest limiting factor for industrial agriculture in a region technically classified as a desert. Over the course of the 20th century, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi–Tulare Lake–was drained to make more land available, the Central Valley Project and State Water Project built thousands of miles of canals and tens of dams to control the supply of water for irrigation, and massive groundwater aquifers were pumped nearly dry during drought years. These transformations were accomplished through the utilization of rhetoric that emphasizes the centrality of the farmer identity to the American political imaginary (despite the massive distance between Californian industrial agriculture and the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal) and the unique importance of providing the nation’s food. This kind of exceptionalism has characterized agriculture across the United States since its inception and has repeatedly produced other forms of social injustice (e.g., the exclusion of agricultural laborers from U.S. labor protections) that compound the hazardous effects of its environmental injustices.

Vo, Katie, Taranjot Bhari and Margaret Tebbe. 2023. "Industrial Agriculture in California's Central Valley." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

“Environmental justice (EJ) scholars and activists see communities’ ability to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect the local environment, including siting decisions for refineries, power plants, waste dumps, and the like, to be integral to the idea of EJ (Cole and Foster 2001; Schlosberg 2007). For some, this explicitly includes the notion of consent: participatory processes are a means through which community members can give their consent (or not) once they fully understand the scope and consequences of a proposal (Shrader-Frechette 2005, 2007).” (252)

“EJ advocates have called attention to siting practices that target communities of color because of their political margin- alization. In order to challenge the siting of hazardous facilities, commu- nities of color have also had to confront exclusionary decision-making processes characterized by unrepresentative local governments, monolingual proceedings, and reliance on technocratic risk assessments, to name a few (Cole and Foster 2001). As a result, one of the Principles of EJ adopted in 1991 by the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit calls explicitly for justice in decision-making practices: ‘‘Environmental Justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making.’’ (254)

“Seeing disclosure as an important element of informed consent provides ethical grounds to excoriate polluting industries for suppressing information, making misleading scientific claims, and intimidating scientists who wish to draw attention to the health risks they pose (see, e.g., Schrader-Frechette 2007, 39-75).” (255)

“Current discussions of procedural justice in the siting of environmentally hazardous facilities are far from na ̈ıve about the limitations of scientific knowledge. EJ advocates have not only criticized industry and government scientists for patently unethical practices like suppressing data (e.g., Shrader-Frechette 2007), they have pointed out the ways that scientific ways of knowing and technocratic modes of decision making can circumscribe community members’ ability to have a say in decisions that will affect their local environments (Guana 1998; Shrader-Frechette 1991); they have also asserted the need for community members’ local knowledge to be recognized as part of just decision-making procedures (Allen 2003; Fischer 2000).” (263)

This text explores some of the current barriers to achieving procedural justice (participation in decision making by those affected by it) based on Science and Technology Studies (STS). Examples of some of these fundamental barriers include (i) lack of disclosure of information from industry, and (ii) lack of information available at the time of decision making (making consent to be subject to environmental hazards difficult or impossible. The author argues for proactive, STS-based knowledge generation to combat this.

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