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.

The aim of this organization is to use medicine and science to record and focus on mass atrocities and human rights violations. The organization was founded on the idea that health care professionals possess skills that pose credibility to those who are persecuted sexually, morally, socially and economically. As health care professionals, they have the opportunity to hold people accountable for their actions. Examples of this include torture, sexual violence, civil unrest- it is their job to protect civilians' basic human rights.

Their membership consists of scientists, healthcare professionals and doctors. 

This organization has invesitgated ad exposed the use of chemical weapons on civilazations in Iraq, exhumed mass graves in Bosnia and Rwanda. They seaked to expose government torture and abuse of civial rights in many countries including-Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone and others. They approach disaster and emergency response through trying to stop them by exposing abuses to human rights. They investigate using human accounts and first hand experience. Through using their resources to expose injustice. They have won a noble peace prize for documenting landmine injuries and calling to ban them.

This group claims to have a new way of addressing emergency situations through using their process of stopping events that are already in progress through investigating the abuses, documenting evidence and stories and using their evidence as a call for action.

The events that motivated their ways of thinking about disaster and health was in 1981 a physician in Boston was called to go to Chilie to investigate the 'disapperance' of three physicians. Johnathan Fine entered the country and met the doctors who were psychologically terrorized. He heard their testimonies and recorded the,. It inspired him to go to Guatemala, Philipines and South Korea to educate about human rights globally. Dr Fine's visit caused the doctors to be released; he decided he wanted to help these people in situations about this full time. In 1986 Robert Laurence, Jean Mayer and Fine created Physicians for Human Rights.

The funding that enables their work to go and help others is through many methods of donation, they recieve grants and investments.

The data/reports they have collected to support their approach to help disaster include annual reports and newsletters that define the issues they are currently focusing on: what it includes, how one person can help. Their website also includes resources that describe the issue they are tackling their position and what is going on to prevent/cure the problem. Their website has experts, a university that specializes on 'empowering global communities' in order to be able to recoginze their lack of human rights. They also have a blog and first hand video accounts.

The research the organization has done in the past year is calling for the closure of Guantanomo Bay and ensuring that the US accepts Syrian refugees. They have taken first hand accounts of individuals in both circumstances. They provide annual reports for each year of the work they have accomplished these reports are extensive and explain what human rights were taken away and what PHR has done to help.