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 Sampson County landfill can be smelled before seen. This olfactory indicator points toward the sensory scale of these pungent emissions but also toward the geographic scope: this landfill receives waste from as far away as Orange County (the state's most expensive property/tax base), among dozens of other distant counties, making this "hazardous site" a lesson in realizing impact beyond the immediate locale. So when we answer the question, "What is this hazard?" we must think not only about the landfill as a thing in itself but as a set of economic and political relations of capital and the transit of other peoples' trash, into this lower-income, rural, predominantly African-American neighborhood. In this way, 'thinking with a landfill' (like this one in Sampson County) enables us to analyze wider sets of relationships, NIMBY-ist policymaking, consumerism, waste management, and the racialized spatial politics that enable Sampson County to be the recipient of trash from all over the state. At the same time we think spatially and in transit, we can think historically to (a) inquire about the DEQ policies that enable this kind of waste management system; and (b) the emergent "solutions" in the green energy sector that propose to capture the landfill's methane in order to render the stench productive for the future -- that is, to enable more consumption, by turning garbage into gas. As such, the idea of "hazard" can expand beyond the site itself - impactful and affective as that site might be - to examine the uneven relations of exchange and capitalist-driven values of productivity that further entrench infrastructures such as these. [This offers a conceptual corrollary to thinking, as well, about the entrenchment of CAFOs for "green" biogas development, as we address elsewhere in the platform].

Danielle Koonce in an Opinion piece in the Fayetteville Observer, states...

"And it’s not just household garbage coming in — chemical waste and coal ash has also been disposed of in the Sampson County landfill."

"We listened to community members share how they can no longer garden or enjoy the outdoors due to the thick odor and fumes from the landfill."

"We learned that the landfill receives trash from around the state, from as far away as New York City, and even trash that comes in on ship-barges through Wilmington."

While Bryan Wuester, manager for the Sampson County Landfill states in the Sampson Independent...

"The Sampson landfill accepts waste from North Carolina only, about 5,450 tons from 16 different counties a day."

"The landfill accepts three kinds of waste: construction and demolition materials, solid waste and special waste, which are byproducts of industry. No coal ash comes into the Sampson facility..."

These are two different stories of the landfill coming from two different stakeholders, one in which needs the landfill to be in operation for a job and the other a concerned citizen worried about the disproportional impacts her community faces. While Danielle Koonce listens to the realities of the community members located around the landfill who express concern and worry, the landfill manager denies these realities and insists they are not true. This is not only invaliding to the community members who are fighting to get their voices heard but further embeds environmental injustice into the community.  

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