For the last five years, I’ve researched Valley fever at a multidisciplinary lab at the University of California, Merced. This experience has convinced me that for my work to pay the greatest dividends for society—and to do the most to fight this terrible disease—it must take place in direct conversation with community members, clinicians, industry, and policymakers.

Valley fever is a respiratory disease caused by the Coccidioides soil fungus, which is common in the American Southwest, including Arizona and California’s Central Valley. People who work with soil in agricultural fields, construction, and landscaping are particularly at risk. Symptoms resemble those of respiratory diseases like the common cold or flu: coughs, chest pains, fevers, and body aches. This can make swift and accurate diagnosis difficult. Valley fever is estimated to kill about 200 people per year, though the true number is probably higher. In California’s Central Valley, infection rates are 90 times higher than they are in the northern part of the state—a disparity that is exacerbated by the region’s low ratio of physicians to patients.

The heavy burden of the disease in the Central Valley created the impetus for an unusual interdisciplinary collaboration between clinicians, researchers, community members, educators, and local policymakers. In 2018, two state legislators from the Central Valley city of Bakersfield, Vince Fong and Rudy Salas, proposed a $7 million bill to research and raise awareness about the disease. The bill included $3 million for the University of California to share funds between major research groups, allowing scientists who had been competitors to become collaborators—and to reach out to community partners as well. Working together, seven labs from five UC campuses split up the funding allocation.

I first experienced this new, inclusive dynamic as a grad student, when I attended a Valley fever health symposium hosted by the Bakersfield Disease Group, a local advocacy group, in 2018. As I took my seat, I noticed that the 70 or so attendees included folks in pressed suits and people in t-shirts and jeans; some showed up in work clothes, with mud still on their boots. Local elected officials updated us on legislation in the works to promote better public health education through schools and doctors’ offices. Clinical and biomedical researchers presented their work, and took audience questions. Valley fever survivors told personal stories about the difficulty of getting a diagnosis and dealing with medical bills. One described how they could barely sit up most days and rarely got out of bed.

After the programs wrapped, the symposium set up a dedicated time and space for everyone to collaborate—a ritual that made communication the norm, rather than something individuals had to seek out. It was a model of open collaboration, grounded in our common goal of fighting Valley fever.

A month later, I joined the lab of UC Merced immunologist Katrina Hoyer—who had long sought to bring in diverse voices and had lobbied for the increased state funding—as her first Valley fever graduate student researcher. The symposium was on my mind as I outlined my thesis and planned experiments. Now that I had directly seen how the disease affected individuals in the Central Valley, the magnitude of what I wanted to accomplish weighed on me: I wanted my work to make a tangible impact on the community I resided in, and I wanted it to happen during my graduate career, not decades down the line.

At the 63rd Coccidioidomycosis Meeting, at UC Davis in 2019, I came to realize how the collaborative environment could make me a more effective researcher. After my first presentation on immune responses that follow inhalation of the fungi, a doctor treating patients at UC Davis’s Center for Valley Fever challenged some of my descriptions and data.

This, of course, was stressful for a new graduate student. But the physician followed up afterwards, and contextualized his question: If my immune cell definitions did not make sense to healthcare professionals working directly with patients, it would limit the applicability of my work.

I had originally thought of my data as something only scientists could use and appreciate. Until that data culminated into a body of knowledge “big enough” or “significant enough,” it would remain too specific, too esoteric, for anyone else to find it useful. But this interaction with a senior clinician taught me that conducting “good science” was more than following protocol—it meant making science that others could immediately use, too. I needed to be more critical of how I was interpreting and presenting the research. My work could have much more reach and impact if I used accessible language. This lesson was invaluable, and I don’t think it would’ve been possible if it wasn’t for the collaborative learning environment that Valley fever fosters.

The study of Valley fever is characterized by a sense of urgency. More people are moving into regions where the fungus is endemic, and the fungus itself is expanding its range. When I first entered graduate school, I was convinced I would remain in academia for my career, but thinking about Valley fever’s increasing impacts made me anxious to do more. Seeing my impatience, Dr. Hoyer steered me towards places where I could provide direct service to the community. Though I was only required to give two public talks for my graduate program requirements, by the time I finished I had given about 15: workshops on an introduction to fungi with excited elementary students, research updates with community educators, and policy presentations to local elected officials.

The collaborative community around Valley fever inspired me to leap into the gap between science and policy. Tests and treatments for this disease may be years away. So, I’ve come to believe that the most pragmatic thing I can do in the meantime is to get involved in science communication and policy, and to continue reaching out to diverse groups of stakeholders.

This approach offers benefits across the board. Funders have the potential to transform research impact by involving diverse communities in deciding what research is conducted. Policymakers can look for ways to ensure that disease research stays attuned to community needs. And researchers can begin to build deliberate places for public discussion into conferences, meetings, and even at their home institutions. Our work would benefit from creating shared, “sacred” time for collaboration, instead of squeezing in such conversations in a hurried and rushed manner, between other obligations. And rather than gearing these social spaces only towards researchers and their work, we should invite industry, policymakers, and community members to join as collaborators rather than merely as vendors or passive listeners.

As both Valley fever and COVID have demonstrated, infectious disease impacts all parts of daily life; the response must also be multifaceted, encompassing research, education, policy, healthcare, manufacturing, distribution, and the broader community. The sheer scale of the task implies the need for broad and diverse communication and collaboration across all parties involved, and researchers like me should not wait passively for outside institutions to take the lead. We must foster strong dialogue between traditionally separated parties. The future of science is in all of our hands.

The post How Valley Fever Brings People Together appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve always hated Arvin, my uncommon, easy-to-mangle name. For most of my life I didn’t even know where it came from. When I was a kid I asked my father, who is from India, what my name means. He told me, “beautiful face.”

A skeptical child, I didn’t believe him. A recent Google search confirmed my suspicions, revealing no such translation and no correlation between my name and a predisposition to attractive features. So, not long ago, I asked my father again about the origins of my name. This time he had a different story. The common Indian name, he told me, is Arvind—with a “d.” My parents had decided to remove the “d” to make the name sound “more American.”

Hold on. First of all, what happened to the whole “beautiful face” thing? You can’t just take that back after you see how the face turns out. And, second, Arvin is not a common American name.

But I have to give my dad some credit. The name does indeed appear to have a spot in American history—or at least a spot by the highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The word “Arvin” can be seen clearly from the road, imprinted on a municipal water tower near Bakersfield, in Kern County. For years friends have taken snapshots of it on their cellphones to send to me.

A few summers ago, I decided to ride my motorcycle down to Arvin. Maybe, I thought, going to the town could help me clear up some of my feelings about my name.

It was past noon when I rolled into town, the midday sun beating down stronger than I was expecting. My plan was to take a seven-stop walking tour I’d found on Arvin’s website. A sign on Bear Mountain Boulevard, the town’s main drag, greeted me: “Welcome to the City of Arvin.” The strip, about a mile long, was populated with fast food joints and squat buildings with Spanish signs in the windows. On either end was more farmland.

Unlike me, the town seemed to have no shortage of pride in its name. There was Arvin Doughnuts, which was conveniently located a short walk from Arvin Family Dentistry and Arvin Dialysis. Across the street was Arvin Auto. Never before had I seen my name so prominently exhibited. It was like seeing your name on Broadway, if Broadway was in the middle of nowhere and you’d never heard of it.

I didn’t see a Starbucks, but I wondered if they would screw up my order the way others did:

“Tall black tea for Irvin!”

“Americano for Marvin!”

“Bitterness with two pumps of self-loathing for Arwyn!”

Arvin, established in 1910, was named after George Arvin Richardson, a storekeeper who’d settled there when the land was little more than sagebrush and rabbits. (The name Arvin, several baby-name websites say, has Germanic origins.) The area’s biggest claim to fame might be the Arvin Federal Government Camp, built in 1936. It housed migrants from Oklahoma and the greater Southwest seeking refuge amidst the ruin of the Great Depression. Author John Steinbeck included the camp in his novel The Grapes of Wrath—although in the book it’s known as “Weedpatch Camp.” Not a terribly flattering nickname.

Arvin prides itself now on its “quiet residential areas, clean streets, low crime rate, a first-class fire station, and a well-kept City Hall,” according to its website. The town is 93 percent Latino, including a significant number of field workers who earned their livings picking potatoes, carrots, grapes, peaches, and plums in the farms surrounding town.

But newspaper reports paint a picture of a small town with big issues. Arvin landed on USA Today’s “Worst Cities To Live in America” list, which cited poverty, violent crime, and “not…much to offer in the way of cultural or entertainment options.” On top of that, the city has a scourge of toxic smog that regularly floats in from across the mountains, and had a water supply contaminated with arsenic (an issue that was recently resolved). In 2017 many residents, one news site reported, were afraid to leave their homes due to a national crackdown on immigration.

I parked my bike and after stripping off my helmet and motorcycle jacket, headed to the first stop on the walking tour, the Arvin Visitor’s Center and Museum. The visitor center door was locked, even though a sign indicated that the building should be open. I knocked and waited a minute, but nobody answered. I circled the building to see if there was an alternate entrance. There was none. So, I pulled out my phone, found a number for the center, and dialed it. A woman picked up. The center, I learned, was closed because it was run by volunteers.

“We’re all senior citizens, you know,” I recall her saying. “We can’t be there all the time. A lot of us are dying off.”

I wasn’t sure what else to say, so I said the only thing I could think of: “My name is Arvin.”

“Excuse me?” the woman asked.

“My name is Arvin. Like, you know… here,” I said. “I’m a writer. That’s why I came. I thought it’d be interesting to go to a place that has my name. I thought that maybe I’d learn something about myself.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, isn’t that lovely?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

Unable to access the visitor’s center, I headed for the next stop, Garden in the Sun Park, a quarter-mile away. The park, the walking tour map informed me, hosts farmers markets and events and is “largely seen as the heart of Arvin’s new downtown.”

The heart of downtown turned out to be a scrubby field with picnic tables and playground equipment. The only noise I heard was what sounded like a Spanish version of “Peggy Sue” floating over from some houses across the way. There was a group of teenagers sitting at one of the picnic tables, giggling. For a moment I imagined their laughter was a cruel taunt—that they’d seen me and figured out my name.

When I was growing up I loved books with protagonists named Joe, Frank, or Henry. Sometimes in school we were made to read stories whose protagonists had weird names, like Won-a-pa-lei or Esperanza. I rolled my eyes at these books, with cultural references I didn’t understand, and characters I wasn’t excited about. Instead of feeling kinship, I felt repelled. I wanted normal stories, just like I wanted a normal name.

In a 1962 speech Malcolm X asked: Who taught you to hate yourself?

Who indeed?  Was it the white man, as Malcolm suggested? Was it popular books, movies, and TV shows that privileged so-called “all-American” characters and stories? Was it my parents, for saddling me with an uncommon name?

Whatever the case, Arvin, California didn’t seem to hate itself. In fact, it seemed downright pleased with itself—and, as its walking tour indicated, its history. As I walked toward the next stop on the tour, Arvin’s first post office, I saw two women on a front lawn. They were pulling clothes out of garbage bags and hanging them on a rack for a yard sale.

One of the women was a farm worker, and the other was retired. Next to the retired woman, whose name was Lourdes, I noticed a bicycle with a small American flag draped over a wire basket. Lourdes was from Mexico, she told me in Spanish as her friend translated. She’d lived in Arvin for 10 years and previously in Los Angeles. In Arvin she’d worked at a laundromat and furniture store, and did odd jobs like selling tamales.

“When I was little I always had a dream that someday I’d come to California,” she said. “It was exactly what I dreamed: a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunities.”

For this reason she loved the American flag. “If you’re living in a country, you have to stand behind it,” she proclaimed.

An Arvin resident filled with pride. Imagine that.

As I moved on, I couldn’t help but think that whoever planned this walking tour should have also included a packing list: snacks, sunscreen, an IV. I hadn’t brought a water bottle and felt dehydration setting in by the time I arrived at my next destination. There was a row of houses with patchy brown lawns on one side of the street, and on the other an elementary school. On the corner was a school crossing guard sitting under an umbrella. I asked her if she happened to know where Arvin’s first post office was, and she gestured at a blue house with a chain-link fence surrounding it. I walked over and discovered behind the fence—on the resident’s lawn—a squat, three-foot-tall monument.

Peering through the fence’s metal links I read: “The name ‘Arvin’ was selected for the post office by the U.S. Post Office Dept. from a list submitted by Mrs. Heard,” the town’s first postmaster.

In 1914, a resident named Birdie Heard (speaking of weird names) petitioned the federal government for the addition of a post office. The proposed names included Bear Mountain, Walnut, and Arvin. Officials in Washington, D.C. chose Arvin, as it was the only name that wasn’t already taken in California. The name was kept for the city when it incorporated in 1960.

Stricken by the heat, I slumped down onto the curb and checked the walking tour map. The next stop was a two-for-one: the Arvin Community Center—home to the Boys & Girl Club—and a place called Smothermon Park.  There were three more stops after that. But I didn’t have the heart, or the energy, to go on. I’d seen enough.

Had I learned anything, apart from the importance of planning ahead?

I thought back to Lourdes’ flag. I thought back to the acres of fields I’d passed on my way into town. I thought about the heat, and people who spent all day working in it, and the new immigrants—the ones from Mexico, not the Midwest. I thought about the town’s walking tour, its visitor’s center, the volunteers who, at least sometimes, commit to passing on a little bit of Arvin’s history. Perhaps, despite the small town’s big issues, there was something quintessentially American about Arvin. Here, in this town named after a white man, was a new group of settlers in search of opportunity.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad town to share a name with.

I returned to my bike and reluctantly tugged on my hot motorcycle jacket and gloves, ready to hit the highway for Los Angeles. Back on Bear Mountain Boulevard I pulled into a coffee shop I’d seen earlier. The door was open, but inside there were no tables. The walls were half-painted and there was no merchandise. The owner and some friends were inside.

“Do you guys have drinks?” I asked.

“Sorry,” the owner said. “We closed. We’re turning the cafe into a smoke shop.” Nobody wanted to buy premium coffee when they could get it for a buck at McDonalds.

I told the men what I’d told everyone else I’d met so far: My name was Arvin, and I was in town to see if I could learn anything about myself.

They considered it for a moment.

“It has your name,” someone finally said, “but it’s nothing to brag about.”

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> The Place Where Everybody Knows My Name appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From this narrow neighborhood park atop the Panorama Bluffs on Bakersfield’s northern edge, you can’t actually see everything. It only seems like you can.

And when you take in this panoramic view of Kern County, you are not just looking out upon our nation’s greatest valley. You are witnessing how California’s past and present may be converging to create a very different future.

The view of oil fields and waterways isn’t exactly beautiful, but it is stunning—even overwhelming. And it provides undeniable evidence that in California, you really can defy the laws of chemistry: Here, oil and water really do mix, and all too well.

As you look out and down, the water appears first. The Kern River, fed from the slopes of Mt. Whitney, the state’s tallest peak, meanders below the park’s bluffs, winding through a small forest of willows, cottonwoods and sycamores. There are fish in the river, and birds flying above it.

This pastoral river can feel like an oasis amidst the larger, drier landscape. But it’s a time machine, a portal into the past—and perhaps into the future.

This land you see from Panorama Park used to be one of California’s wetter places. The river and other waterways often flooded, and the valley was a land of lakes. One of these was Tulare Lake, which could grow to as much as 60 miles long and 36 miles wide, making it the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. In heavy rains or heavy snowmelt in the Sierras, the water systems of the Kern and San Joaquin Rivers and Tulare Lake would merge, turning the middle of California into an inland sea.

But in the 19th century, farmers began taming those volatile river and lake waters, eventually creating today’s drier landscape, with its tumbleweeds. Dams and canals went in. From Panorama Park, you can see two of the first: Beardsley Canal and Carrier Canal. Water that supplies the Carrier Canal also feeds the Kern Island Canal—Bakersfield once had so much water around it that its name was Kern Island.

Bakersfield is still an island—perhaps California’s largest isle—at least in the ways its people live and think. The hometown of Kevin McCarthy, the highest-ranking GOPer in the U.S. House of Representatives, is a redoubt of reactionary Republicanism, surrounded by a state turning ever bluer. But what really makes Bakersfield an island in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley is its economic devotion to oil.

The vista from Panorama Park demonstrates this, to a shocking degree. To your left, an oil refinery is in view. Beyond the river vista near the bluffs, massive oil fields stretch north for many miles, further than your eye can see. Indeed, the oil fields here so dominate the landscape they remind me, perversely, of the giant trees not far away in Sequoia National Park. The oil patch, like the sequoia groves, is too grand in scale for a human field of vision, or even to be easily photographed.

Kern River Oilfield, discovered by prospectors in 1899, helped turn California into America’s leading oil producer in the early 20th century. It brought people from around the world to work and live here. From Panorama Park you can see the community of Oildale, where Merle Haggard grew up in a boxcar, and later wrote a song about it:

The oil tanker train from down on the river
In Southern Pacific and Santa Fe names
Would rumble and rattle the old boxcar we lived in
And I was a kid then and I loved that old train

Haggard would popularize the brand of country music known as the Bakersfield Sound. You can visit his family boxcar at the Kern County Museum, just two miles from Panorama Park. Poor people, successors to the Haggards, still live around Oildale, and still pay too much for sub-standard housing.

The Kern River Oil Field has produced 2 billion barrels and counting. But its output has fallen dramatically since 1985, propped up by pushing steam into the wells to draw out the sticky oil that remains. This is an extraordinarily costly practice, both economically and environmentally, and support for the oil business is not bottomless, even here. A court recently ordered Kern County to halt new oil permits. From Panorama Park, you’re looking at an industry in decline.

Bakersfield is changing in other ways, too. If you stand in the park and turn away from river and the oilfields, you’ll see Alta Vista-La Cresta, one of the city’s older neighborhoods. The Alta Vista tract was first laid out by Donald McClaren, son of famed superintendent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, John McClaren. This neighborhood was once a distinguished address—its denizens enjoying those grand views—but the area has been fading ever since Bakersfield expanded west, to the other side of Highway 99, and richer people bought places in neighborhoods like Seven Oaks.

The Panorama Vista—specifically, the area between the bluffs and the oil fields to the north—has been the focus of successful restoration for more than a generation. It’s been called the Panorama Vista Preserve since 2004, and visitors there enjoy trails and a native plant nursery.

It’s not hard to imagine the preserve growing larger, and the vista changing. As California responds to climate change, the state will turn harder against oil. In the 50 years, the pumpjacks might well be gone, replaced by park space, solar energy farms, or some of the new homes California needs to build.

These days, water already feels like a far more precious commodity than oil. And this land, if restored to its original condition, might fill with it. Will some dams be removed? Will the vista become wetter again?

The view from Bakersfield really makes you think.

The post From Bakersfield, You Can See Forever appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

First, it’s famous for producing food. In 2014, it grew $7.5 billion worth of grapes, almonds, milk, citrus, and beef. The county’s carrots alone were worth $288 million.

Secondly, in a national survey by the Food Research and Action Center, the county seat of Bakersfield consistently comes in as the hungriest city in America, with about a quarter of families saying they struggle to pay for food.

In 2013, 13 organizations in Kern County came together as the Food Policy Council to grapple with the Golden Empire’s hunger-agriculture conundrum.

Members now include a science teacher, a mom who’s revving up her school district’s wellness policy council, a retired cop, a planning consultant, a farmers market manager, representatives from Public Health, Kaiser Permanente, Aging and Adult Services, and the Food Bank.

Zócalo spoke with Jill Egland, Vice President of Community Impact at United Way of Kern County about the Council and what they hope to accomplish.

Q: It sounds like one of the challenges in Kern County is choosing a problem where the Food Policy Council can really make a difference. Is that so?

A: Well, yes, but not in the way you might think. When we first convened, we were all over the place in terms of what we thought we should be focusing on. Most of us are direct service agencies—we think in terms of program delivery, right?—so, we automatically went into “doing” mode—coming up with new programs the Food Policy Council could implement. But the fact is, everyone sitting around the table already had an overwhelming workload. Our first meetings felt more like recruitment sessions—everyone had something going on that desperately needed volunteers, and the Council represented a new source of worker bees.

Finally, making the shift and looking at problems from a policy perspective at first was just as frustrating for us because nobody could see past the specific context of their agency. Diabetes is a great example. Statewide, there’s a big push for a tax on sugary drinks, which has been proven to be a huge contributing factor to diabetes. The logic for the tax is, you make sugary drinks more expensive than water, and people will drink water instead. Our county health-related council members—whose local work is influenced by state mandates—were for this. Others weren’t so convinced. My agency’s perspective, for instance, is that this sort of tax is regressive—essentially getting poor people to fund programs to study themselves.

Then it hit the news that the arsenic levels in the town of Arvin’s water was off the charts. People were told to stop using their tap water for anything. Kids were told to stop drinking from school drinking fountains. Local foundations have been paying to get filtration systems installed in the schools most directly affected, but they’re $1,500 a pop.

What we’ve come to see is that you can’t advocate for taxing the orange-colored sugar water that’s currently available by the gallon jug for a buck without also advocating for access to free, clean, uncontaminated water. Once Sacramento passes a bill to cover the costs of school filtration systems and laws that protect the further contamination of our groundwater, the Kern Food Policy Council will be happy to discuss a tax on sugary beverages.

Q: Why did you start the Food Policy Council?

A: We started it because we thought it would help us strengthen our county’s emergency food relief efforts. What we’ve discovered since, though, is that the underlying causes of the chronic hunger in this county are way more complicated to solve than just bolstering our food bank. Early on, we learned about other California communities actually identifying their food deserts, and then using the data picture as an advocacy tool. One of our members had the GIS software, so we brainstormed what we wanted on it, and he create a map that identified low-income neighborhoods and the locations of any shop that sold fresh produce. He included all the bus lines, and added circles around the shops showing a 2-mile radius, which is, I guess, considered a reasonable distance to walk. It was amazing to behold. But when we looked at it all together, it was like trying to come to an agreement on the meaning of a Rorschach inkblot. We realized that we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what we should be valuing, or really concerned about, or what assumptions we should be challenging. Take the 2-mile walking threshold, for instance. When it’s 110 outside, who’s walking 2 miles to get produce? Should we be advocating for more bus routes, then?

From the perspective of UWKC, food insecurity is a byproduct of financial instability. People can’t afford to eat well. United Way did a survey of families in Kern County and found that 34 percent can’t pay basic bills; and nine out of ten of those families have at least one member working. In order to make ends meet here, a family of four needs to have 2.25 minimum wage jobs. It’s important to have fresh produce at the food bank, but then again, everyone should make enough money to go to the store and buy whatever they want.

We decided to do a Food System Assessment to learn more about the whole system. We didn’t just want to know who didn’t have food; we also wanted to find out about food waste, food employment, and food processing and manufacturing in Kern. The whole picture.

Q: It sounds like the more traditional California food policy approach wasn’t really going to work here. How did you tailor it for Kern?

A: Kern County is different from other places: Big Ag and Big Oil influence just about everything. While public housing for low-income residents is usually financed by HUD, here a third of it is also financed by USDA, and is meant to be used as transitional housing for farmworkers.

We had to figure out how to get the other food system stakeholders in Kern to join us. We’d failed so far to get Big Ag at the table—there’s a history of acrimony between the agriculture industry and the labor movement, and a definite awkwardness between Big Ag, the second largest employer in the county, and the agencies making up the FPC, who essentially fill the gaps in services that exist due to the low wages earned by farmworkers.

We knew that nobody locally had the authority needed to facilitate a conversation between such diverse stakeholders. So, we asked Dr. Gail Feenstra, from UC Davis’s Sustainable Agriculture Research Education Project to help us. Everyone respects UC Davis in Kern County. Everyone sends their kids there—conservative and progressive alike. We invited the Wonderful Company, Kaiser, Kern Health System, the Farm Bureau, the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, city managers and planners, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, school districts, county agencies, our state legislators, and California State University Bakersfield to attend a meeting about the food system, facilitated by UC Davis. Twenty-eight stakeholders in all. Everyone said yes.

The first thing Gail asked us was to describe what we wanted our food system to look like. Everyone had a different vision, and was pretty passionate about it. Over the months, she helped us listen to each other, and build a picture of our food system that reflected everyone’s passion. And the group said yes. She asked, “What would you specifically need to see improve in order for you to agree that the system as a whole was improving?” and helped us focus on what was viable and measurable. At one point, The Wonderful Company and the Dolores Huerta Foundation disagreed over a particular set of indicators. There was a fierce debate; we all got into it. But by then, we had met enough times so that people genuinely liked each other. We had a civil discourse.

Q: What were the subjects of debate?

A: There was a big one around what is meant by a “healthy environment.” People in the schools wanted a decrease in pesticide/herbicide levels. The Cooperative Extension people said that since you can’t measure that accurately, we shouldn’t include it as an indicator. The public health people adamantly disagreed with Cooperative Extension. Then the planners in the room said they would be willing to get together and figure out a way to do it. Everyone walked away from the conversation feeling they’d been heard.

Q: How did the group come to like each other enough to work through this?

A: Gail constantly reconfigured everyone. Nobody stayed in the seat they started in. Everyone had the opportunity to work closely with everyone else at some point, to share information and brainstorm ideas. By the end of the first meeting, we were all on first name basis. The constant reconfiguring also made it really hard for anyone to stay locked in their cynicism. There were just too many perspectives and stories and, well, this overarching sense of hopefulness. Even the biggest cynics have come around.

We also always have a meal in the midst of our meeting. It sounds hokey, but there’s something really powerful about stopping one’s work in order to break bread together. It’s like, things can get really contentious, but then there you are, sitting across from the person you were certain you had absolutely nothing in common with, both of you chowing down on Mediterranean food, making happy grunting noises.

Q: What’s the big, complex problem you’re wrestling with?

A: People like to point to the irony between our abundant agriculture and our high level of food insecurity. But it’s really not any more ironic than having workers at a Toyota plant drive some cars that aren’t Toyotas. Our agriculture industry is part of a global market. Its importance to us here is not so much as a food generator as it is a wage generator. To understand the symbiotic relationship between workers, the local economy, and big agriculture—you have to see it as its own complex ecosystem. The unspoken question—the elephant in the room—is how sustainable is this ecosystem, truly? The drought is showing us just how vulnerable a system it is.

We understand the complicated relationship of the workers to industry. Nobody wants to see Big Ag fail. We’ve had a portent of what that would be like, with the downsizing of Big Oil here in Kern. The influx of unemployed oil workers has been a blow to the local economy, and to the agencies trying to provide relief. But everyone knows Big Ag needs to evolve. Kern’s relationship to agriculture needs to evolve. We can’t continue relating to food production primarily as a commodity. On the other hand, if the legislative landscape changes too quickly, and Big Ag destabilizes, we’ll have an emergency on our hands. So we have to start these conversations, getting everyone out of their siloes in economics, industry, or social services to talk about the future of Ag here.

Q: So part of this was making peace with Big Ag?

A: Well, if Wonderful decides to grow their pistachios in Texas, there’s just nothing to keep them here. Systemically speaking, we’ve got to figure out how our higher education, our technical and vocational training, doesn’t just feed the Big Ag labor force, but also fosters innovation and entrepreneurism. We need more small and mid-size farmers, more independent ag-related enterprise, in order to diversify our economic base. We also need to help farmworkers get more than just an increase in wage; they need a voice at the table.

Q: So what does this all have to do with food, aside from low wages and poverty for workers?

A: We’ve had to realize that we don’t have a functioning food system, despite the presence of Big Ag. How we get carrots is that they leave our fields, get processed in LA, and come back here in little sacks. Our real local food system is CISCO (the super market distributor).

At the same time, we have 60 small farmers who sell their produce outside of Kern because there isn’t enough local farm-to-fork activity to make it viable for them to stay. We know we have to build a local market through restaurants, farmers’ markets, other retail outlets. Schools could provide a market big enough to make it interesting for the larger ag enterprises to consider. But finding a price point that makes it worth it for both sides is difficult. We’re looking into how those small farms, and even gardeners, can get licensed to sell vegetables to their local convenience stores. We’re also realizing that we need to develop new investment options, and economic incentives that encourage people to innovate and be food entrepreneurs.

In the next few months we’ll get a report back from Gail Feenstra’s group and start to talk about what we can do.

Q: Are you hopeful?

A: Yes. Rich Harwood, who founded the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, says that there are five stages of community life, how quickly and easily can embrace change depends on which stage they’re in. First, a community is in The Waiting Place. People will tell you that change would be possible “if only we had the right mayor.” And so they do nothing. The next step is “Impasse, where everyone agrees something is wrong, but nobody can agree on what it is. If you can find a small group that agrees, maybe you get an isolated pocket of something happening. The next phase is Catalytic, with pockets of innovation starting to connect. But I think that Kern is now out of the Waiting Place and moving through “Impasse.” And that’s a great thing! The Food System stakeholders are an example of a small group of people who have figured out how to agree. Hopefully, the assessment will let us identify other small groups, connect with them, and help us move into the Catalytic stage.

Q: What happens after the catalytic phase?

A: Don’t know. We refer to them as the “Nirvana stages.”

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No? History suggests that the identities of cities and regions are more fragile, and their central industries more perilous, than we care to admit. (Just ask former Detroit autoworkers.)

So it’s well within the realm of possibility that Los Angeles’ entertainment industry, already struggling with shifting business models and technology that allows film production just about anywhere, could be a much smaller part of life here in the near future. And Silicon Valley? Here’s a nightmare scenario: What if the security state escalates its current war against Apple to the point that technology companies relocate headquarters to countries with laws that protect their businesses and their customers’ privacy? Heck, they may even be able to lower their taxes while they’re at it.

These dark thoughts occurred to me while reading a smart new book about a different California place—Bakersfield—and its identity as a capital of its own brand of country music.

The Bakersfield Sound: How a Generation of Displaced Okies Revolutionized American Music, by the editor of the Bakersfield Californian, Robert E. Price, is an entertaining piece of music history, essential for those of us who are fans of outlaw country and its greatest San Joaquin Valley musicians, Merle Haggard and the late Buck Owens. But the book also says something more profound—and troubling—about how places come to be hotbeds of a particular enterprise, and how they can lose that identity.

Bakersfield became a country music capital through both accident and intention. The accident was the Dust Bowl, which brought environmental refugees to Kern County in the 1930s and ’40s. The migrants were outsiders among Bakersfield’s elites, so they mixed with each other and other outsiders—creating music in the post-World War II years that was informed by what Price calls “a synergy of economic hardship, determination, kinship, and dumb luck.”

Haggard’s special talent and paranoia, the latter earned from spending a third of his young life behind bars, also were crucial to inspiring the Bakersfield sound. Location helped; Bakersfield is close enough to Los Angeles to benefit from its energy and musicians, but far enough away not to be infected by its glossiness. And technology played a role, too, with the invention of Clarence “Leo” Fender’s Telecaster, the guitar that produced the rough, uncultivated, rock-infused country that became known as the Bakersfield Sound.

The intention involved the creation of infrastructure to support a community of musicians. In Bakersfield, that infrastructure consisted of the honky tonks, starting most crucially with Joe Limi and Frank Zabaleta’s north side place, the Blackboard, and growing to more than 20 clubs with live music by the 1960s. Bakersfield’s musicians had audiences and gigs to pay the bills.

These musicians also had a common enemy in Nashville’s establishment, the home of popular country music, which produced a warm, rich sound against which Bakersfield’s “small town belligerence” clashed. The distance from Nashville and the outsider status of the Bakersfield musicians fueled creativity. (Hollywood’s founding is a similar story, with moviemakers heading west, far from the brutal goons that New Jersey’s Thomas Edison employed to enforce his many patents on technologies related to motion picture technology.)

But here’s where the story of the Bakersfield Sound becomes its own sad country song. How did Bakersfield lose its status as a capital of country? The problem: Bakersfield’s infrastructure didn’t develop as deeply as it would in other places—like Nashville—where “saloons (or art galleries) beget restaurants, which beget jobs, which beget hotels, which beget apartments and markets and home improvement stores.”

In his book (and over a recent lunch at Woolgrowers in Bakersfield), Price suggested that maybe rich folks, or the oil industry, could have supported that infrastructure, but never did. Another factor was a change in society, cited by the longtime Bakersfield music engineer Jim Shaw: the rise of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which made a night of drinking and driving between honky tonks a dicier proposition.

The other problem, paradoxically, was the success, and expansion, of the Bakersfield Sound. Other places, other musicians, and other genres borrowed and incorporated elements of it. Price shows how “the Bakersfield Sound never really died … [A] big chunk of it up and moved to Texas,” where you can still hear it on Austin’s Sixth Street. And KWMR, a radio station in Marin County, of all places, keeps the sound alive with its program, “Bakersfield and Beyond.”

Bakersfield still has a music scene, but it’s harder to find. Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace remains a vital venue for country; Trout’s Nightclub is still around. I’m a big fan of Jerry’s Pizza and Pub downtown, where owner Jerry Baranowski, a sharp-talking Polish immigrant, says he hosts two kinds of musicians: the very good and the very local.

Price identifies two lessons for communities: First, cities need to develop strong identities. And second, they can never allow that development to stop, even after they’ve created a culture or industry so central to their identities that it wouldn’t seem to need nurturing.

“Every American city, whether it prides itself on its public sculptures or deep-dish pizza, on hot-air balloons or woolen jackets, on abundant trout streams or Greek architecture, needs to develop that identity, or if it has been allowed to escape, remember what it once was,” Price writes, adding: “It’s a conversation Bakersfield should have initiated decades ago.”

It’s an especially important conversation in California—precisely because we are so defined by industries that rely on ideas, stories, and art that can leave our state in the blink of an eye. The promise of our creative industries is also its peril. These days, you can write code, make movies, or hear the Bakersfield Sound just about anywhere.

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“American music was never the same,” said Price—and neither was Bakersfield. In the 1960s, that young musician, Buck Owens, went on to record a slew of number-one country songs. Merle Haggard followed suit from the mid-1960s through the 1980s. In just a decade, Bakersfield became a “font of creativity,” said Price—and in 15 years, it was also a country music brand.

What made the music of Bakersfield special? And how do you define what became known as the “Bakersfield Sound”? Price asked the panelists these questions before a full-house crowd at Bakersfield’s Metro Galleries.

Jim Shaw, Buck Owens’ longtime music engineer, keyboard player, and business manager, said that the Bakersfield Sound developed because the city offered artists so much freedom. In Bakersfield, a musician could hire his own band, write his own songs, and do his own thing. Producers would “get the right guy and get out of the way,” said Shaw. In Nashville, musicians played with the same studios and backing bands; the raw edges got sanded down. In Bakersfield, they stayed raw.

Matt Munoz, a Bakersfield musician and entertainment writer, said that when he thinks of the Bakersfield Sound he thinks of working-class people, agriculture, and “a lot of sweat.” It’s about working hard and partying hard, he said.

How, asked Price, has music influenced the city’s broader culture?

Singer and local economic development official Jennifer Keel Faughn said that music gives Bakersfield “a sense of place [and] quality of life.” And it makes the city a destination: 1,500 to 2,000 people visit Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace—a museum as well as a music venue and restaurant—each week.

It also gives the city a hipness factor, said Munoz: “Buck Owens is really hip all over the world.”

But the club scene that nurtured Buck Owens has deteriorated. Shaw recalled that when he started playing in bars at age 18, it was possible to play six nights a week and make $20 a night—enough to buy a home and support a family. There were dozens of musicians like him making a living by entertaining people who went out every night to party and listen to live music. They’d often drive home drunk. Thanks to a combination of a larger movement against drunk driving, economic downturn, and new forms of recorded music (including the emergence of DJs), theorized Shaw, the club scene dried up. “I can’t think of one place in Bakersfield today where you can make a living playing music,” said Shaw. “You have to have a real job and do it a couple nights a week.”

You can still hear the Bakersfield Sound if you go to the right places. Munoz pointed to Monty Byrom, front man of the band Big House, as one local musician following in the city’s tradition. But local musicians aren’t necessarily doing something new. “I think there are a lot of musicians here who pay homage to the Bakersfield Sound,” cautioned Munoz.

Perhaps, suggested Price, such homages mean it’s time to go off in a different direction entirely.

Some artists already have, said Shaw. The band Korn comes from Bakersfield, and while they sound nothing like Buck Owens or Merle Haggard, they do have something in common. “We’re talking about raw, inventive music that stood everybody on their ear,” said Shaw. Korn’s guitarists popularized putting an extra string on the guitar, he said.

Like Owens, “they changed music,” said Munoz. They may have left Bakersfield in order to become famous. But “when you listen to a Korn record, it sounds like Bakersfield to me,” he said.

Faughn said that the historic Bakersfield Sound is a touchstone for young artists who can look to Owens and Haggard and say, “He did it—so can I.”

Does Bakersfield still nurture young artists?

Shaw said that Bakersfield has a lot of very good local groups, but he’s not sure if they’re going to be able to break out. Record companies used to come to Bakersfield to scout talent, but now you have to leave if you want to get discovered—and the market is tough.

Young artists have to be entrepreneurial. Munoz said that one of the best ways to develop a following—for local bands and touring acts—is to put on living room tours, giving concerts in private homes. If you sell your own tickets and do your own marketing, you just might have a chance at building a fan base.

A few Bakersfield bars and nightclubs—including the Crystal Palace, Trout’s, and Ethel’s Old Corral—still host live country music. But you’re not going to drive through downtown and hear the sounds of a steel guitar humming through the streets, said Munoz. (You’re 40 years too late for that, said Shaw.)

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked to advise young musicians on how to find their footing in Bakersfield—getting mentors, booking shows, connecting with audiences.

“This is a great self-starter market. You can start anything here,” said Munoz—from a band to an open mic night. “The people will come.”

You’ve got to make your own stage, added Faughn. She said that the best way to find mentors is to surround yourself with people who play the kind of music you want to play—and then get up and sing.

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