California’s San Joaquin Valley is a place of contradictions: It is the most agriculturally productive region in the world, growing over 250 crops and grossing approximately $35 billion in annual sales of everything from fruit and nuts to livestock, wine, milk, and grains. Its 27,000 square miles reside in a geographical sweet spot, with a Mediterranean climate and land watered by once mighty rivers flowing from the Sierra Nevada mountains. The valley possesses incredible cultural diversity, too: People of more than 70 different ethnicities, speaking over 100 languages, call the region home. It is the place that gave rise, among many important cultural moments, to the powerful farmworker movement that built solidarity across race, class, and other divides.

Despite this abundance, it is also a region of deep and concentrated poverty and food insecurity. The San Joaquin Valley is the United States’ most polluted air basin for fine particles (which, when inhaled, increase the risk of a host of health problems, including early death). It is one of the surfaces on Earth most altered by humankind due to a century of mining groundwater, which has caused land to sink by as much as 28 feet in some places and counting.

These contradictions hold obvious perils, but also promise—that the science and resources government and industry have poured into extraction can be redistributed and focused instead on eliminating environmental racism and building just, livable communities.

I was born and raised in the heart of the valley, in Madera County. I was diagnosed with asthma as a kid, although my race and class in many ways buffered me from the worst impacts of our air pollution problems.

For five years I worked as an organizer for the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition (CVAQ), raising awareness of air pollution’s health impacts. Over and over again, decision makers, air regulators, and industry lobbyists constantly told me, and the community leaders and youth advocates I worked with, that we had to accept our fate, that where we live makes pollution unavoidable.

The unhealthy air to which all 4.3 million valley breathers are supposed to resign ourselves is partly rooted in the region’s role in feeding the nation and world. Industrialized agribusiness in the valley utilizes hundreds of millions of tons of pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemical inputs and uses polluting equipment such as tractors and nut harvesters. The region is also a major source of oil and natural gas production, which emits a slew of toxic air pollutants and contributes to smog and particle pollution. Trucks and trains traveling up, down, and across the state via freeways that run through our communities play a role as well. Catastrophic, climate change-fueled wildfires and extreme heat compound an already dire situation.

Research from California State University, Fullerton has shown that unhealthy air costs our region at least $6 billion dollars per year—paid in premature deaths, asthma attacks and other serious medical conditions, and missed school and work days. Compared to the national average, children in the San Joaquin Valley are twice as likely to be diagnosed with asthma before age 18.

The valley is a designated “sacrifice zone,” where industrial extraction and disposal takes precedence over human health—and where low-income, Black, brown, and Indigenous residents are asked to sacrifice the most. That is certainly true of south Stockton, which has some of the highest asthma rates in the state. Barred from living in other parts of the city, Filipinos immigrated there in the early 20th century, and the neighborhood became home to the largest diaspora in the nation. But in the 1970s, the state demolished large swaths of the neighborhood to construct Highway 4, an artery for the flow of goods in and out of the Port of Stockton. The port concentrates cancer-causing diesel pollution from ships, trains, trucks, and other equipment, which commingles with other pollution sources nearby, such as an industrial biomass plant that burns woody waste.

As I keep hearing, the people of south Stockton, like people across the San Joaquin Valley, have a “choice”: accept pollution-causing industries or suffer lost jobs and revenue. But I know it does not have to be this way. I have seen community-innovated solutions firsthand, in both my academic research and advocacy work in the region.

In extensive interviews with advocates, staff, and decision-makers at the San Joaquin Valley Air District, I learned that they agree on one thing: that the region needs transformation away from extractive industries in order to achieve clean air. As one decision-maker told me, “The only way you’re going to change the Air [District Governing] Board is change the boards of supervisors because they control the Air Board, and until you get a majority of the supervisors who don’t have that farmer mentality, you’re not going to be able to change the valley.” They added, “The economy has to be diversified.”

Change, however, can also come from the ground up, which I’ve witnessed in my time at CVAQ, where I returned as executive director after receiving my PhD in geography. I’ve seen how communities across the valley continue to take matters into their own hands when it comes to air pollution, to protect and improve neighborhoods. Local campaigns in Kern and Los Angeles Counties, combined with years of cross-regional organizing, have built the political will to help institute a 3,200-foot health and safety setback rule to protect people from oil drilling. The setback will help keep homes, hospitals, schools, and other sensitive receptors farther from oil wells, which increase the risks of respiratory illnesses, cancer, and other health issues for people living and working nearby.

In south Stockton, community groups like Little Manila Rising are providing asthma management services to the most impacted households, distributing resources such as indoor air filters, planting trees, and employing unhoused and formerly incarcerated community members. Little Manila Rising, CVAQ, and the enforcement division of the California Air Resources Board are collaborating on a multi-year research project that is engaging the community in studying and implementing solutions to address diesel truck traffic.

There are many more opportunities to create jobs and build a more equitable and healthy San Joaquin Valley. We have a history of building solidarity to achieve change. California has abundant science, people power, and economic resources to make good on its claims as an environmental trendsetter that prioritizes equity.

The post Where Bad Air Carries Peril and Promise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The photographs are historical not because they are old—all were taken within the last few years—but because the elements you see in the frame contain so many old stories. Photographs often illustrate histories, but these photographs are different. They inspire a history. They drive a narration.

California Exposures started from photographs. Years ago, when I worked on a documentary with Geoff Ward, who writes most of Ken Burns’s films, I tried to figure out how documentary narration worked. I told Geoff, “I think I’ve got it. Every sentence is a topic sentence.”

“No,” he said. “There are no topic sentences. The photograph is the topic sentence.”

A photograph captures light at a particular moment. But a photograph also pushes back from the moment, and rides the elements in the photograph—trees, buildings, land, animals, roads, levees and more—into the past that created them. Link these elements to documents in archives, books, other photographs, maps, and memories. What emerges is history.

With one exception, the photographs in this gallery come from a single area, one of several in the book: the Tulare Basin and the neighboring San Joaquin Valley. This is the heart of the Yokut Indian homeland at about 1750, before European contact. Most Californians have seen it only while traveling on I-5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. By modern markers, it is the land to east of the freeway starting at about the In-N-Out Burger in Kettleman City and stretching nearly to the In-N-Out Burger near the Grapevine.

Thematically, these photographs show the rearrangement of water, which means some of them show no water at all—only what once was the Tulare Lake bed. Tulare Lake covered much of this area more than a century ago. And today, in some wet years the lake returns and the land floods. But in most years the old lake exists only in cut-off sloughs or in dismembered remnants impounded behind levees. Ecologically, this is the most altered landscape in California. Los Angeles seems a biological preserve in comparison.

This rearrangement of water has produced some of the most productive agricultural lands in the world and, sometimes, pastoral landscapes; it has also produced some of the most impoverished communities in California. The people traveling the I-5 largely come from politically blue California, but this is red California—in part because a significant number of its inhabitants cannot vote because they are not citizens, incarcerated or live in counties that intentionally and unintentionally pursue policies that suppress the vote.

The history has not been pretty, and the photographs reveal this history. To look at the image of the Tachi Casino is to grapple with genocide—and I used that loaded word advisedly to describe the slaughter of California Indians, whose population plunged from 150,000 in 1846 to 30,000 in 1873.

Those pumps draining the aquifers on the old lakebed? They involve a story of monopoly ownership of land that is now subsiding at a rate faster than any other place on Earth.

The vastness of this landscape, the seeming emptiness, is particular, not generic. The story in this selection of photographs is not the story of seemingly similar places in California. The single photograph from outside the San Joaquin is from the Owens Valley, a place that did not become part of the book, in part because it is already so well known. The Owens Valley is a different story. Jesse’s photographs both speak to it and put it in context.

The post Where Tulare Lake Once Was, a New Telling of California’s History appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When schools here in Fresno County and across California closed to protect students from COVID-19, I was a senior at Coalinga High School. It has about 1,200 students, and I know many of them, because I tried to make use of every single minute of my high school career. I’ve had some special challenges in life, so I’ve been careful to make academic plans a year in advance and follow those plans carefully. School is incredibly important for my life, my future, and my family’s future.

When I was younger, my brothers, sisters, and I were taken out of our family by Child Protective Services. We grew up in the court system. I was fascinated by the attorney who handled our case in court. She listened to us and then decided how to represent our interests. The experience made me want to educate myself so I can become a lawyer and a voice for the unrepresented.

That’s why I’ve involved myself in more than a dozen extracurricular activities including the Associated Student Body, School Site Council, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the California Scholarship Federation, and perhaps most important of all, Mock Trial, a competition where I handled a fake court case in front of a judge and real lawyers. I’ve taken college classes, visited UCLA, and attended camps to develop my skills in arguing and advocacy. I’ve found I have a talent for trials.

I also made a point of enrolling in six Advanced Placement classes to prepare me for college, boost my GPA, and provide college credits, which will save me money when I head off to university. In my senior year, I decided to take AP classes in English, and Government and Politics, and also enroll and study for the AP Spanish test on my own, because the actual class didn’t fit my schedule.

Taking AP classes helps you develop self-discipline and challenge yourself to see things from a broader perspective. It also means you’re surrounded with teachers and students who support you and are ecstatic about learning. Teachers and staff at Coalinga High have fostered a safe environment and gone above and beyond to help students succeed, at school, at home, and in life. That support makes you want to work harder. My fellow students and I never missed class; if one was sick, we’d FaceTime in. We also embraced other challenges; starting in the summer of 2016, I took classes at my local community college. That means I’ve already completed my “transferables”—the courses you need to transfer from a community college to a UC campus or another four-year school.

As the spring semester began, my plan was on course. I was accepted to my dream school, UCLA. Then we heard about a pandemic.

School ended mid-semester in March, and there was no time for a proper goodbye to teachers and students. We all went home, unaware of what was to come. We also left school empty-handed, with no work plan. School just ended in the middle of the sentence.

In the meantime, our teachers suggested that we review our own materials or visit educational websites, such as Khan Academy.

At first, I responded like a teenager, treating this as a vacation from schoolwork and an excuse to stay up late. But as the weeks went by, and the virus spread, I recognized I needed to keep studying. AP tests would still be given online, and I still had to go to college in the fall.

Bringing a structure into our home has been the most difficult task. I live with my mother and my stepfather, but they both have to work long days. So I had to create a schedule, and a place to study and work, for myself and for my four siblings, ages 15, 10, 9, and 8.

After a few weeks of experimenting, I arrived at this arrangement. I sat at the kitchen table and set up my laptop so I could study. I got my brother and three sisters all beside me, on their iPads, and had them reading as much as possible, working on math games, and watching science videos.

Alizé in her Class of 2020 jacket. Courtesy of Alizé Basulto Ibarra.

My biggest concern as an older sister as this went on was that they’d return to school and be one of the kids who fell behind their classmates. My sister, 15 and a freshman in high school, found it hard to study math at home, without a teacher, so I made it a point to spend extra time with her. My younger siblings soak up information like sponges; so as long as they had the information at their fingertips and were doing their work, they would learn well. This arrangement went on for six weeks.

The school only started its official distance learning in May, two months after the break started. Its arrival created new frustrations for me. The platforms for distance learning are very difficult to navigate; they are closed systems. Each sibling attends a different school, and there was no easy or direct way of entering each school’s website. It was a long process just to sign in to each site, and then navigate through four or four or five different tabs just to find my siblings’ work.

It took me a ton of time, energy, and stress to help my siblings navigate their schoolwork. Often it was hard to understand what the teachers were looking for, and what it meant to do an assignment well. The schools did provide computers and other electronics, but those devices came with restrictions that made it hard to access all the websites that my siblings needed to complete their work.

I encountered some issues in my own schooling as well. Certain classes were on distance learning while others were on Google Classroom. Still, at Coalinga High, I was fortunate to have counselors who did everything they could to resolve these problems, while putting up videos that showed us how to navigate the online lessons. Teachers started up AP classes over Zoom, and I took my three AP exams on May 11, 13, and 22, without much trouble.

But it was much easier for me—a senior who knew all the classes and teachers—than it was for my freshman sister, who had a harder time figuring out how to get what she needed. And while I was nearly done with high school, she was just getting started.

None of us will get to make up the time or the lessons of this spring, or experience the milestones and make the memories that we missed out on. I fear that my siblings will be behind not only on work, but on skills we need. This time may make it hard for kids of our generation to build a strong foundation and thrive. Will some lose out on the opportunity to go to college as a result?

As I write this, I’m readying for graduation. All major events were canceled. The school community is looking into having some kind of modified prom or graduation.

Usually in the summer I take classes at UC Berkeley, Fresno State, or UCLA, but this year those have been canceled. So I intend to keep the job that I have working in fast food. And I hope that in the fall, I’ll be able to go to UCLA, in person, and not at a distance.

The post When COVID Came to Coalinga High, ‘School Just Ended in the Middle of the Sentence’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most Americans know little, and think less, about this complicated and neglected region. Novelist Manuel Muñoz describes the valley, where he was born and grew up, as “a strangely unexplored area of our nation. As a region, it gives so much of its bounty to the rest of the country and receives little in return.” By bounty, he means food. He could also mean the bounteous way valley migrants and immigrants have nurtured our collective American story.

The agriculture of the valley today is a joint creation of 19th century Mexicans, Californios, and Chinese, as well as 20th-century African-Americans, Sikhs, and Okies—along with dozens of other ethnic groups, like Assyrians, Croatians, Volga Germans, Russian Molokans, Mien, Hmong, and my own family of Basques and Béarnais. Farming was the lure for many migrants, who often found themselves in a triangular squeeze of resentment, rejection, and accommodation. While some who came to exploit the land then found themselves exploited, many immigrants bettered their lives.

By the 1890s, settlers from Japan, Sweden, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Turkish Armenia, and other regions helped make the center of the San Joaquin Valley “one of the more cosmopolitan regions in the country,” says the scholar David Vaught. By 1900, farming colonies blurred into new settlements, “creating a vast, unbroken region of small farmers.”

That’s when my Béarnais-American grandfather grew wheat and barley as a tenant farmer along the San Joaquin River. After World War I, with the expansion of irrigation and the development of deep-well turbine pumps, he moved to the interior valley to plant a vineyard and cotton on his own forty acres. One-third of the nation then lived on farms and ranches. Today, after a stunning hundred-year shift, a scant one percent of Americans remain on the rural lands that feed us.

Nicknamed “The Other California” because its character is distinct from the state’s tourist and metropolitan haunts, the San Joaquin Valley joins the Sacramento Valley to stretch 450 miles through nearly three-fifths the length of the state. It comprises the largest area of the richest soil in the world. Most farmers don’t like the generic term Central Valley because it expunges the distinctiveness of the two valleys that grow more than 230 crops and one-third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. This expanse is also more populated than Oregon and larger than Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts combined.

A bit of agricultural and environmental history is important here. At the heart of the Great Depression, during California’s worst recorded drought, farms were going under as their wells pumped dry. Unless something was done, it was predicted that the area’s underground aquifer wouldn’t last another thirty or forty years. So the federal government launched the Central Valley Project, joined later by the California State Water Project, building dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, tunnels, and lateral ditches to send water up and down the state. An irony of the water projects is that they killed off half the smaller family farms in the valley, while helping bigger and richer corporate “farmers” like Standard Oil, Prudential Financial, Southern Pacific Transportation Company, Getty Oil, and Shell. “Get big or get out” became the valley apothegm. My family got out.

In his novel Census, Jesse Ball writes:

No one but farmers understands fairness.
What is there to understand? I asked.
That there isn’t any.

A story that doesn’t often get told is how many valley farmers and ranchers, like most of my neighbors of immigrant and migrant stock, hung on. California farms remain smaller on average than in the rest of the nation. A current aerial flyover map of Madera County in the center of the state, the area where I grew up, shows hundreds of small parcels of twenty acres or less. Of 1,507 farms and ranches in the county, most are small: half are less than 60 acres and 1,095 are smaller than 180 acres. Only 118 are 1,000 acres or more. Some small farms get rented to larger ones. The original 40 acres once owned by my grandfather are now leased for table grapes to the biggest agribusiness investors in the San Joaquin Valley.

The problem of vanishing water—a defining characteristic of both the urban and rural West—is still extreme in the San Joaquin Valley. All farmers and ranchers, large and small, and the workers on the land suffered during this decade’s seven-year drought. With no federal or state surface water, farmers let millions of acres go unplanted, costing agriculture billions of dollars. Hot, dry winds stirred up fungus spores from the dirt, causing a silent epidemic of deadly valley fever, mostly among the poor. A front-page photo in the Fresno Bee in 2015 showed Cha Lee Xiong on his small twenty-acre farm near Sanger, hunkered down in a barren field with dirt in his cupped hands after his well went dry.

Advertisements like these recruited farm workers from around the world to California’s San Joaquin Valley. Courtesy of Frank Bergon.

In 2016, as the drought neared its end in other parts of California—but not in the valley—a controversial and sullied presidential election revealed a widening gulf between the country and the city. I came to see this split while writing about the valley, where mostly conservative small-town and rural residents sensed a clamor for their votes without a matching desire for understanding or empathy.

My initial intention was merely to write profiles of valley people I knew. Eventually my portraits became a book about generations of immigrants, migrants, and their descendants, who remain suffused with a prevailing ethic from the 19th century. An Old West state of mind emblazoned the career of the Dust Bowl migrant Darrell Winfield, who for thirty years reigned as the iconic Marlboro Man without abandoning his trade as a working cowboy. My valley friend Fred Franzia, the legendary creator of the best-selling wine in history, popularly known as Two-Buck Chuck, consciously adopted the work ethic of his Italian grandmother who’d immigrated to the arid valley of rattlesnakes and jackrabbits.

In the new millennium, the San Joaquin Valley endures as one of the most racially and ethnically rich areas in the country. Two out of three people are racial or ethnic minorities, and two out of five minorities are foreign-born. Belief in the valley as a place of individual freedom and economic opportunity for those who pursue education and work hard—a faith American at its core, though Western in its intensity—has become harder to maintain beyond a wistful dream in an era of gated communities and suburban isolation.

Not all is bleak. Sal Arriola, a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border with his family without authorization when he was three, now farms the biggest vineyards in the country for the family-owned Bronco Wine Company. Irene Waltz, of mixed German and Chukchansi heritage, told me she experienced no discrimination in valley schools, worked for nearly forty years as the manager of grape contracts for Constellation Brands, and served as treasurer and now insurance executive for the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians. Albert Wilburn, a valley high school valedictorian and student body president who became the first black captain of the Stanford football team, and a physician, remembers his boyhood valley as a place of tolerance.

“We assumed tolerance,” he told me. “It came to us through osmosis and was as natural as drinking water and breathing air.”

From many rural and small-town people I heard how the valley gets a bum rap. Or no rap at all. A common refrain arose: “It’s like we don’t exist. We’re invisible.” If we are to understand America as it really is, the San Joaquin Valley and all its people must become visible.

The post America’s Most Productive Agricultural Region Is Also One of Its Most Diverse appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Whether that happens will be determined in Madera County, on the north side of the river from Fresno. There, a new city, consisting of multiple large planned communities, is finally under construction after decades of planning and litigation.

The city has no name and incorporation could be decades away. But within a generation, its population could grow to more than 100,000 people; by mid-century, it might double Madera County’s current population of 150,000.

And that is just on the Madera side of the river. On the Fresno side, the county is developing open space, the city of Fresno’s north side is growing, and the city of Clovis is expanding to its south and east. Rising together, the new Madera city, Fresno, and Clovis could come to constitute a tri-cities area in the center of California, offering a new model for the state’s long-neglected interior.

If the new Madera and expanded Fresno and Clovis cities could cohere into a stronger region by mid-century—and that’s an “if” as big as the Valley floor—greater Fresno could transform from a relatively poor backwater of 1 million-plus into California’s answer to Austin, an inland country metropolis of 2 million or more capable of spreading the Golden State’s coastal prosperity to its dusty interior.

Of course, such a transformation would require extensive regional planning of the sort that has been little seen in Fresno. It would require establishing new and more effective governance arrangements and funding for regional transportation, economic development, water management, recreation, and air quality. In short, it would require something just short of a revolution in California governance, and in thinking about what city governments do.

Transforming greater Fresno also would require collaboration between local governments that have spent decades using lawsuits to stall the growth of their neighbors. Madera County’s development has only recently gone forward after fights so bitter that the governor’s office intervened.

Indeed, the very structure of California, and its land-use planning, works against turning Fresno into a region, never mind a powerhouse. In our state, local jurisdictions are weak and have little power to raise their own revenues; they are incentivized to compete with other cities, often using questionable subsidies, in the chase for developments and the taxes they bring. In the Golden State, cooperating with neighboring municipalities is for saps.

The battles between the San Joaquin Valley’s cities have been especially hard-fought, since those municipalities are weak even by California’s diminished standards. (Madera County doesn’t even have a parks department.) The game is: support development that provides revenue for your city, while spreading the costs—in traffic, water and air quality—onto your neighbors.

That has inspired nearly constant litigation. To take just two examples: The city of Fresno sued Madera County to block the new river development plan until it got a tax-sharing agreement that would compensate it for impacts like traffic. In retaliation, Madera County sued Fresno to block a new shopping center, claiming it would siphon off shopping dollars and sales taxes that should go to Madera.

Most, but not all, of such litigation is now over, offering an opportunity to build together. Potential collaborations could include a stronger and more resilient water infrastructure (the new Madera developments tout their water efficiency), a joint powers authority that could raise revenue to improve access to the river itself, and a regional transportation network. That network ought to reach as far south as Visalia, and north, across the river into Madera, along both the Highway 41 and 99 corridors.

Another problem is the lack of local government brainpower. The area’s municipalities in particular need more personnel with training and experience in regional planning. The existing regional planning includes some collaboration on trails and water treatment, but it is still too irregular and unimaginative.

That’s why the big and bold development in Madera is so promising. The county on Fresno’s northwestern flank is saying via its big new developments that it doesn’t want to be small, poor, and isolated anymore. That’s the message all of greater Fresno needs to embrace.

Indeed, Madera County is pitching its new developments as a huge step forward for central California: master-planned communities with trails and schools and job centers and water facilities wrapped in, providing the greater density and smaller lots of more urban living.

The signature project, now under construction, is Riverstone, with acres of commercial space and nearly 6,600 homes of various sizes across six themed districts, along Highway 41, best known to most Californians as a road to Yosemite. “The new-home community of Riverstone,” boasts one brochure, “will be a celebration of California living where people of every generation can enjoy the relaxed and informal spirit of the Golden State.”

Other developments in the pipeline—with names like Tesoro Viejo and Gunner Ranch—are supposed to offer a similar approach, and county officials say they are likely to be incorporated one day as the county’s third city (after Madera city and Chowchilla). These developments are close to river-adjacent Fresno County projects—like a town-size development near Friant Dam.

“This is going to be a new town and we have this opportunity with a blank canvas to do it right,” Madera County Supervisor Brett Frazier recently told local television.

Much could go wrong. If the new river city doesn’t produce promised jobs and inspire better transit, the expanded development could fuel sprawl, add to air pollution, and turn Highway 41 into a traffic nightmare.

Successful regionalization will require outside help. The state’s climate change regime must prioritize infill development in central Fresno, so that the urban core isn’t weakened as people move to the new river city. The ongoing revival of Fresno’s downtown needs the added momentum of the state’s high-speed rail project, which is already under construction across Fresno County (a signature rail bridge is being built across the river, linking Madera and Fresno in another way).

Greater Fresno badly needs high-speed rail to provide connections to Northern California and Southern California, making it an affordable crossroads between two world-class regional economies.

And Fresno has a large population of undocumented immigrants who are desperate for legal status so they can advance themselves, and their region, economically.

You should not bet the farm on the grand project of turning greater Fresno into the next great region. But if Madera’s new development can inspire progress in that direction, the state would have reason to celebrate—and perhaps call the new river city Future Town, CA.

The post Could a New River City Transform California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The remark not only showed that de León needs a bit of education on the Valley (where 4 million people live) but also cast light on an oft-overlooked plant.

Tumbleweeds, like the San Joaquin Valley, are misunderstood and full of surprises. While the plants are best known from their appearances in Westerns and Americana of the region, and tend to symbolize an untamed landscape, they are in fact foreign invaders, and rely on human development to spread.

The term “tumbleweed” can refer to any one of a variety of species, like Russian thistle and kochia. Generally, these plants are bushy and round, and their stem breaks off at the ground in the fall or winter, often after a frost. Then they get carried off by the wind, scattering seeds as they go. Some of these plants can hold hundreds of thousands of seeds. Gary Larson, a botanist at South Dakota State University, recalls that during his graduate study in North Dakota, he tracked a tumbleweed by the trail of seedlings it had scattered.

One type of tumbleweed, though, remains the most notorious—the plant you’ve probably seen in Westerns bouncing along the dusty ground. It goes by the name of Russian thistle, or Salsola tragus.

This irksome rogue hails from the steppes of central Asia, and likely stowed away in a batch of flaxseed from Russia, arriving in the mid-1870s to the charmingly named town of Scotland, South Dakota.

In the 1890s, a U.S. Department of Agriculture botanist named Lyster Hoxie Dewey was sent from Washington, D.C. to South Dakota to learn more about this weed, which had been causing problems amongst ranchers and quickly spreading, as National Geographic reported.

“The rapidity with which the Russian thistle has spread, both in infesting new territory and in thoroughly covering that already infested, far exceeds that of any weed known in America,” Dewey wrote. People told stories of tumbleweeds driving ranchers out of their homes through sheer abundance. The weeds to this day can cause problems like car accidents and are more than capable of knocking over fences.

By that time, it was already too late to halt the tumbleweed’s spread, and it could be found as far away as Canada—and California, by 1885. Today, tumbleweeds are present in every state except for Alaska and Florida (which is really quite a notable distinction, considering that Florida is famous for its invasive species, from Burmese pythons to lionfish). But tumbleweeds are most plentiful and obnoxious in the Great Plains, from North Texas to the Dakotas and west to the Rockies.

Today this plant is also found in most of California’s counties, according to the USDA Plants Database. But—take note Kevin de León—the tumbleweed is notably absent from San Joaquin and Fresno counties. It is still found in the Valley, though, and can be quite plentiful at times, said Patrick Akers, of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, Integrated Pest Control Branch. Part of Akers’ job is to help control the beet leafhopper, an agricultural pest that likes to live on Russian thistle plants—so he pays some attention to the plant’s abundance.

“No one really tracks tumbleweed populations,” he told me when I asked if the number of the plants had increased or decreased in recent years. Anecdotally, this past year there weren’t a lot of the plants.

Russian thistle, and other tumbleweed-forming species, excel at exploiting disturbed ground, land that has been plowed for crops, dug up to make roads, or trampled by livestock. And, owing to their arid origins, they can outcompete native plants in drought conditions.

“Tumbleweeds really are a product of human activity,” Akers said. For example, you can see them on roadsides, but if you walk past them into untrammeled fields or meadows, you won’t be able to find them. While tumbleweeds are excellent at germinating seeds in soil that has been loosened by humans (or cattle), they cannot generally compete in grasslands or more pristine areas, where the soil is harder to penetrate.

While tumbleweeds can cause problems, some people are actually willing to pay for them. In the 1990s, Kansas resident Linda Katz set up Prairie Tumbleweed Farms, a website purporting to grow tumbleweeds, as a joke. But she started collecting the plants when people began to actually order them—and at one point she reportedly made $40,000 a year selling them.

Russian thistle was not the only tumbler to come here without a green card, as it were. Basically all of the species known as “tumbleweeds” hail from Eurasia. Probably the second most notorious tumbleweed, known as kochia (Bassia scoparia), is also from central Asia, and is a nuisance throughout the Great Plains. It’s found in all but six states, and in several counties in California. A study of the genetics of tumbleweeds in de León’s favorite valley, the San Joaquin, found that one widespread “tumbleweed” in the central and southern Valley was a subspecies of Russian thistle that hails, perhaps surprisingly, from South Africa, and has been there since at least 1963.

The research also revealed two other hybrids, or variants of the species. So although the plant isn’t generally a problem in places where people haven’t disturbed the land—or introduced cattle to do it for them—these tumbling plants are adaptable and could continue to surprise in the future.

“Many questions occur regarding [tumbleweeds’] habits, life history, potential for invasion,” the study’s authors wrote. But it seems fair to say that as long as humans are around, so too will our tumbleweed tag-alongs.

The post Where Do Tumbleweeds Come From? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Surprised to hear from me? In normal times, I wouldn’t be inclined to cooperate with the anthropomorphic scheme of a writer desperate for a mid-summer column.

But today so much is being said about agriculture here in the Central Valley, and dairies in particular, that I felt the need to—if you’ll pardon the pun—milk the moment. Too many of you city slickers have the wrong impression of the cows you pass along the 5 or the 99.

In the stories and headlines, we cows are usually invoked as symbols of the past, the epitome of a traditional way of life. And so the stories say we’re threatened by whatever is the news or preoccupation of the day—climate change, labor costs, taxes, regulations, cheap food, the environment. Sometimes cows and dairies are portrayed as victims, unable to flee this dysfunctional state for greener pastures, like other businesses have. Or we cows are seen as victimizers, part of a water-guzzling agricultural industry that is getting its comeuppance with this drought.

Most of these narratives, I can assure you, are just so much manure. The truth is, I’m not old-fashioned, and these are neither the best nor the worst of times for me. In fact, if you got to know me, you’d realize that I’m a lot like you, my fellow Californians. And no, I am not just saying that because we’re mammals, or because there is some of me inside you if you drink milk or eat cheesy pizza.

What I am saying is that we all feel a little like cattle these days. Like all my fellow Californians, my life is being reshaped by technology. Like most of you, I am producing more than ever before. And like many of you, I experience a higher quality of life than those who came before me. But, just like for you, my day-to-day remains a struggle, and I don’t have a clear sense of what the future holds for me, not to mention my calves and grand-calves.

The story of my California probably sounds a lot like yours. We’re still the number one state in dairy (as we are in so many other things), producing nearly 5 billion gallons of milk annually, more than a fifth of the American supply. The county where I live, Tulare (this piece was inspired by a stare down I had with a columnist there), is one of four California counties among the top five dairy counties in America.

But California’s continued leadership among cows is not assured. The end of the last decade was brutal for us, much as it was for you with that housing crisis and recession. Supplies got so high that prices dropped. Then the cost of feed soared, in part because of a lack of rainfall. The combination of lower prices and high feed costs was too much for many dairymen. Since 2007, as a result of foreclosures and consolidation, California has lost about a quarter of its dairies.

Some dairies actually left the state. That may sound strange—how can you pick up and move a farm?—but it’s not uncommon. More than a generation ago, my ancestors lived in Southern California’s Inland Empire, which was full of dairies, but they relocated here in the San Joaquin Valley where land was cheaper. Today, states like Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota seek to lure our dairies with promises of cheaper land and less environmental regulation.

The result: The one constant in my corral is change. Just as you probably have to do more with less in your office, today’s economics require dairies to produce more with fewer cows.

That’s been good for me in some ways. It’s more important than ever for me to live comfortably so I give more milk. I now enjoy special fans and water sprays that keep me cool in the summer; flat, dry, and fluffy bedding (some cows even have water beds); and more freedom to exercise and socialize with my herd mates. I spend half the day resting; otherwise, when I’m not in the milking parlor, I eat (I need as much as 35 gallons of water and 60 pounds of feed a day). The medical care I get is better than a lot of humans’ (and I don’t have to deal with the Covered California website or phone line). Not that things are perfect: Many of today’s cooler dairy sheds have hard floor surfaces that make my hooves tender when I walk on them too much.

The pace of life in today’s more productive, technologically enhanced dairies has sped up. The game changer: sexed semen. You read that right—for nearly a decade, dairymen have been able to impregnate their cows with semen modified to produce more female (milk-producing) animals. And you thought online dating had taken the romance out of mating.

Parenting has also gotten more complicated. We’re having babies—calving— at 24 months old, and calving season is now year-round. Younger, fresher animals mean that a dairy makes more milk today with 700 cows than it used to make with 1,000 cows. The downside: It’s like being a billionaire’s wife—there always seem to be younger, hungrier females around, ready to take your place. Cows now typically have five years before they leave the dairy; there’s a nasty rumor in the sheds that we all eventually become meat for human consumption, but I prefer not to think about it.

In the last year or so, because my fellow cows and I are so productive (despite the drought), there’s been talk of a California comeback in dairy. Milk prices are up as overseas demand for dairy products increases, and our cow competitors in Europe and New Zealand have their struggles. But the comeback feels tentative.

There is also the problem of all those nuts out there. There’s only so much land in California, and if you’ve been in the Central Valley lately, you can see almonds (as well as pistachios and walnuts) taking up more and more land that once belonged to us cows, or to our feed. Olives are gobbling up more acres too, as the world can’t seem to get enough olive oil. With the drought taking more land out of cultivation, feeding me and the cows that come after me will get harder.

But you won’t hear me complain. California cows live by the same rule that the boys in Silicon Valley are always citing: adapt, or die. So you can whine about all the change in the state until the cows come home, but that doesn’t mean we’ll listen.

The post If California Cows Could Talk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In this very quiet California election year, it’s fitting that our state’s most overlooked region has emerged as the center of every single major debate about California’s future. As we fight over high-speed rail and water and prisons and fracking and unemployment, we are really debating the future of the San Joaquin. Not that many of us have noticed; the new leader of the California State Senate, Kevin de Léon of Los Angeles, recently dismissed the region as a place full of tumbleweeds.

The San Joaquin—the south Central Valley stretching from the California Delta to the Tehachapi Mountains—only looks small compared to the rest of California. With 4 million residents across eight counties, its population is as big as Oregon’s—and bigger than that of 24 states (Nevada, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Connecticut among them). In square miles, it’s larger than Maryland or Massachusetts. And for all the talk about the power of the San Joaquin’s agriculture, most of its people live and work in cities. Fresno has more people than the cities of Atlanta or Miami. Stockton’s population is bigger than that of Cincinnati or Newark. Bakersfield is home to more humans than Tampa or St. Louis.

And the San Joaquin’s problems may be even bigger than the place itself. So now, without quite realizing it, we are having a variety of different policy debates that all turn on the same question: Just how much does the rest of California want to do for the San Joaquin?

This is the real question of high-speed rail, even though it’s obscured by debates over the project’s cost and legality and whether it will ever get people from L.A. to San Francisco in less than three hours. High-speed rail is less about connecting north to south—and more about connecting the San Joaquin, where rail construction is to start, to our coastal mega-cities, and about trying to boost the San Joaquin economy by attracting new people and jobs to the region. Those important goals are why so many California leaders, Brown among them, are still backing the train despite the collapse of public support for high-speed rail.

The water debate has a similar cast. Yes, California’s water issues are statewide, but the drought is being felt most strongly by the San Joaquin. Farms there, despite considerable improvements in water efficiency, remain heavy users of water, and need the sort of steady supply promised by backers of the water bond measure and the proposed Delta tunnels.

The San Joaquin has more than its share of prisons and crime, and so the state’s ongoing “realignment” efforts—to house more prisoners in county jails—has an outsized financial impact on some communities there. The fierce debate over how and whether to allow fracking in California is very much about what happens to natural gas in the Monterey Shale, much of which sits under the San Joaquin. The immigration debate has been especially hot in the San Joaquin, where agribusiness wants comprehensive reform, and Bakersfield’s Kevin McCarthy leads the U.S. House of Representatives majority blocking it.

And when people talk about the lack of jobs in California, they are really talking (even if they don’t realize it) about the San Joaquin, where unemployment remains in double digits even as most of the state experiences economic recovery.

The bad news is that all six of these San Joaquin-centric policy fights—high-speed rail, water, fracking, prisons, immigration, jobs—are complicated and could end in stalemates. The good news is that each of these debates, when grounded in the particulars of the region, could scramble our partisan and predictable politics and inspire creative compromises.

It’s good that both major parties are divided by these issues. Governor Brown has stood up for the San Joaquin by backing high-speed rail in the face of criticism from other Democrats, including his lieutenant governor, that it costs too much. He’s also drawing protests from environmentalists within his own party because of his support for water infrastructure and his refusal to ban fracking, which is about as popular as George W. Bush is among his Bay Area base.

Kashkari, the Republican gubernatorial candidate from coastal Orange County, is playing both sides of the San Joaquin divide. On one hand, he’s made poverty central to his platform, which includes a specific plan for combating it in the San Joaquin. On the other, he’s calling for the demise of high-speed rail (Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” has become his theme song). His opposition to high-speed rail puts him at odds with other San Joaquin Republicans—including perhaps the most important politician to watch this year, Fresno’s popular mayor, Ashley Swearengin, who is running for state controller and may be the California GOP’s best hope.

The San Joaquin is essential to both parties. Success in that region would keep Kashkari from embarrassing himself in November. And if the Democrats can kill off the GOP in its last major California stronghold, they could ensure that California—a GOP stronghold for most of the 20th century—remains a Democratic powerhouse for the rest of the 21st century.

The San Joaquin also may provide a solution to a basic problem facing California this year: the total absence of public interest in an election lacking any overarching narrative, or clear stakes. The candidates are all familiarly boring or boringly unfamiliar. But the San Joaquin is not a boring place; it’s worth fighting for.

When Governor Schwarzenegger was in office, he focused public attention on a specific issue by giving each year a theme. 2005 was his Year of Reform; 2007, the Year of Healthcare. He didn’t get the policies he wanted in either year, but he did manage to drive media coverage and public debate across California. In that spirit, it’s not too late to call 2014 the Year of the San Joaquin.

The post All California’s Problems Lead to the San Joaquin Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In engineering class, such consequences were rarely, if ever, mentioned. Instead, we learned that the impacts of our designs would be handled later by other professionals during a project’s “environmental review.” But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if late-stage review would produce anything more than small or ornamental changes to projects. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone to anticipate such effects and address them in their initial designs?

A similar question hangs over California today as it seeks to implement SB 375, a 2008 law that requires each of its regions to develop 30-year plans to reduce the number of miles people drive each year.

Long-term planning is a good idea, but this law didn’t require much else. It didn’t require local governments to rein in sprawl by bringing destinations—work, schools, healthcare facilities—closer to where people live. It didn’t require cities to provide more opportunities for people to walk or use public transit. Instead, it directs regions to make a plan and determine how that plan will perform in the future. There are few incentives for local communities to follow through and no penalties if they don’t. The most important legal check on the 30-year plans is a computer model that evaluates them by simulating future travel patterns—and that model doesn’t account for the realities of political decision-making.

As it turns out, it’s awfully easy to hit a regional driving reduction target if your plan is based on a future detached from the politics of transportation investment and local land use. The San Diego region, for example, placed most of its projected investment in public transit near the end of its 30-year planning period to show that it would reduce driving in the future. Never mind that between now and then city and county governments can approve sprawling residential developments on the urban fringe that run contrary to SB 375 plans. The federal dollars that typically support ambitious public transit projects could also be gone by that time.

Common sense, not to mention the imperatives of climate change, demand that we make changes today, not in 30 years. Even if it’s too late to avoid the worst of climate change’s impacts, building cities that allow people to go without an automobile for some trips can decrease risk of wildfire damage, improve resiliency to drought, and reduce the “heat island” effect that makes urban areas warmer. And plans that encourage more walking and biking today will make us healthier in the long run.

In collaboration with colleagues from geography and community development, I have been studying California’s efforts to hit SB 375’s goals. Including perspectives from beyond engineering is absolutely necessary to understand the promise and perils of long-term planning.

My colleagues and I have found that, for all the things it’s missing, SB 375 has the transformative potential to spark regional conversation, and local action. And nowhere is this type of regional vision more important than in the San Joaquin Valley, where planning agencies are currently adopting their SB 375 plans.

In the Valley, as elsewhere in California, development traditionally has been driven by cheap land, seemingly abundant infrastructure, and a lack of consideration of environmental and social impacts. As a result, development has expanded outside central cities, where it can produce new revenue for cash-strapped local governments and seems to meet the preferences of some consumers for low-density housing.

But this type of fringe development has been disastrous for the region as a whole. Forty percent of Valley commuters cross county lines for work each day. There are few reliable transit options; it currently would take a resident of Lanare about two hours to travel the 30 miles to Fresno by bus—four times longer than it would take to travel by car.

With so many people on the road, it’s no wonder that the entire Valley fails to meet federal standards for ozone and fine particle air pollution. According to recent data prepared by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, about a quarter of the Valley’s census tracts are among the most polluted and most vulnerable in the state. And the American Lung Association says the Valley’s metropolitan areas rank among the worst in the nation in terms of air quality. Sprawl also consumes valuable farmland—60 percent of all San Joaquin Valley land developed since the Gold Rush was prime agricultural land, according to the American Farmland Trust.

Making progress on such issues requires cities and counties to work together. Unfortunately, each county is coming up with its own plan under SB 375. That’s eight separate plans in the San Joaquin Valley to address similar patterns of sprawl and automobile dependence; eight separate plans for an over-committed public to comment on; and no overarching analysis or discussion of how it all fits together.

There’s nothing in the law that says those counties couldn’t come together to create a strong plan that includes new regional transportation alternatives, more affordable housing, and incentives for higher-density housing in urban areas. There are already good examples of what might be possible in rapid public transit, like the proposed Fresno Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line and the successful Stockton BRT. A strong Valley-wide regional plan might also encourage reconsideration of some of the county plans, which call for future growth in new towns far from urban concentrations of jobs.

It’s not enough to make plans for 30 years down the road with the hope that we’ll make things right between now and then. Although modeling can tell us a great deal about our potential futures, the hard work of redesigning our regions, and their land use and transportation policies, needs to start right now.

The post Can California’s San Joaquin Valley Conquer Urban Sprawl? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a lifelong Californian, I’ve grown to love the mountains so much that I’ve done volunteer work in the forests of the Sierra for the past 15 years. And over that time, I’ve seen a dramatic shift in the condition of the forests. The problems are twofold: a lack of funding and a lack of personnel.

The problem is particularly acute in the Sequoia National Forest, most easily accessed from Bakersfield or Porterville. It has no forest rangers. Let me be very clear: I do not use the word “ranger” like others, who count anyone wearing a Forest Service uniform as a ranger. What I am talking about is the absence of the traditional “ranger-naturalist” who spends his or her time tromping the trails.

These are the rangers who interact with people in the backcountry, protect our resources on the ground, maintain the structures related to trails, check permits, and help people in trouble. Interacting with such folks remains a very fond memory of my youth, and it was part of what brings me back to the mountains.

Such people are gone now. Yes, you will find a few rangers who work in the information booths and offices, where the cars park, but there is no one away from the roads. This has translated into a slow but steady degradation of the forest, and the rise of destructive visitor behavior, such as graffiti on trees or the creation of fires when conditions are dangerous.

It’s not just the rangers who are gone. The professional trail maintainers have disappeared, too. Not so long ago, teams of such people maintained trails, using only “primitive” tools like shovels and handsaws. Skills with such tools are crucial because one rule of working in Forest Service wilderness is that any kind of engine or wheeled device is prohibited. Trails can’t be maintained with chainsaws or wheelbarrows.

Why are all these skilled people gone? It’s money, of course. The Forest Service budget to the Sierra forests has been cut on an almost an annual basis, with frontline workers bearing the brunt of the cuts.

Who fills the gap? Volunteers like me. Today, all the trail maintenance done in the Sequoia National Forest is performed by a half-dozen volunteer groups, members of which spend their own time and money to get special training, buy their own tools, drive up to the forest, and work hard for days or even weeks. For example, my group, the High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew, has restored many trails that had been left to deteriorate.

Such work has to be done. Trails are artificial things. Water washes them out, trees fall on them, and rocks crash onto them. If these problems are not fixed, trails become impassible in just a few years.

Most trails require work every year, or they deteriorate. But such maintenance doesn’t always happen. Two years ago, I led a crew to repair a portion of the remote Pacific Crest Trail, which had gotten no attention in almost a decade. This is one of our great national scenic trails, yet it took my crew of 15 two hours to find it. It was so terribly overgrown that it took 30 days of work over a three-year span to clear just a few miles of trail.

This sort of thing is not just a labor of love but also a labor of public health. Trails need maintenance not only because people wish to travel in the wilderness, but also because poorly maintained trails erode the watershed, diminishing the quality of water in Central Valley cities.

Volunteers, of course, can do only a small part of this work. At least that has been the standard thinking. But now, there are only volunteers. With no one else chipping in, we don’t merely lose access to trails. We lose trails altogether.

The trails are organized into a system, and “system trails” are required, by law, to be maintained. But when trails can’t be maintained, as is the case now, the government complies with the law by “decommissioning” poorly maintained trails from the trail system. And decommissioned trails literally disappear from maps. One of the best mapmakers for the Sierra, Tom Harrison, tells me that Forest Service personnel regularly instruct him to remove trails from his maps. Eventually, no one knows the trail was ever there.

This trend represents the ongoing loss of national resources—our trails and the access they provide. And these losses seem to be happening without public awareness or debate. Yes, there are some people who believe that wilderness areas are better off without trails or the ability of people to access them; they want the land kept pure and believe that the harder it is to get into the forests, the better. They hold as their scripture the 1964 Federal Wilderness Act, which designates areas “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.”

I read the Wilderness Act differently, since it also speaks of wilderness lands being preserved “for the people,” as places where “man himself is a visitor.” Access to our public lands is a right of all Americans, and the huge system of public lands is something that distinguishes America from most of the world’s other countries. It also makes the Central Valley a special place to live. With the decline of forests and trails, we are losing a part of California—and part of our American selves.

The post Why California’s Trails Are Disappearing From Our Maps appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.