While most activities ground to a halt in the COVID-19 crisis, nature didn’t skip a beat at urban farms across the Bay Area. Urban farms meet an array of local needs, whether it’s for organic food, living wage jobs, a community center, or a place to connect with nature. With the COVID crisis, and with many American communities touched by loss and fighting racism, these needs have become even more acute. Farms, gardens, and nurseries across the Bay Area are rising to the challenge.
Times of extraordinary change reveal how future climate injustices may well play out: the “haves” marshal the means to protect themselves and the “have-nots” bear the burden of impacts. In particular, the nation is gaining painful insight into how pre-existing vulnerabilities and prejudices get lethally compounded in a crisis.
The voices of Bay Area farmers, shared in this story, highlight personal experiences of climate justice and community resilience. Urban farms and gardens strengthen their communities, in the face of both climate change and persistent inequality.
Gardening for Health and Justice
Yenni Copto grafts fruit trees for East Oakland’s Planting Justice, a combination farm, nursery, and education program that serves people impacted by mass incarceration and social inequity. The community the nursery serves has been her home for twelve years, and it is already experiencing tangible climate impacts.
“I remember, when I was a little girl, the heat waves didn’t used to be this hot,” says Copto. She has felt firsthand the escalation of heat and unbreathable air from wildfires, which in recent years have razed communities across the state. Many of Copto’s neighbors have asthma, a condition linked to prolonged exposure to air high in particulate matter. In East Oakland, the air is already polluted by the 880 freeway, and wildfires only exacerbate the pollution. But Copto’s neighbors have noted improved air quality around the nursery.
Planting Justice uses no chemical pesticides or fertilizers, in order to protect the plants they grow and the people who eat them. From the organization’s standpoint, the resilience of the land is intimately tied to the health of the people. Fresh produce in itself presents a health boost, given that the area is a food desert. “Aside from the nursery, you have to drive to get organic food that’s not processed,” says Julio Madrigal, a Planting Justice farmer.
As Copto’s community proves, a food desert is not just a place of lack. They can be dynamic communities, animated by people who have found innovative and resourceful ways to meet their needs despite their circumstances.
Illustration: Robin Bean Crane
Growing a Resilient Community
Urban farms strengthen a community’s social safety net. Even before the COVID crisis, they offered resources and mutual aid through informal community networks. “The chayote, collard greens, herbs for respiratory distress, garlic— it was all already growing before COVID,” says Wanda Stewart, a garden educator at Hoover Elementary School Garden in West Oakland.
In a time when bulk food supply chains have broken down across the country, community farms have emerged as a strength rather than vulnerability. Marianne Olney-Hamel is a farmer with Berkeley Basket CSA, which grows its produce in three Berkeley backs. The farm participates in an intricate web of cooperation. “Because we are so small and hyper-local, there is opportunity for community building and mutual aid, like some CSA members delivering boxes to those who are disabled or can’t leave the house,” says Olney-Hamel.
The farms foster relationships between neighbors, and between the community and the land. Zolina Zizi is a farmer with Urban Tilth, and she maintains the community garden along the Richmond Greenway’s three-mile community bicycle and pedestrian trail, along with a nearby edible forest that boasts more than sixty varieties of fruit trees. She has observed the mutual benefits that the Greenway and the community gain from each other. “Homeless folks have a really good relationship with the garden and help take care of it, and make sure nobody bothers it,” Zizi says. In turn, the garden’s bounty is available to all for free, as a community resource.
“It’s the ultimate in stacking functions,” says Stewart, describing the diverse benefits, including support for mental wellness, that coalesce in community gardens and farms. At Hoover Elementary, she has observed firsthand how her students’ test scores, behavioral issues, and general ability to focus improved after the school’s garden education program was implemented. At Planting Justice, the staff includes people re-entering society from jail and the prison system. The farm provides structure and a tight-knit community. “People who have worked with us have stayed out of trouble for years, because we give them the support and resources they need,” says Copto.
Adaptive Farming With Past and Future in Mind
In anticipation of a changing climate, Shao Shan Farm in Bolinas has intentionally stressed its crops with minimal watering and selected seeds for drought tolerance. Owner Scott Chang-Fleeman is entering his second growing season, selling heritage Asian produce to CSA members across the Bay Area as part of the urban greenbelt. As someone who learned how to farm during the worst drought in California history, Chang-Fleeman knows what he will be up against in the future and is preparing today. In an effort to conserve water and minimize impact, at Shao Shan all irrigation water is gathered as rainwater catchment. The farm does not divert water from streams or draw water from wells.
Not all farmers are on equal footing when it comes to preparing for climate impacts. Much of a farmer’s power and ability to plan ahead hinges on land ownership, which has been denied to many farmers of color. That inequity galvanizes Chang-Fleeman. “California’s agricultural landscape was built by people of color, and it was stolen from them. There needs to be a redistribution and re-allocation of wealth when it comes to land ownership and agriculture,” he says.
This history affects how farmers today like Minkah Taharkah can prepare for disasters. “People who come from historically marginalized communities have certain generational setbacks that impede our ability to get prepared,” says Taharkah, a farmer with the Black Earth Farms Collective in Berkeley, which practices African indigenous agroecology on UC Berkeley-owned land at the UC Gill Tract Community Farm. Because they cultivate land that they don’t own, they can’t count on being able to farm it in the future, making it difficult to plan ahead. Nevertheless, the Collective is undeterred. “Working within a communal structure of different parcels of land will allow us to build a network that [provides for] different types of disaster preparedness,” she says.
Illustration: Robin Bean Crane
Healing and Health
In addition to supplying the community with food and jobs, the farms seek to shift how people care for the land and each other. Before he joined Planting Justice over ten years ago, Madrigal wasn’t aware of the pesticides and chemicals in the food he ate. “Learning about farming opened my eyes to having that connection to growing my own food, for myself and my family,” he says. As one of Planting Justice’s teachers, he hopes to pass on that awareness to his students.
When it comes to raising awareness of climate change in the community, he thinks the lessons lie in the garden. “When people grow gardens, they start to realize that we emit a lot of pollution and that we have to allow nature to recover,” he says.
Taharkah also sees implicit lessons in cultivating the land that have long-term impacts. “We learn from plants that things take time. We have to move at their speed alongside them. Continuing to return to the earth together is an integral part of addressing all these crises,” she says.
“I don’t think the climate change piece is in any way separate from the people piece,” says Stewart. “The people systems have served me as well: sharing resources, seeds, relationships. Those relationships are what get us through. We’re tending the earth and tending its people.”
Audrey Brown is an independent writer based in the Bay Area who works at the intersection of environment, culture, social equity, food, art and climate. She covers environmental climate justice issues for Estuary, among other topics.
Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...
Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems. Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...
Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.