Perennial: The Undergraduate Environmental Journal of Berkeley - Issue 2

PERENNIAL Fall 2020 | Issue No. 2

THE UNDERGRADUATE ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNAL OF BERKELEY

TRANSFORMATION

letter from the editors

Dear Reader,

2020 was a year of reckoning. The world had to face public health and economic crises created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Natural disasters ravaged the planet on unprecedented scales.

Floods displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia, and the Atlantic hurricane season was one of the worst on record. Wildfires amplified by the climate crisis burned through California and Australia, forcing many communities to evacuate. In the United States, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and far too many black citizens forced Americans to confront police brutality and racial injustice. We need to be prepared for the next crisis.

Many community activists, world leaders, and academic institutions, among others, have emphasized the need for resilience during these tumultuous times. Adapting to not seeing family, navigating online school, working from home, and the many other changes to daily life associated with the pandemic undoubtedly demands resilience on a personal, communal, national, and even global level. As a publication, it’s our duty to recognize and highlight the resilience that so many have shown in the face of disaster after disaster.

However, we cannot stop at resilience. Resilience implies accepting and adapting to the current environment we have found ourselves in, but unfortunately it is too late for many communities

most

affected

by

the

crisis.

Oftentimes,

the

burden

of

adapting

disproportionately falls onto these communities. When it comes to the climate crisis, surviving extreme heat waves or rebuilding after devastating hurricanes takes a tremendous amount of resources that many do not have. It is not sustainable to only adapt to the extreme climatic events: rather than focusing on post-disaster response and recovery, we need to also address the root causes through mitigation, preparedness, and transformative measures.

The crises we witnessed this year have brought the need for change and have pointed a way forward: we must protect not only the people, but also the planet. These crises are interconnected, and they have exposed existing gaps and inequalities — a burdened healthcare system, enduring systemic racism, and the climate crisis, to name a few. Our theme for this issue is “transformation” because we need to go beyond adaptation. We have to actively work

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to transform institutions like the economic, energy, and political systems to help society better navigate future crises. Resilience becomes something that is built in, not hoped for.

In this issue, we highlight several ways we can transform our society to become more just, equitable, and sustainable. Whether it means transforming how we manage forests and fires, how we conserve endangered species, or how we address environmental injustice, there are many avenues to instigate transformation. This issue explores how we can transform the way we manage waste, reimagine worker health and safety in the face of wildfires, adopt a new model of tourism that minimizes environmental impacts, among many other transformative ideas and efforts. While this issue highlights just a few examples, there are countless opportunities for transformation in every industry.

Amid difficult times, the story of Perennial has given us a reason to stay hopeful. The publication was founded in Fall 2019 as the brainchild of two Berkeley undergraduate students. Within a year, Perennial has grown to a 40-person team. Although the journey of launching our first issue was fraught with challenges, the positive feedback we received from our community has encouraged us to keep going. Our staff produced this second issue in a much tougher situation, adapting to a fully online semester and collaborating through virtual meetings across time zones. During these trying times, Perennial provides a space for us to connect and exchange our ideas and passion to re-envision the human-environment relationship in our community. There is a long way ahead, but we draw hope from each other in knowing we are working together to create a better future.

We must act before the next crisis hits our backyard. Today, more and more people are becoming aware of the intersectional nature of environmental issues and are taking action to facilitate change in their own fields. This year must be a turning point: we need to implement the emerging ideas, policies, and technologies that aim to achieve a more equitable and sustainable future. We call on you to join this movement and become a part of the change.

Sincerely, Jasmine Chen, Celine Yang, and Grace Sandel

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1

Letter from the Editors

7

Toiling in the Smoke: Historic Wildfires Threaten California’s Agricultural Workforce

11

E D I TO R I A L

by Teresa Campbell

The Myth of Green Development

by Verona Teo

15

UC Berkeley’s Zero Waste By 2020: Goals, Realities, and Reframings for the Future

20

`Ilio holo I ka uaua — Protecting Hawaiian Monk Seals

by Olivia Hemond

by Claire Sauter

24

Green Spaces: An Urban Mental Health and Environmental Solution

27

From the Sea to Your Plate: The Impacts of the Global Fishing Industry

30

Is Ecotourism the Solution to Unsustainable Tourism?

34

What’s in a Name: The Controversy Surrounding Rausser College of Natural Resources

37

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Leaving A Legacy of Environmental Progress

by Shani Lyubomirksy

by Nicole Inaba

by Christina Pellicio

by Jacqueline Cox

by Andre Zendejas

40

Obstacles to a Just Transition: Analyzing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Lobby Against Climate Policy

44

Featured Op-Ed: Semipermeable Beings: Reckoning with Trans-Corporeality and Capitalism

by Lamiya Gulamhusein

by Tessa Stapp

R ESEARCH 51

Wildfire Resilience and Mitigation In Paradise, CA

57

The Effects of Grazing on Perennial and Annual Grasses and its Implications for Grassland Management in California

by Nolan Force

by James Bowe

63 71 72

Aztlán to Eden: Primitive Accumulation on the Grasslands of Arizona

by Anjika Pai

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Toiling in the Smoke:

By Teresa Campbell

Redwood tree burning after CZU August Lightning Complex passed through (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

“The sky darkened‌ It was like night during the day.â€? This could be the opening line to a sci-fi movie, yet it was a farmworker’s description of a California vineyard in mid-September.

As fires ravaged close by, he continued to pick grapes, working through the smoke dense enough to blot out the sun. It seemed apocalyptic, and all the while, the farmworkers returned to harvest.

Across California, checking the air quality becomes a routine for many in the fall. Changing plans based on the forecasted AQI becomes a seasonal affair.

However, many people do not share the choice of minimizing their exposure. Hazardous air quality caused by California wildfires is forcing farmworkers to choose between their health or their income. Many choose the latter, as economic needs take priority over future health repercussions.

Environmental justice and human rights activists are calling on the state and federal government to address the disproportionate effect of wildfires on 7 Fall 2020 / Perennial

California’s agricultural communities by creating economic safety nets to protect their health and livelihood.

As of January 2021, California wildfires have already decimated an estimated 4.1 million acres of land. According to Cal Fire, climate change has created hotter temperatures through the spring and summer and has shortened periods of snow, which creates longer dry seasons that increase the risk of wildfires. The number of extreme fire risk days has doubled since 1980.

This weather intensification is threatening the already short windows that characterize California's harvest seasons. Some types of produce only have a two-week harvest window, driving farm labor during even the worst environmental conditions.

This has large repercussions for farmworkers in California, widely considered an agricultural epicenter in the nation. In 2019, over $50 billion dollars was generated by the agricultural sector, over 400 commodities produced in California were shipped worldwide, and hundreds of thousands of

agricultural workers were employed.

One farmworker I spoke with, who asked to remain anonymous over concern for his job, continued working the vineyards in Monterey County even as smoke darkened the sky.

“It was really bad when the fires were at their worst,” said the worker. He, who I will refer to as G., is 38 years old and has worked in agriculture for 18 years. G. works at the vineyard five days a week from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. On the sixth day, G. does landscaping.

During fire seasons, G. comes home with chronic headaches, dizziness, and shortness of breath: all common repercussions of exposure to unhealthy air quality. Long-term risks include asthma and scarred lungs, but these are not issues many farmworkers can afford to think about.

Still, the consequences of wildfires go beyond physical health. G. described the panic that arose from being forced to breathe in smoke all day.

“I didn’t want to be breathing that air,” he said. “I wanted to go home. It just didn’t feel like where I should be.” However, despite his mounting anxiety, G. faced 10 hours of work a day, as going home meant risking his job and income.

To compound this struggle, G. said that the farm owners did not supply N-95 masks to the workers

or have a conversation with them regarding their rights or protections. Cal/OSHA, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, requires employers to supply N-95 masks to workers when the air is over 150 AQI. In Monterey County, the AQI hovered around 200 in mid-September.

Frustrated that the farm owners were neglecting to acknowledge the horrific conditions that workers were facing, G. and several of his colleagues took it upon themselves to find their own N-95 masks. However, the masks were out of stock in every local store. Ultimately, the workers were left to work all day without protection to feed a country that they felt was not caring for them.

When asked why he avoids speaking to the farm owner about protections, G. said that he wants to, but fears losing his job. The inability to speak up against injustice is a pervasive issue in the farmworker community. Many people cannot risk losing a day’s income by missing work on a day with hazardous air quality, or worse, being fired for speaking up.

COVID-19 has exacerbated this fear, according to Dr. Don Villarejo, co-founder and executive director emeritus of the California Institute for Rural Studies. Due to the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, over $8 billion in grower revenue will be lost during the current calendar year, which is about 20% of the revenue California growers were predicted to make in 2020. This loss of

Farm laborers from Fresh Harvest in a field in Greenfield, California (Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

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Farm laborers in masks wash their hands before work in Greenfield, California (Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

revenue often translates to layoffs, a looming work.� threat to workers.

Yet, while it is difficult for workers like G. to hold In addition, undocumented workers, who make up farm owners accountable, the burden should not an estimated 50% of the farmworker population in fall on to them to do so in the first place.

California, were hit disproportionately hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Undocumented workers are A policy transformation needs to go beyond the not eligible for food stamps, unemployment insur- requirement of distributing N-95 masks, said ance or a variety of federal financial support Alexis Guild, director of Health Policy and programs, including the federal stimulus pay- Programs at Farmworker Justice. Guild explained ments. that there are ways to improve ventilation in the fields, such as fans and other air quality control Villarejo described the inequality between docu- technologies that farmers can invest in. Additionmented and undocumented workers as tragic: “It ally, better wages, a path to citizenship, overtime means that essential workers‌ are denied the protection, more comprehensive labor laws, and same benefits as even the people with whom they increased access to education are among many

Closeup shot of massive Monterey County fire (Mercury News)

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ways farm workers can be empowered by legislation.

It is worth noting that there are farms, like Swanton Berry Farm, that are dedicated to protecting farmworkers. Their website states that “the dignity of farm labor is a founding principle of Swanton Berry Farm.” The website further elaborates how the farm has worked to honor the mental and physical health of their coworkers by implementing medical plans, retirement plans, paid vacation time, and hourly pay rather than a piece rate.

These working conditions are important steps forward in the continuous process of ensuring farmworker justice.

Villajero believes that there are two ways that those concerned can support farmworker empowerment: one is by voting, and another is by organizing. In his eyes, voting for representatives who will prioritize farmworker communities is critical in creating effective and comprehensive policy. “[Organizing] can be life changing, and it can be rewarding [for both those organizing and those benefiting from it],” said Villarejo. Below is a list

of organizations partnered with the COVID-19 Farmworker Study (COFS) that Villajero recommends people to engage with or explore internship opportunities.

When I asked G. what he would like to share with students, he said, “I would like if everyone would take us more into account, because we work hard, and we should be given protection.”

G.’s statement points to an obligation and privilege that people have to support and uplift those who are the very backbone of our society’s health and national economy.

“A lot of pride and dignity in farmwork gets left out of conversation which is important to share; share not just about challenges but also dignity,” said Guild. She believes that farmworkers need to be present in our daily conversations and receive our gratitude.

According to Guild: we need to talk about farmworkers, honor them, and then work to show that appreciation tangibly through being an activist for their rights.

Organizations partnered with COFS: Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, Central California Environmental Justice Network, Lideres Campesinas, Alianza Ecologista, Comité Civico del Valle, The Farm Worker Care Coalition, California Institute For Rural Studies, Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, and The Western Center for Ag Worker Health and Safety

River fire scorches nearly 4000 acres in Monterey County (David Rodriguez/The Californian)

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The Myth of Green Development

by VERONA TEO The San Francisco Bay Area, once home to diverse populations, has been constantly changing since the 1990s. Lower income families are moving away at increasing rates to seek more affordable housing.

According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, gentrification rates are higher in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the United States. Although there are many elements that affect population dynamics within cities, green gentrification is a recent phenomenon that has significantly shaped the region’s neighborhoods, 11 Fall 2020 / Perennial

cities, and populations. “Green gentrification,� also known as environmental or climate gentrification, is the process in which the implementation of eco-friendly amenities and environmental planning agendas increase property values and thus attract wealthier populations (Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability). While gentrification overall has been a topic of debate for quite some time, the idea of climate gentrification is one that has become more popular relatively recently.

Marquis Houghton / flickr

As the effects of climate change have become more well known, local government officials have adjusted their policies to make cities more climate resilient. Cities are implementing electrification reach codes, constructing more sustainable buildings through the use of sustainable materials and renewable energy, and using land for recreational parks and conservation.

As a result, data from the Urban Displacement Project shows that there are higher property values, an influx of wealthier populations, and a departure of lower-income communities in the Bay Area. These trends have caused researchers and activists to question how residents are being impacted by such policies.

Alex Werth, a policy associate at the East Bay Housing Organizations, said, “[Green spaces and amenities] are geared toward certain populations.

Cultural spaces like parks, investments, infra-

structure all appeal to newcomers and wealthier consumers.”

As an urban geographer who has previously worked with local government officials, Werth has seen how the policy making process occurs at the local level.

“City governments were very clear they wanted to attract new businesses and residents, and that was part of the intentions behind the [green] development efforts,” said Werth.

According to Werth, part of the reason for such intentions is that local governments are very dependent on certain revenues. California specifically is highly constrained because of Proposition 13, a failed proposition that sought to allocate money towards schools.

Karen Chapple, a UC Berkeley professor and Fall 2020 / Perennial 12

founder of the Urban Displacement Project, brings up a similar idea to Werth’s: the concept of the “entrepreneurial city.”

“Cities are collectively thinking about how they can make themselves attractive and bring in more tax revenue and high-income people,” said Chapple.

However, the implementation of such policies and green development efforts have affected Bay Area residents unequally. According to Alex Nutkiewicz, a Ph.D. Civil and Environmental Engineering candidate at Stanford University, energy efficiency and building retrofits are unequally distributed towards higher-income communities. Such development efforts are catered towards those who can afford it, although their impacts tend to be more significant for people of lower income.

For example, according to an article by Resources Magazine, lower-income residents who live in older buildings often do not have access to air conditioning. This makes them more susceptible to the higher levels of heat that Californians have been experiencing over the past few years.

“There is an overall lack of awareness of how upfront costs of implementing building retrofits can have such great downstream effects on buildings’ energy use,” said Nutkiewicz.

Such retrofits can include adding rooftop solar or improving a building’s energy efficiency According to Nutkiewicz, while energy efficient buildings might raise property values, they ease utility costs, which can offset this price difference.

However, it is not yet entirely clear how much of an impact green gentrification has had on the Bay Area’s changing population trends. It can be difficult to decipher the intentions behind the policy making process, such as determining whether local policies related to climate initiatives like clean energy, green infrastructure, and parks are set with underlying intentions to attract wealthier populations or to improve quality of life.

“There’s a long-standing debate on whether development and population changes in neighborhoods are driven by production or consumption,” said 13 Fall 2020 / Perennial

Chapple. “While production is partially driving inequality, consumption shows that consumer preferences have changed. For instance, people today want more parks, recreation spaces, and different types of accessible transportation.”

Such preferences have impacted housing prices.

“With parks and green spaces, [more] people want to live near there. And so typically, housing prices are much higher near these larger, more recreationally-driven areas,” said Nutkiewicz.

Tim Frank, a partner of the Housing Leadership Council and policy professional with over 20 years of experience working on issues surrounding land use, transportation planning, and economic development, argues that gentrification in the Bay Area is not driven by climate so much as it is driven by people’s preferences.

For instance, one element that plays into mobility and dynamics within cities is the Bay Area’s robust public transportation system. Frank explained that home buyers in Berkeley are more likely to be in the tech industry, so they value being close to public transit. This in turn drives higher property values.

Other policy experts and researchers believe that it is the lack of affordable housing in lower-income communities that are the most significant causes of gentrification and displacement in the Bay Area.

Frank said, “There is a huge amount of underused land and exclusive communities here, which provides part of the explanation for the lack of housing and gentrification.”

Advocates also point to a lack of investment in lower-income communities as another reason.

“Underinvested neighborhoods lead to displacement because increases in costs of living are larger than wage increases. Property taxes also go up, which can be very destabilizing,” Werth said.

Although climate gentrification and displacement are complex issues that will have long-lasting impacts on cities and populations, there are several

Edgar John / flickr

“There needs to be an urban shift in priorities. We must empower the voices of residents who live here.” ways to help mitigate them.

Some possible solutions to reduce the effects of gentrification include requiring developers to build a certain number of affordable homes, implementing policies that guarantee residents’ rights to stay, and offering grants and other incentives only to developers committed to affordable housing.

Chapple said, “[It’s important to] reduce income inequality and provide more housing support so people can afford to live where they are.”

Both Chapple and Frank highlighted how cities must take joint action at the local, state, and national levels to reduce the effects of gentrification.

Werth also brought up the importance of improving planning processes within green planning.

“Planners and policymakers should take advantage of the large amounts of data available on buildings, energy, market fluctuations, and population changes to make data-driven and informed policies,” said Nutkiewicz. “We need to leverage access to the data that we have to improve how cities function.”

While some of green gentrification’s negative effects towards certain populations can be counteracted by such solutions, Werth stressed the importance of how cities must listen to those most at risk of gentrification.

“There needs to be an urban shift in priorities. We must empower the voices of residents who live here,” said Werth.

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Photo credit: Yulia Nesterova, Impakter

Global Anti Incineration Alliance Philippines Executive Director Froilan Grate standing in front of piles of plastic in Malaysia (Yulia Nesterova, Impakter)

Cal Zero Waste by 2020: Goals, Realities, and Reframings for

By Olivia Hemond

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the Future

“It’s been incredibly encouraging to see all of the support across personnel,” said Jessica Heiges, a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley studying waste management. “That’s rare, to have such a multidisciplinary coalition formed around a single vision.”

UC Berkeley community members may have noticed the signs around campus advertising the goal of “Zero Waste by 2020.” The campaign has reduced the amount of waste the campus sends to landfills by 20% since 2012, although the pandemic has temporarily disrupted recent operations.

Now, moving forward from its titular year, the Zero Waste by 2020 and Beyond initiative is working to improve its waste practices and incorporate inclusive and justice-oriented narratives.

With over half a million people involved in the UC system, improvements from each campus have the potential to accumulate and create significant impacts. Since 2004, the UC system has created goals through the initiative, setting targets to divert 90% of solid waste away from landfills, reduce waste generation to less than half of 2015-2016 levels, and eliminate single-use plastics and styrofoam packaging products.

plinary coalition formed around a single vision.”

In April 2020, UC Berkeley also committed to the strongest plastic ban in the country. This policy aims to eliminate all nonessential single-use plastic products on campus by 2030 by identifying and phasing out these products within food service, academics, research, administration, and campus events. “[The policy] is making sure we get there now, and it’s not just words,” said Madi Alcalay, a co-facilitator of the Cal Zero Waste Lab. To facilitate change across the campus, the UC Berkeley Zero Waste Plan targets waste at multiple points. It incorporates “upstream” waste management practices, which focuses on minimizing the amount of waste produced. This can mean promoting the use of reusable water bottles and coffee mugs through the Refreshing Refills campaign or working with campus eateries to adopt specific zero waste practices.

The plan also includes “downstream” strategies, which deals with materials once they’ve entered the waste stream. The goal of these strategies is to minimize the amount of waste that ends up in landfills through the reuse of products and proper waste sorting.

Julia Sherman, Chair of the Zero Waste Coalition at Berkeley, believes that the standardized signage

Due to the variation in operations across the UC system, each campus is responsible for creating its own strategic plan to meet these zero waste goals.

UC Berkeley has started by reducing its per capita waste generation and increasing the rates of waste diversion from landfills. According to the 2019 UC Berkeley Zero Waste Plan, these efforts have decreased the amount of waste sent to landfills from 4,600 tons of landfill waste in 2012 to under 4,000 tons in 2018. Students have played a large role in creating and updating the plan by forming partnerships across campus organizations, as well as creating a Zero Waste DeCal course to educate their peers on systemic environmental solutions.

“It’s been incredibly encouraging to see all of the support across personnel,” said Jessica Heiges, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate studying waste management. “That’s rare, to have such a multidisci-

Image of Big Belly Bins near Barrows Hall (UC Berkeley)

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Graph showing UC Berkeley’s waste diversion rates since 2010 and the 90% goal line (UC Berkeley)

and Big Belly Solar Compactor bins on campus have helped the community learn how to sort their waste, as have educational campaigns during student orientation and within the dining halls. As many waste processing facilities do not sort waste onsite, proper waste sorting plays a critical role in diverting waste from landfill.

“It’s been a work in progress through standardizing signage, standardizing infrastructure, and education,” said Sherman. “I think we’re slowly getting there in terms of students understanding where things go.”

Despite these efforts, much work remains to reach the Zero Waste campaign’s targets; the campus’ diversion rate currently stands around 54%, which is much lower than the 90% goal. To help close this gap, Heiges proposes composting as a potential area where improvements in sorting can have beneficial downstream impacts.

“There’s so much opportunity for a higher diversion rate,” said Heiges. “If they end up in the landfill, organic waste generates methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas. However, if the waste ends up in the compost bin and is then processed to create compost or soil, then it goes back into our environment and ultimately captures carbon.”

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While Heiges highlights the advantages of effective waste sorting, she also points out that there are flaws within waste systems themselves. A recent NPR article found that despite plastic producers knowing that recycling is not a physically or economically viable solution, companies still market recycling as a solution to ease con-

“When you throw something away, it never goes away,” said Madapoosi. “We send our recycling to a materials and cardboard facility in Richmond … that in itself is a form of injustice in that we’re sending all of our waste, recycling and plastic waste, to a city that’s predominantly people of color, predominantly of lower socioeconomic status.”

sumers’ concerns about using plastic. Less than 10% of all plastic ever produced has been recycled. Plastic loses quality each time it’s recycled, so it can only be recycled a few times at most before becoming landfill waste.

While composting is a potential solution for organic waste, some have raised issues with the process. For one, the presence of compostable bioplastics is growing in the form of compostable utensils, takeout containers, and cups. These items are made from plant-based materials and are often marketed as being more environmentally-friendly while maintaining the convenience of single-use disposable products. Their appeal seems to be sticking: according to European Bioplastics, these bioplastics comprise about 1% of all plastic produced today, and production is set to increase.

However, many composting sites do not have the capacity to actually compost these bioplastics. For example, the West Contra Costa Landfill, where UC Berkeley sends its compost, sorts bioplastics out of their waste stream and sends them to landfill.

Most bioplastic products require 90 days in a facility to break down completely, but the Contra Costa facility uses a 30-day turnover rate to handle the large volume of compost they receive.

Additionally, the facility mainly produces compost for agricultural applications, but bioplastics are not nutrient-rich nor beneficial for soil. “[Switching all our single-use plastics to bioplastics is more of] a band-aid solution,” Sherman said. “This doesn’t really have the ability to scale up because of the infrastructure we currently have.”

While we often associate waste with what we see in the garbage can, the entire waste life cycle poses an issue. By the time a product gets to the consumer in the form of a takeout cup or container, a significant environmental footprint has already been created.

“About seven to eight times the amount of waste is generated during the production process than what you put in your bin at home,” said Heiges.

“That is what they call industrial waste or manufacturing waste, and it’s astronomically high.”

As downstream approaches alone cannot effectively minimize waste, some solutions turn to producing less waste in the first place. Reusing items and buying fewer products in the first place are two ways to reduce manufacturing waste.

According to Varsha Madapoosi, a Cal Zero Waste Staff Associate and member of the Students of Color Environmental Collective, these practices are not new: Indigenous peoples and communities of color have been reducing waste and reusing items for generations, as these practices are built into many cultures.

Currently, the Cal Zero Waste Plan contains no mention of environmental justice. However, addressing issues of waste will require more investigation into the ways that they intersect with environmental justice issues.

“It’s the creation of the product itself. Where is it being created, who is working at those manufacturing facilities or those refineries, who is being exposed to those harmful production processes or those harmful production chemicals?” questioned Heiges. “What demographic is predominantly exposed to the chemicals that are inherently in these disposable goods? And then, finally, who is overseeing the collection and processing of the waste itself? All along these processes it’s minorities, it’s immigrants, it’s BIPOC, it’s disadvantaged communities that are being disproportionately affected by the consumption and disposal of waste.”

Once out of sight, it is easy to forget about the impact campus waste has on people outside the Berkeley community.

“When you throw something away, it never goes ‘away,’” Madapoosi said. “We send our recycling to a materials and cardboard facility in Richmond … that in itself is a form of injustice in that we’re sending our waste to a city that’s predominantly people of color and of lower socioeconomic status.”

Some students believe that recognizing the humanitarian issues behind waste management is key to creating successful community engagement with the zero waste goals. Sherman hopes to see more environmental justice education in the plan, as humanizing the waste system could help people better understand waste management Fall 2020 / Perennial 18

practices and what they can do to help.

While waste sorting is a critical component to reducing waste overall, the responsibility should not solely lie on consumers. Heiges points out that individual consumer action alone cannot create the change necessary to decrease the amount of waste humans produce.

“How can we shift [the burden] from individuals as consumers to individuals as professionals?” asked Heiges. “How can we stop focusing on what we’re purchasing and start focusing on how we are contributing to society in our decision-making abilities in our careers? How can we, in our day-to-day jobs, make an impact versus how we as consumers make an impact? Because it’s just increasingly clear that there’s only so much we can do as consumers.”

Heiges hopes that this narrative can resonate with a broader audience, empowering more people to take action. While isolated individual consumer actions may not be enough to address the waste

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crisis, individuals working together as a diverse collective can be a powerful force for change.

“When people think ‘corporations are making all the plastic, we can’t do anything about it,’ there’s not as much individual action. But there can be a lot of change made with individual action,” said Alcalay.

When looking beyond 2020, Heiges is optimistic that waste management is headed in the right direction.

“I think waste is such an enormous problem that it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by it,” said Heiges. “I urge and challenge everyone to take [the problems] instead as frames of possibilities and figure out what they can do as consumers, professionals, or members of civil society.”

‘Ilio Holo I Ka Uaua

Protecting Hawaiian Monk Seals

by Claire Sauter

The Hawaiian monk seal, called “‘ilio holo i ka uaua”, in the native Hawaiian language, means “dog that runs in rough seas.”

Unfortunately, the monk seal is currently living up to its name by being one of the most endangered mammals in the world.

These primarily solitary marine mammals are underwater hunters but go onto sandy beaches to sleep and give birth to small black pups. The adult monk seal has dark grey to brown fur that it sheds periodically, and many seals are known for natural markings on their fur that are unique to each individual.

However, the Hawaiian monk seal is facing many threats including limitations in food availability, shark predation, entanglement in marine pollution, habitat loss due to sea level rise, and even intentional killings. Today, NOAA Fisheries estimates that there are only 1,400 seals left, about a third of their historic numbers.

While these threats are specific to the monk seal, it is one of the hundreds of Hawaiian organisms on the endangered species list which comprise the largest proportion out of any state. Hawaii, making up only 0.2% of the nation’s land, holds more than 30% of the country’s endangered species and has seen 75% of the nation’s documented extinctions.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature identifies the main causes of extinction globally to be habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation, illegal wildlife trade, invasive species, climate change, and pollution. The organization cur-

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rently lists 32,441 species threatened with extinction.

However, the number of endangered species in Hawaii is much higher compared to other areas.

Professor Rosemary Gillespie, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley who studies islands in the Pacific, attributed this to the fact that the Hawaiian islands are the most isolated archipelago in the world.

“What happens in all of these situations is that when the organisms reach the islands, there are lots of ecological opportunities, so there is spectacular diversification. But with that, they become specialized and tend to occupy small areas,” said Gillespie.

As a result, such species are particularly susceptible to impacts such as disease or loss of habitat.

Steve Beissinger, a UC Berkeley professor of conservation ecology and researcher, referred to it as “a sort of funny double edged sword.” He explained that the isolation is both the reason for Hawaii’s high rates of species diversity, as well as

Photo Credit: Jonathan Blais/CORBIS

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why it is so under threat.

The monk seal, like many other Hawaiian organisms, is limited to a very small geographic region and is found nowhere else in the world. The seals are part of the Hawaiian indigenous culture, having been mentioned in an oral tradition: a creation story lists it as one of the creatures living alongside the first humans.

However, compared to other species like sharks, the monk seals are less widely known because of where their range is centered. As a result, they face some problems in terms of public sympathy.

“When I started working with monk seals about ten years ago, people didn’t really know much about them,” said Dr. Trisha Kehaulani Watson-Sproat, the owner of an advocacy consulting group for sociocultural issues in Hawaii. Watson-Sproat is an active member of the Hawaiian indigenous community who has worked with monk seals and studied their historic cultural significance.

She explained that this lapse in recognition was because up until the twentieth century, the seal

Photo Credit: NOAA. French Frigate Shoals.

population primarily resided in the northwestern Hawaiian islands and did not frequently venture to the main, human-populated islands. Increased sightings have brought up questions about how these seals fit into Hawaiian history and culture.

“It’s certainly not as significant as other species, but it’s significant nonetheless. This doesn’t mean that there still isn’t significant tension and hostility towards them because many people do not think they are native,” said Watson-Sproat. For example, she noted that while many Hawaiians recognize the seal’s importance, there have been some misconceptions among some locals that the seals were brought by the federal government and adversely affect fisheries.

Protection of the species began with its listing as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act in 1976. The Monk Seal Recovery Plan was initiated by the Hawaiian state government outlining efforts needed to recover the dwindling seal population. These efforts to improve seal survival have included translocations, removing marine pollu-

tion such as fishing nets and hooks, rehabilitating sick or injured seals, vaccinations, and public education.

As a result, the monk seal population is beginning to stabilize at 1,400 individuals with a gradual increase of 2% annually in the last decade. However, the larger ecological situation in Hawaii remains extremely precarious with over 400 other Hawaiian species at risk.

Protecting these environments demands significant work and collaboration. Who is involved in these efforts, as well as which groups are represented at the decision making table and which are not, are areas of concern to many conservationists.

“I still think there is a lot of division between science from a western standpoint and a lot of the efforts targeted toward Hawaiian and local communities. I have concerns about not focusing their attention enough on Hawaiians,” said Watson-Sproat. “I still think they have ways to go Fall 2020 / Perennial 22

when it comes to working with and involving the Hawaiian and local community.”

it’s incredibly frightening, really, if you are worried about conservation.”

Because these species and environments are culturally and socially meaningful and their health impacts local people, having more equitable representation in research, restoration, and decision making is a topic of concern that members of this community don’t want overlooked.

While climate change has the potential to become a larger threat in the future, Bessinger noted that at the moment, more direct human impacts, such as land use decisions, are having the most direct influence on ecosystems. In a 2010 statewide assessment of forest conditions and resource strategy, the Hawaiian Department of Land and Natural Resources identified invasive alien species, whose takeover has been caused and accelerated by human activity, as the most significant threat to native species in Hawaii.

But even with more integrated support and attention, the scale and impacts of endangered species in Hawaii and beyond leave many to question whether these efforts will ever be enough. For instance, the Center for Biological Diversity conducted a study in 2016 that estimated the United States would need to spend $2.3 billion a year to recover endangered species with only 3.5% of this amount currently being spent.

“It’s sort of like this question of, well, what do I save? Do I choose the ones that are most likely to be successful, or the ones that people care the most about, or the ones that maybe are going to have the biggest roles in ecosystems, or the ones that will be cheapest?” Beissinger said. “I don’t know. And then the question is, do you let any of them fall through the cracks? Should you let any fall through the cracks?”

Watson-Sproat also noted the importance of accepting what might be unpleasant in order to make meaningful decisions going forward.

“Every species you lose is horrific. It’s insane and it’s terrible, but how we start to find ways to protect species and create protected areas that will be successful, will be supported by a wide community and a diverse community and are set up to succeed in the long run,” said Watson-Sproat.

“That’s a hard conversation to have, but it’s an important conversation to have.”

Tackling conservation efforts are often complex and include addressing factors beyond climate change.

“Sometimes you think, well, climate change is the most horrible problem to be confronting the world at the moment. But in Hawaii, there are even more severe problems because the invasive species and disease are happening by the day you can see these huge changes,” said Gillespie. “And 23 Fall 2020 / Perennial

While the rates of species extinction due to and exacerbated by human activity is a complex challenge, some are hopeful that conservation efforts can work to maintain species diversity, as well as preserve cultural significance.

Watson-Sproat gave an example of a recent change she witnessed in Waikiki, a famous tourist strip of beach on Oahu, which is now seeing sharks and schools of fish return during the pandemic that are typically chased away by tourists.

“I remember when I was little and my grandpa used to take me to Waikiki to swim, there was always fish,” she said. “So what we’re seeing now is more the ecosystem of my childhood, and it’s just really amazing to see that you have sort of the entire food web moving back in the moment you remove those anthropogenic impacts.”

To her, the opportunity to more clearly see the immediate environmental impacts of human activity, such as excessive tourism, is a sort of “silver lining” for the pandemic.

“When you’re having tens of millions of tourists a year, it’s not necessarily the way the local people live their lives. It’s the influx of perhaps way too many humans who are not from here into ecosystems where they should not be,” she remarked.

In the case of the monk seal, recovery efforts have begun to turn the tides for these creatures, but there is still much to be done for these Hawaiian species and other species around the globe.

Green Spaces An Urban Mental Health and Environmental Solution

by Shani Lyubomirsky A grey, looming skyline peeking through the fog. Towering skyscrapers with smog blanketing everything in sight. Cars honking, traffic lights blinking, seas of people winding through concrete jungles, focused on getting to their next immediate destination. While these strike up an universally-recognized image of a modern city, this style of living is relatively recent.

Population growth has necessitated urban living with the expansion of civilization booming with innovation across all fronts. However, these advancements come with an increasing price to pay for space.

Green spaces are becoming a luxury that many are increasingly becoming unable to afford. They are becoming harder to come by in cities, and the

resulting impacts of those losses may already be impacting human and environmental health in distinct ways.

An increasing number of studies are finding that the decreasing amounts of green spaces may be a critical factor in the growing issue of poor mental health. According to Environmental Psychologist Susan Clayton, humans experience changes in their mental health when placed in “extreme environments,” which can be found in cities where excessive noise and pollution is the norm.

A 2019 study found that some urban populations hold nearly a 50% increased risk of developing “psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and mood disorders compared with their rural counterparts.”

Fall 2020 / Perennial 24

Projections illustrate that in 2015, two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in urban areas.

While urbanization brings the benefits of economic and industrial development, it may lead to increasingly adverse health effects in city residents. According to an article published in the Industrial Psychiatry Journal, extreme environments could be accompanied by an increase in stressors such as “overcrowded and polluted environment, high levels of violence, and reduced social support.”

While cities have been romanticized in mainstream media and culture, its bright image may be masking a darker reality. The growing trend of city living is altering reality beyond expectations.

This urbanization has rapidly altered family structure and social norms. Family units that would once care for their elderly and provide emotional support are now split between urban and rural areas. Taking these factors into account, urbanization can contribute to mental illnesses and might continue to do so without proper intervention.

In conjunction with growing eco-anxiety surrounding the climate emergency, increasing research supports the idea that the creation of green spaces can have both human and environmental benefits: they can help to nurse the urban population back to health while revitalizing the environment.

A groundbreaking study performed on nearly one million Danish individuals discovered that children with the least exposure to green spaces from birth to the age of 10 experienced a 55% increase in the risk of developing subsequent mental illness (see figure 1 below (NASA, n.d.).

While this study included many confounding variables such as parental age, hereditary mental illness, and socioeconomic factors, the association held true even after adjusting for these variables, including urbanization.

This finding suggests that imple-

25 Fall 2020 / Perennial

“

some urban populations hold nearly a 50% increased risk of developing “psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and mood disorders compared with their rural counterparts.”

menting green spaces in cities can be a method to improve the mental state of its citizens. Additional studies by Engemann suggest that green space exposure might lower risk of depression, schizophrenia, and “neural activity linked to psychiatric disorders” all while improving children’s cognitive development and general mental health with long-term positive benefits.

More studies are finding access to green spaces to be an environmental justice issue as much as it is a scientific matter. One study analyzing 37 metropolitan areas in Baltimore found that areas “inhabited by ethnic or racial minorities contained nearly half the canopy cover than their U.S.-born, white counterparts. Another study, conducting meta-analysis pulled from over 60 different studies, concluded that there is “significant income-based urban forest inequity.”

The findings of these studies have environ-

“

In conjunction with growing eco-anxiety surrounding the climate emergency, increasing research supports the idea that green spaces can have both human and environmental benefits.

mental justice implications: according to Urban Forest Consultant Darya Barar, the benefits associated with increased tree canopy are only seen if the green spaces are well maintained after implementation, the logistics of which are largely based on the interest of the community.

Communities without established green spaces are less likely to invest resources into these efforts when more immediate necessities — such as food and housing — often take priority. This is compounded in regions such as the arid Southwest in the United States where trees do not naturally grow and require significant funding and maintenance to be cultivated there. In these areas, directing funding towards implementing green areas becomes even more crucial.

Despite these trends, there is still a great amount of variance in green spaces from city to city. Sarah Hosterman, a landscape architect assistant for the city of Pleasanton, states that the requirements

for natural space amenities are left to the discretion of each city, causing variance in parks and natural spaces.

“The benefits of good landscaping are improved aesthetics, property values, and quality of life. A robust urban forest can reduce greenhouse gases, slow traffic, increase property values, reduce energy consumption, as well as the heat island effect,” Hosterman said.

Hosterman details the effects of such development on housing prices: as more people move to Pleasanton in part due to its beautiful parks and green spaces, a cycle of increasing housing prices and affluent areas continues. The lack of funding towards green spaces keeps property values low, which continues the systemic cycle of trapping urban residents in poverty and in environments with detrimental health benefits.

The reality is that for many city residents, particularly in those lacking green spaces, policy and public health interventions become more critical.

Urbanization is an increasingly inevitable phenomenon as the world’s growing population increases its demand for space, resources, and infrastructure. But in an era of increasing mental health crises, particularly those exacerbated by the pandemic, green spaces may have the potential to provide public health benefits while addressing environmental injustice, socio-economic inequality, and climate change.

As more of the world’s population lives in cities, promoting green spaces in city planning processes could pave the way for sustainable urban living on all fronts.

Full citations are available on the website.

Fall 2020 / Perennial 26

From the Sea to Your Plate The Impacts of the Global Fishing Industry

by Nicole Inaba From toxic pesticides to animal cruelty, efforts to increase transparency within the agricultural industry have led to a budding movement to transform food systems and grocery markets. Despite a global appetite for seafood, few know about the process behind how seafood makes it to their plate.

Fishing is a major industry with an annual value of over $171 billion. The process behind the harvest of seafood is an incredibly intensive one: according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the number of overfished stocks globally has tripled in half a century, and today one-third of the world’s assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits.

Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, 90% of fisheries are overexploited or fully exploited. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a major contributor to overexploitation: IUU fishing is roughly estimated to be an industry worth $36 billion, providing 20 to 50% of the seafood in global markets.

Illegal fishing occurs when fishing activity goes against laws of the seas or fisheries management measures. Sometimes fishing activity is not accurately reported or reported at all, while unregulated fishing occurs in the high seas or outside of the jurisdiction of regional fisheries management.

27 Fall 2020 / Perennial

“... 97% of fishing efforts in the high seas, or international waters, were attributed to countries with relatively higher income...” “

78% of industrial fishing efforts [in exclusive economic zones of lower income countries] were conducted by vessels flagged to higher-income countries”

“Some [vessels] are even turning off their tracking,” said Blake Ratcliffe, a research associate at the Stimson Center, explaining how some fishers avoid regulations. “You have situations where satellites have tracked ships that are going dark, but they still have other signatures like electronic radiation or just lights. [Satellites] can detect when there are fishing boats in the region with their tracking off, which is illegal.”

Currently, there is no international framework that requires automatic identification systems to be on at all times on fishing vessels or to have this data publicly available. This makes it difficult to address issues of misreporting or underreporting, which contributes to a lack of standardization and organization regarding global fisheries landing and catch data.

Geopolitical and Economic Relations Industrial distant water fleets (DWFs) are fishing vessels that fish outside of their country’s territo-

rial waters, often hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. Foreign industrial fishing is prevalent within the fishing industry, contributing to a power imbalance between DWF nations and coastal nations.

One study found that 97% of fishing efforts in the high seas, or international waters, were attributed to countries with relatively higher income.

The five countries that comprise the majority, or 86%, of the fishing effort are China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Spain, respectively.

Additionally, in the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of lower-income countries, or the territorial waters spanning 200 nautical miles from the shore, 78% of industrial fishing efforts were conducted by vessels flagged to higher-income countries.

“China uses its fleet to further its economic and security goals around the world, tightening economic relationships,” said Ratcliffe. “Their DWF is Fall 2020 / Perennial 28

usually part and parcel with furthering their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the marine element of the BRI. Particularly along the African coast, investment goes into building ports or processing facilities for its fleets.”

Since some developing countries do not have the industrial capacity to utilize their EEZs, they enter into agreements with developed countries and foreign companies in the hope of maximizing their financial gains.

For many coastal nation governments, the fisheries agreements provide a major source of revenue.

However, the revenue is not always reinvested into the local communities to improve the health and management of the fisheries, often leaving many communities deprived of fish and income.

Fishing fleets of developed nations are heavily subsidized, allowing them to fish when it would not be economically profitable otherwise. As fishing technologies improve for higher and middle-income nations that allow for lower prices, fishers in lower-income nations face increasing difficulty accessing resources and markets. This further exacerbates economic and resource disparity between countries.

In other instances, local fishers that are able to participate in the global market sell high-value fish to developed countries, driving up prices and depriving local communities of that particular fish.

The health implications of the trade is significant, considering that some 3.3 billion people rely on aquatic animals as their primary source of protein.

The welfare of many coastal nations and communities are intricately tied to the wellbeing of their fisheries. However, the current fishing industry is undermining many communities’ food security, economy, and livelihoods.

For instance, in several African nations, the phenomenon of “ocean grabbing” has led to internal strife within several communities. Local people find themselves in conflict with foreign industrial vessels, particularly along the coast where DWFs are common.

“If you see fish stocks crash in 20, 30 years, I mean, where are we going to be?” said Ratcliffe. “It’s go29 Fall 2020 / Perennial

ing to be very scary besides the water situation, other resources, overcrowding, and the coastal flooding.”

Shifting the fishing industry’s practices to become more socially responsible and sustainable will take a global effort. For example, the United States is responsible for a significant portion of the seafood demand that is driving these fisheries to depletion. In 2018, the U.S., European Union, and Japan, representing roughly 13% of the world’s population, accounted for a whopping 57% of total seafood imports by value. This percentage used to be higher in past decades, but it is quickly declining as demand surges in Asia.

Moving Forward While transparency and accountability within the fishing industry is an ongoing issue, there are many approaches and efforts that can be taken by a multitude of actors to increase transparency and accountability within the fishing industry.

As a major seafood importing country, the United States has implemented the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) which requires importers to provide key supply chain data of thirteen fish and fish products to reduce market access for illegal fish products. While SIMP is promising, more steps can be taken for major seafood importing countries to standardize and tighten their import requirements, as well as track their supply chain.

As for distant water fleet nations, actions such as mandating vessel tracking systems, increasing transparency of vessel and catch data, and expanding public access agreements can further clear the obscurities that exist within the fishing industry.

These nations also have a shared responsibility with coastal nations to ensure that revenue from fishing agreements are invested back into fisheries management and the coastal communities.

So far, 97 countries have signed the Port State Measure Agreement, the first binding international agreement on IUU fishing, but some key countries have yet to sign and ratify the agreement. Without a sweeping, concerted effort from all levels of governance and stakeholders, our oceans and the most vulnerable communities cannot regenerate and flourish.

Is Ecotourism the Solution to Unsustainable Tourism?

by Christina Pellicio I sit down and turn on my TV after a long day. Immediately, a travel commercial to Cancun starts playing on the screen: within 40 seconds, I am presented with the image of a seemingly perfect life, one in which I lounge in a comforting white robe, surrounded by pristine views of the crystal ocean and swaying palm trees, piĂąa colada in hand.

The speaker on the screen promises me an all-inclusive 5-star resort for a relatively affordable price.

How could I say no?

Research shows that tourism contributes to around 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a significant portion of land, air, and water pollution. Through the overconsumption of natural resources and improper development of infrastructure, considerable pressure is put on

However, as I continue to gaze at the snippets of white Ecotourism encompasses the many forms of Alternative sand beaches and luxury hotel Tourism. Retrieved from https://tourismnotes.com/ eco-tourism/. rooms, my blindness to the reality of the commercial begins the local resources, resulting in to fade. Such travel experiencthe degradation and loss of vies like this, while surely enjoytal natural ecosystems. able for the consumer, may not be so ideal for the global comIn these ways, mass tourism can munity as a whole.

cause harm that is beginning to have an unignorable effect on the state of the environment and local communities. Ecotourism is a growing alternative travel solution that is often directed towards threatened natural environments and intended as a low-impact alternative to mainstream tourism.

Whether it is in the form of becoming educated on environmental issues, providing funds for the conservation of natural habitats, or supporting the development of local communities, ecotourism is emerging as a way to sustainably support and observe wildlife.

Ecotourism originated in the 1970s but has risen in popularity in recent decades, largely as a mechanism to combat unsustainable practices that were prevalent within the tourism industry. Mass tourism has Fall 2020 / Perennial 30

been known to have high environmental impacts, whether it be increasing carbon emissions from plane travel or growing amounts of waste produced.

well as “design, construct and operate low-impact facilities.”

When executed properly, ecotourism can supply important economic benefits for developing nations.

By practicing these “leaveno-trace” principles and regThe last pillar of ecotourism, ulating the size of ecDue to masses of the socio-cultural pillar, seeks otourism groups, people often travto galvanize local support, adecotourists can eling at once, dress social issues, and preserve leave a small“there exist environmenthe culture of the destination. three main pillars er impact tal effects of Social agencies and residents on the of sustainability such movewill ideally raise awareness and surroundment are needed for successful ing enviact on social needs, nurture becoming art, heritage, and culture, all of ecotourism: environ- ronment increasingwhich enhances both the qualwhile ly difficult mental, economic, and better imity of life and quality of place to avoid. when done well. mersing sociocultural.”

The UN Envithemselves ronment ProWhen all three pillars of ecinto local lifegramme explains otourism are implemented styles. Furtherthat tourism manageproperly, ecotourism can help more, by promoting ment plans in response to the mitigate the effects of unsusthe long-term benefits of condegradation of destinations tainable tourism, provide muservation-minded practices, often include implementing tual benefits for tourists and ecotourists hope that more deland-altering objects, developthe locals, and aid tourists in structive interests will be given ing the natural environments gaining a deeper appreciation less priority. further, and erasing the culture and connection to nature. of these places to make way for The economic pillar seeks to more tourist destinations.

“I think people in Amermitigate the economic ica are, maybe, losleakage that mass The goal of ecotourism as a tourism often “The goal of eco- ing a little bit of sustainable alternative is to their connecfacilitates. tourism is that we as minimize these effects of travtion with naInstead of ecotourism professionalel. An article by Dr. Adam Barture,” said tourism so want to give people this nett titled “Sportfisheries, Dr. Tiffany dollars beconservation and sustainable ing leaked meaningful, deep relation- Rhodes, an livelihoods: a multidisciplinary out of the ship with nature” that maybe ecotourist they have never experienced who is a guide to developing best praccountry tice” states that there are three before, so that they walk professionthrough main pillars of sustainability al member cruise away from that changed needed for successful ecotourof the Interships, hotel and wanting to save ism: environmental, economic, national Ecohains, or other it.” and sociocultural. tourism Society. non-local accom“The goal of ecotourmodations, ecotourThe first pillar recognizes the ism is that we, as ecotourism ism advocates for local involveimpact that human activities professionals, want to give peoment in the tourism industry have on the environment. Two ple this meaningful, deep relato promote the reinvestment of the principles of ecotourism, tionship with nature that they of economic benefits into loas set by the International Ecmight have never experienced cal communities. This may be otourism Society, state that before, so that they walk away direct involvement such as fulecotourists should “minimize from that changed and wanting filling guide or mechanic roles, physical, social, behavioral, to save it.” or indirectly by selling local and psychological impacts,” as goods and tourist services.

31 Fall 2020 / Perennial

Ecotourism group pictured with locals in Madagascar. Image provided by http://www.lambahoany.org/en/ecotourism-approach/sustainable-agriculture/.

Fall 2020 / Perennial 32

Annual carbon dioxide emissions from international aviation in megatons of CO2 from 2005 to 2050. Retrieved from https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-08-10/aviation-could-consume-a-quarter-of-1-5c-carbon-budgetby-2050/.

Rhodes thought back to some of her own experiences with ecotourism, explaining that they have helped her personally connect with nature, as well as build intimate relationships with locals. When detailing her recent trip to Zimbabwe, Rhodes stated that “we only stayed in local accommodations, ate at local restaurants, and had local guides.”

Other countries, such as Madagascar, also thrive on ecotourism, where ecotourism is allowed in small numbers because of the government’s strong commitment to conservation. Education and funds from the travel enable more conservation efforts for the country to implement in the future, and tourist revenue aids in stimulating the economy.

While ecotourism can have huge environmental, economic, and social benefits in cases like these, there are criticisms of the practice. One prominent critique is that ecotourists are still traveling by flight, which 33 Fall 2020 / Perennial

further contributes to our carbon emissions problem and creates a false image of the practice as being completely sustainable.

While this is true, Rhodes states that many ecotourists are actively fighting to change this by taking on an activist role.

“I think even though ecotourists have a big carbon footprint because of the plane use, they are the lobbyists to try to get it to be changed,” said Rhodes.

“That’s the goal: to get every business and airline to start thinking about renewable energy and how to become more sustainable in their own practices. But they won’t do that unless consumers put the pressure on them.”

Another criticism is that ecotourism might pose a threat to indigenous cultures, further homogenizing the world through the introduction of non-local people and practices.

In response to the criticism,

Rhodes said, “I see ecotourism as trying to combat this homogeneity of the world, giving people reasons to have preservation of their local practices. I think tourism maybe has helped with the homogenization of the world, but I think it’s also probably the biggest avenue to stop it.”

Whether ecotourism can solve the issues associated with unsustainable travel is unknown.

The emerging ecotourism model has much room for improvement. But if done right, ecotourism can have some benefits for both the environment and local communities. It can promote travel as a medium not only for personal enjoyment, but as a way to promote the health of local communities and the environment.

Full citations are available on the website.

Jericho Tang / Daily California

WHAT’S IN A NAME: The Controversy Surrounding Rausser College of Natural Resources

by JACQUELINE COX

Fall 2020 / Perennial 34

In February 2020, the former dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources Gordon Rausser contributed a $50 million donation to the college, which was subsequently renamed Rausser College of Natural Resources. Shortly after, students created a petition to express their opposition to the renaming, which was followed by a social media campaign using the hashtag #RausserCollegeIsNotMyCollege.

“

the funds are distributed with the exception of a few stipulations, including the creation of an endowed chair of agricultural economics.

According to David Ackerly, the current dean of Rausser College, decisions about where funds will go must first face a faculty consultation process.

Their initial priorities include investing in graduate programs and the diversity & inclusion programs, renovating facilities, and recruiting faculty.

The renaming of Rausser College unearthed an ideological divide between members of the UC Berkeley students, faculty, and environmental communities regarding The renaming of Rausser different perspectives on what environmentalism College unearthed an truly embodies.

While college administrators support the renaming as recognition of Rausser’s generosity, some students reject the notion of being represented by a man whose actions they believe are inconsistent with the values of justice-based environmentalism.

ideological divide between members of the UC Berkeley students, faculty, and environmental communities regarding different perspectives on what environmentalism truly embodies.

Around the nation, following the murders of black Americans and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, many activists have torn down and defaced monuments dedicated to problematic historical figures. Renaming monuments has become an increasingly prevalent alternative to defacement: on UC Berkeley’s campus, the Building Name Review Committee recently removed Boalt, Barrows, and LeConte’s names from their respective buildings and is currently reviewing a proposal for Kroeber Hall. To its opposers, changing the name of the College of Natural Resources is the next issue to join the list.

Rausser’s donation is a part of UC Berkeley’s “Light the Way’’ fundraising campaign, aimed at garnering billions of dollars in philanthropic donations to secure the university’s position as the top public research university. This donation is unrestrictive, meaning the college has discretion over how 35 Fall 2020 / Perennial

”

“The COVID budget cuts have made us rethink everything,” said Ackerly.

Thus, the donation funds must be considered in the context of the college’s overall financial portfolio.

Students who oppose the renaming created a Facebook group, Reject Rausser, to cite multiple grievances against him, namely his corporate investments and teaching methods.

Aside from previously serving as a professor and dean of the College of Natural Resources, Rausser is the co-founder of OnPoint Analytics Capital Partners (OPAC), a capital advisory firm. According to a September 2020 statement made by the group, it was his involvement in corporate investments, coupled with his emphasis on agricultural economics, that led students in the “Reject Rausser” movement to believe that his career is inconsistent with the future of the environmental movement. This grievance is reflective of a larger debate regarding corporate influence over the university as students raise concerns about private interests shaping their public education.

As the former professor of Introduction to Environmental Economics, a popular class for College of Natural Resources students, Rausser has also faced past criticism for speaking to students in a condescending manner and creating an overly

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competitive environment. The opponents to the change claim that this classroom culture is inconsistent with the college’s values of community.

“I am devastated that a person who has caused me and many other students so much mental grief, dangerously anxious behavior and serious contemplations of dropping out of this university is going to be the namesake of the college that I and many others will receive degrees from in just a few months,” wrote Kajol Gupta, Angela White, and Maceo Hart-Kapic, in an op-ed published on Daily California.

In response to these criticisms, Ackerly and the naming committee have held several meetings with a small group of students who came forward, although Ackerly acknowledged that not all students would be comfortable expressing their views directly to him.

Ackerly said that their goal through these ongoing conversations is to “engage with them about the fact that these are meaningful resources for enhancing the student experience,” particularly with the added financial stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the concerns about private money influencing the college, Ackerly stated

that “the funding did not change our priorities,” particularly since it was unrestricted.

According to Ackerly, Rausser’s intent with the donation was the continued excellence of the college, and the fact that Rausser spent the large majority of his career there makes the gift all the more personal. He further explained that during the ongoing conversations with Rausser, renaming the college seemed an appropriate response that “merged his desires and our desire to recognize the scale of a gift like that.”

“Change is disruptive,” said Ackerly, and the renaming of Rausser College is certainly a significant change. Student pushback reflects a growing divide among the environmental movement.

Some younger activists, such as those involved in the “Reject Rausser” movement, view traditional corporate motives as incompatible with justice-based environmentalism while others view them as “necessary evils” for a larger good.

With the added stress of the budget cuts due to COVID-19, the acceptance of Rausser’s donation and subsequent renaming of the college is a balancing act between student opinion and financial pressures.

Fall 2020 / Perennial 36

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leaving a Legacy of Environmental Progress

by Andre Zendejas The September 2020 passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one that leaves a broad sense of uncertainty in the realm of environmental law, a realm once occupied by a woman who championed environmental reform amid a sea of opposition.

Ginsburg, best known for spearheading key decisions in gender equality and women’s rights, was the longest serving liberal judge to sit on the Supreme Court. Throughout her 27 years on the court, the core of Ginsburg’s cultural and legal popularity became centered around women’s rights. Yet she also pushed for more comprehensive environmental law.

During her time as a Supreme Court justice, 37 Fall 2020 / Perennial

Ginsburg cast her vote on a plethora of environmentally-focused cases. One important case was Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007) in which Ginsburg’s deciding vote bestowed the EPA with the power and authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.

She also contributed to the landmark decision in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations (2001), which upheld the EPA’s ability to set national air quality standards for smog and soot without consideration for the associated economic costs.

This decision helped to preserve the EPA’s ability to address climate issues and set a foundation for future environmental policy.

These cases, along with the many other decisions made in the Supreme Court during Ginsburg’s time as justice, serve as a testament to the emphasis that Ginsburg placed on the wellbeing of the planet and those inhabiting it over the interests of economics and politics.

One cannot undoubtedly say that Ginsburg was always directly invested in environmental protection and regulation. However, her record of these key decisions and her involvement in environmental cases convey her desire to uphold the role of the Supreme Court as she thought it should be: maintaining oversight over regulation and intervening on matters concerning the health and wellbeing of the entire country.

Professor Daniel Farber, the director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at UC Berkeley, stated that it was Ginsburg’s more “general views of the role that courts should take in overseeing regulation” that allowed for the decisions made during her time on the court.

This commitment to upholding the law and the role of the Supreme Court can be best seen in the opinion authored by Ginsburg over the 2011 case of American Electric Power Company v. Connecticut, which stripped the power of the states to sue private power companies. While one might expect her to side with the states seeking to lower emissions across the country, Ginsburg wrote: “We hold that the Clean Air Act and the EPA actions it authorizes displace any federal common

law right to seek abatement of carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel fired power plants. ” Despite this unexpected decision from Ginsburg and the rest of the court, her willingness to commit to authoring this opinion displayed her loyalty to the law and how she based her legal decisions off of the nuances of the law itself. Her dedication may not necessarily have been at the expense of environmental progress.

In the court’s opinion, Ginsburg wrote: “It is altogether fitting that Congress designated an ex-pert agency, here, EPA, as best suited to serve as primary regulator of greenhouse gas emissions. The expert agency is surely better equipped to do the job than individual district judges issuing ad hoc, case-by-case injunctions.”

Her vision of the roles that the Supreme Court and EPA play in overseeing regulation have paved the way for the decisions made during her time as a justice. However, the future of environmental law may depend on the restructuring of the court as Ginsburg’s seat was filled.

In October 2020, President Trump successfully nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett as the ninth seat of the Supreme Court, and the replacement for Ginsburg. The new conservative majority in the Supreme Court has sparked questions over the future of decisions regarding environmental law and policy for the decades to come.

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“ Real change,

enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

The reputation that conservatives and the Republican Party have garnered in terms of environmental activism and attention elicits the idea that environmental progress made during Ginsburg’s time may be undermined.

“Over the last 20 years, the court has gotten more conservative, and as a result, less receptive to environmental regulation,” Farber said.

Given the trend of growing conservatism already present in the court, the loss of Ginsburg’s occupancy and the confirmation of Justice Barrett to one of the nine seats leaves uncertainty over the question of how the highest court in the nation will recognize and attend to environmental concerns.

However, on the other end of this uncertainty lies the image of a more gradual, yet effective path to climate action and environmental regulation under a conservative court. Despite the recent addition of the conservative Justice Barrett, the Court has witnessed past decisions supported by conservative justices to uphold the ability of environmental agencies and the government to address environmental concerns, such as the Massachusetts v. EPA case.

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While this precedent maintains some hope for the future of environmental law in the United States, it is more likely that the environmental progress will be more gradual and periodic.

“It will probably involve, instead of making big dramatic moves, making a larger number of smaller moves that might add up [over time],” said Farber.

The replacement of the ninth seat on the Supreme Court was a process that brought great uncertainty to the nation, whether it be over environmental concerns dealing with large scale matters, or the very livelihood of individual Americans in marginalized communities throughout the fifty states.

While Justice Barrett was recently confirmed, it will take time to see the Court’s environmental legacy unfold.

And yet, despite the intricacies and polarization within modern politics, it is Ginsburg’s own words that serve to paint a positive future of environmental law, as well as provide hope for the nation and world as a whole: “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

Full citations are available on the website.

Obstacles to a More Just Transition:

Analyzing the Fossil Fuels Industry’s Lobby Against Climate Policy

by Lamiya Gulamhusein In 2009, U.S. Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey authored the Waxman-Markey Bill, also known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act. It proposed a cap and trade scheme to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from 2005 levels by 2050, marking the first time the U.S. government would have regulated greenhouse gas emissions.

However, the bill’s lifespan was cut short in 2010: it failed to pass the Senate and did not become law. In a recent study focusing on the bill, environmental economists Dr. Kyle Meng and Dr. Ashwin Rode found that lobbying by special interest groups played a significant role in lowering the chances of it being passed.

They calculated that the probability of the bill passing dropped by “13 percentage points, representing an expected social cost of $60 billion.”

Lobbying greatly affected the outcome of this policy, and it continues to influence environmental policy today.

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Photo Credit: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images

The Rise of Anti-Climate Lobby Groups Lobbying is a method of legally attempting to persuade the decisions and policies of government officials to favor the interests of the special interest group. Major oil and gas companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying against climate policy that would limit the production and use of fossil fuels, as well as backing campaigns that generated doubt surrounding the legitimacy of the climate crisis. A Greenpeace investigation found that from 1998 to 2014, ExxonMobil funded 69 different organizations, foundations, and institutions that spread disinformation regarding climate change.

While companies like ExxonMobil sought to persuade the public that climate change was not a significant threat, many scientists at the time stated otherwise.

In a 1968 report, Stanford Research Institute (SRI) scientists Elmer Robinson and R.C. Robbins predicted the irreversible damage of ongoing fossil fuel consumption. It stated that “although there are other possible sources for the additional carbon dioxide, now being observed in the atmo41 Fall 2020 / Perennial

sphere, none seems to fit the presently observed situation as well as the fossil fuel emanation theory...carbon dioxide and submicron particles may be the cause of serious worldwide environmental changes.”

The report was prepared for the American Petroleum Institute (API), which represents over 600 petroleum corporations and remains the fossil fuel industry’s largest and most influential trade group today. The publication of the SRI report means that as early as the 1960s, members of the fossil fuel industry were aware of the drastic harm their products could cause. Despite this, many oil and gas magnates continued to lobby and fund campaigns against climate data, labeling the urgent call for more sustainable forms of energy as “alarmist.”

Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the environmental degradation caused by fossil fuel production. Growing public concern, coupled with more stringent environmental policy, has led to greater efforts to introduce policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

Transformation in Transportation: Are Biofuels the Answer?

While gasoline remains the most commonly used fuel in vehicles in the U.S., there is much focus on introducing policies that would “green” the transportation industry.

“The low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) requires oil and fuel providers to reduce the carbon content of their fuels,” said Ethan Elkind, the director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “In California, we’ve largely been doing that through biofuels.”

Biofuels are derived from organic matter, such as plants, algal matter, or animal waste. The heat produced from burning the matter is used to run power plant generators that produce electricity.

Since biofuel sources can be replenished, as opposed to nonrenewable sources like oil and gas, they are considered to be a source of renewable energy.

However, there is some controversy surrounding their use: an increasing number of studies find that depending on the type produced, biofuels can also be harmful to the planet. One study found that the need to clear land to make space for cropbased biofuels would create 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the use of biofuels would be able to displace.

But other biofuels, including those produced from waste biomass, were found to have few negative effects. Due to these statistics, many argue that in comparison to petroleum-derived fuels, biofuels can be a productive alternative.

Liquid biofuels are also becoming a more popular alternative in transportation policies. In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which authorized the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS).

The RFS is a program designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions nationally. Because biofuels can be combined with petroleum to power a traditional vehicle, the act “mandates that U.S. transportation fuels contain a minimum volume of biofuel.” This minimum volume increases every year in order to prompt the phasing out of traditional gasoline.

According to Elkind, oil and gas companies often do make investments into renewable fuels in re-

sponse to such policies. Likely due to policies such as the LCFS and the RFS, ExxonMobil partnered with MIT researchers and Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) to publish a 2012 research paper analyzing the energy production of algal biofuels. Upon finding that these biofuels have sufficient energy potential, the company announced its intention to produce 10,000 barrels of algae biofuels a day by 2025 as part of its pledge to be more environmentally conscious.

Royal Dutch Shell made similar environmentally-focused claims in their 2019 annual report, stating that they expect to invest “on average $1-2 billion a year until 2020 in different services and products from a range of cleaner sources…

Between 2021 and 2025, our investments in power could grow to $2-3 billion a year on average.”

Earlier that year, Shell publicly withdrew from the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers lobby, citing they did not want to support an organization that undermines the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Whether these efforts will significantly reduce emissions remains to be seen.

“There’s legitimate business inquiries and investments to try to see what’s going on [with renewable fuels],” Elkind said. “[On the other hand], there’s this kind of middle ground of ‘well, policy is basically requiring us to do it, so we’ll kind of do the bare minimum.’”

Talking Green, But Walking Brown Despite these investments into renewable energy like biofuels, the vast majority of investments made by ExxonMobil and Shell, as well as others in the industry, are in polluting products. ExxonMobil produces on average 2.28 million barrels of oil a day globally, overshadowing the company’s investments into renewable energy.

In 2019 alone, along with the world’s other three largest publicly owned oil and gas companies—BP, Chevron, and Total—ExxonMobil and Shell spent approximately $200 million on lobbying against climate-motivated policy. Contrary to Shell’s publicly pro-climate stance, a joint Unearthed and Huffington Post investigation revealed that Shell remains an active member of at least eight trade organizations that lobby against climate mitigaFall 2020 / Perennial 42

tion actions in the U.S. These trade organizations include the API, which released an article calling the Renewable Fuel Standard “a broken and outdated policy.”

Part of this lobbying is fighting against attempts to restrict fossil fuel production or add taxes to fossil fuel sales. In 2019, InsideClimate News reported that BP spent $13 million on advertisements and lobbying campaigns to prevent the adoption of a carbon tax, which would have placed a fee on the burning of carbon-based fuels in the state of Washington.

Since then, BP has publicly supported other forms of carbon pricing, such as the implementation of cap and trade policies. Despite previously rejecting the carbon tax, BP stated in January 2020 that it “strongly supports” Washington state’s Senate Bill 5981, which would place a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

To explain BP’s behavior, Elkind noted that cap and trade policies often allow for a lot more flexibility. Oil and gas companies often advocate for cap and trade as a compromise policy.

“So in other words, you’ll see [companies] sort of back what looks like climate-friendly policies,” said Elkind. “However, that’s really a fallback position when they’re more worried about a more stringent alternative passing.”

The Move from Fossil Fuels to Renewables

Petroleum represents 92% of the energy used in 43 Fall 2020 / Perennial

America’s transport sector and is an incredibly profitable product: in 2018, the total revenue of the United States’ oil and gas industry came to about $181 billion USD. The industry also accounts for millions of jobs — in 2018, the traditional energy sectors employed approximately 6.7 million Americans.

Many in the fossil fuel industry fear that a transition away from oil and gas could leave them without work. Yet, much of the fossil fuel industry’s workforce skill set could transfer to the renewable energy industry. Carbon sequestration captures carbon from the air and buries it underground, and its process shares similarities to the production of fossil fuels.

While achieving a transition from fossil fuels is a daunting task, it is one that more people are calling for.

“You’ve got to be able to provide alternative industries where you know you can get those unionized, good-paying jobs,” said Elkind. “And if that is out there, and it’s a clean industry, then that makes it a lot easier to phase out oil and gas.”

While the fossil fuel industry is currently the dominant sector in the United States and holds much lobbying power, there is promising growth in the renewable energy sector. However, more action is needed to fuel what many are calling a “just transition” to renewable energy.

Elkind said, “We’re also going to need political courage.”

Featured Op-Ed

Semi-Permeable Beings Reckoning with Trans-Corporeality and Capitalism

by Tessa Stapp In ninth grade biology, we learn that the cell has a semipermeable membrane that allows nutrients to pass through it from the surrounding environment. Stepping back and considering ourselves as the cell — as we too are affected by the nutrients and chemicals in our environment — is to believe in our own trans-corporeality.

Stacy Alaimo, a professor of the environmental humanities, coined the term “trans-corporeality” to highlight the ways in which human bodies are inseparable from the natural world they inhabit. In her book “Bodily Natures: Science, EnFall 2020 / Perennial 44

Fig. 1. The average difference in toxic concentration value between Black and white families across income categories. Retrieved from https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/environmental-justice.

vironment, and the Material Self,” Alaimo states that “the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world.” Contrary to the colonial view of the human-nature relationship, which values natural resources based on their use to humans, she argues that society needs to first think about human-centric hierarchies and the impact they can have on the environment.

Alaimo’s work interrogates the human interconnectivity with non-human nature by connecting corporeal feminist theory, disability studies, environmental health, and interdisciplinary sciences. For instance, the onset of the Anthropocene marks the period of time where the human experience has had the most impact on the environment. Modern nature hierarchies were instilled in America through colonization that formed the narrative of anthropocentrism, an environmental view of humans at the top of the food and life pyramid while all other animals occupy a lesser space.

Research on who lives near toxic waste sites in America and the health effects of toxic waste sites, like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s survey of superfund sites, sheds light on why the trans-corporeal framework is necessary to understanding the human-environment relationship. Alaimo’s theory explains the ways in which capitalism steals our ability to see our own porousness and continues to toxify the hu45 Fall 2020 / Perennial

man body through environmental mediums such as the air, soil, and water.

A critical study by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that 49.7% of those living within three miles of a remedial superfund site are minorities (meaning those on the census except those marked white non-Hispanic), while minorities are only estimated to be 38.4% of the total U.S. population. The toxic sites surrounding BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) populated communities directly impacts the health of these communities.

Nancy Langston, an environmental historian, explains in her book Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES that “toxic chemicals have the potential to cross the boundaries between species and generations, altering the hormone systems that shape our internal ecosystems of health, as well as our relationships with the broader ecosystem around us.” In “Health Effects of Residence Near Hazardous Waste Landfill Sites: A Review of Epidemiologic Literature,” author Martine Vrijheid explains that the impact of generational immune system trauma means that children growing up in communities near sites polluted with hazardous material are more likely to develop asthma and cancer in the future.

There has been proof of a correlation between race and toxicity in the environment for decades. The

fig. 3, and fig. 4 illustrate the correlation between marginalized communities and their proximity to pollution on the city and national level.

BIPOC families are disproportionately affected by this choice to value corporate motives over the environment and people. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reports that the oil and gas industry in America emits nine million tons of methane and pollutants annually, and African American communities bear the brunt of this pollution.

Fig. 2. A depiction of the correlation in Los Angeles County between the density of Hispanic peoples in an area code and the number of uncontrolled toxic waste sites in the area. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net/publication/247405204_Rethinking_Environmental_Racism_ White_Privilege_and_Urban_Development_in_Southern_ California.

first environmental justice research conducted in Southern California found a direct correlation between the percentage of non-white peoples living in an area code and the amount of uncontrolled toxic waste sites in the area.

Based on this research, air pollution appears to disproportionately affect POC and low-income communities. Ihab Mikati and other researchers from the University of Minnesota have concluded that those in poverty have a 1.35 times higher burden of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5), POC have a 1.28 times higher burden of PM2.5, and Black people have a 1.54 times higher burden of PM2.5 compared to the average person. The research analysis further shows that these patterns of disproportionate impact hold across cities and states. Thus, the trends seen in fig. 1 and fig. 3 seem to be applicable beyond individual cities. Low-income and POC families experience environmental injustices on multiple levels; toxicity permeates the water, soil, and air of these communities.

The damage is inflicted on the environment through illegally dumping hazardous waste or creating cheap solutions for oil spills. These tactics allow profits to soar for companies like Shell and ExxonMobil by negating their environmental culpability. Ultimately, the true cost falls on the individuals who live intimately with the Earth. Fig. 2,

Even on a global level, corporate actors are the key contributors to environmental degradation.

The Carbon Disclosure Project states that only one hundred companies are responsible for 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As Alaimo suggests, by viewing the environment as a space without agency and as materials for usage without considering that we also must live on this land, we are ignoring the porousness of our bodies.

In feminist theory, the term “necropolitics,” explored by philosopher Achille Mbembe, reckons with the implications of ignoring our trans-corporeality. There is an acknowledgment of the state’s view of specific individuals, and in this case environments, as “living-dead” or already dying. The willingness to misuse nature and allow primarily low-income BIPOC families to live on toxic land is how the politics of death move through the envi-

Fig. 3. Nonwhite population exposure rates to PM2.5 in relation to white population exposure by state. Retrieved from https://insideclimatenews.org/content/map-people-color-greater-air-pollution-burden.

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Fig. 4. The correlation between Blackness and hazardous waste site density in Boston, Massachusetts. Retrieved from www.nsta.org/science-scope/science-scope-septemberoctober-2020/case-studies-environmental-justice.

ronment.

Ensuring a healthy living environment for all people requires decolonizing our land and point of view related to the environment.

“Human beings have been talking about leaving a small footprint on the Earth,” the spokeswoman of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone and co-founder of the Sogorea Te Land Trust, Corrina Gould, explained during a panel on decolonizing Ohlone land. “Nearly everything we made was biodegradable. Everything except the shellmound, mortar and pestles, and arrowheads.”

“How do we return to leaving behind a small footprint?” asked Gould. Through rematriation, the women-led process of returning stolen land back to its ancestral caretakers facilitates the process of trans-corporeality. The land trust works in Huichin Ohlone land to facilitate land and food sovereignty for native peoples. The work of physical decolonization recognizes the importance and vitality of the environment.

Gould then explained why her ancestors respected nature. Through a story of her 47 Fall 2020 / Perennial

grandson hitting a tree with a branch one day, she reminded us all to be grateful to the tree and respect it for all it does for us.

“Can you give me air?” asked Gould.

Her grandson replied “no.”

“Can I give you air?” asked Gould.

“No,” her grandson responded.

Gould said, “that is why we must protect and care for them as they care for us.”

Through facilitating the stewardship of the land by those whose ancestors knew how to best care for it and abandoning a human-centered hierarchical view of nature, there is hope for positive change.

Gould, with a determined look in her eye, ended with, “we lived in reciprocity with the land. The land gave us what we needed and we nourished it. Then it continued to feed us and future generations.” According to Gould, by divesting ourselves of an anthropocentric viewpoint and instead embracing systems of mutual aid across species, we can live trans-corporeality.

Full citations are available on the website.

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Urban Planning for Wildfire Resilience and Mitigation in Paradise, CA AUTHOR: Nolan Force, Antonio Heath, Edward Saloj Abstract With climate change increasing the frequency of weather anomalies, California has suffered many wildfires in recent years. This paper focuses on the 2018 Camp Fire at Paradise, CA, examining the dry conditions that led to California’s deadliest wildfire to date. Analyzing these conditions, taking into account Paradise’s current fire resiliency plans, and comparing Paradise to places of similar wildfire risk, we devise an urban plan to mitigate the potential of future wildfires in Paradise, CA. Given the climate, there are many external factors that the city of Paradise cannot control. Nevertheless, by implementing suggested urban planning guidelines, cities can prevent unnecessary wildfire spread, prepare safe evacuation routes, and increase community safety.

The city of Paradise, California, was devastated in the Camp Fire of 2018 and is still in the process of recovery. The purpose of this project is to propose wildfire resilience rebuilding strategies in Paradise using data from similar regions that have experienced fires. Although the cause of the 2018 Camp Fire was anthropogenic, conditions in Paradise were ripe for combustion, so we will consider the fire to be a true wildfire — as if it had occurred naturally.

For the purpose of clarity: we will be assuming that an effort to rebuild Paradise is to be made at all costs.

the Camp Fire to protect against future wildfire events.

The second step in formulating our solution will be to find information from regions of the world that have experienced similar wildfire events and have similar wildfire vulnerability. We’ll research what efforts have been made in those places to recover and become more resilient for future catastrophes, and attempt to deduce which strategies are most effective.

The third step combines the first two: using the Paradise data and the case studies of other locations, we will synthesize our findings and come up with a hypothetical plan for the town of Paradise to use in their rebuilding process in order to become more fire-resilient in the future.

Materials and Methods

Results

Due to the nature of our project being based in a location apart from where we’re all living, as well as due to the current pandemic, our only materials will be exclusively online documents, articles, websites, and virtual tools. Our methods of obtaining data will be to research the cited documents to draw conclusions using their data or results.

Before the Camp Fire struck Paradise in 2018, fuels in the area were far more dry than usual, mainly due to the drought that had been affecting the region for years.

Figure 2, taken from a Cal Fire report (“Burn Injuries” 4) shows a map of California in 2018 with a drought filter, and Paradise is in a zone where precipitation during the year leading up to the fire was around half of what it normally is. Furthermore, Figure 3 (5), shows the Energy Release Component, or ERC, for the Northern Sierras where Paradise is located during the 2018 calendar year.

It shows that the ERC, a measurement of flammability on a scale of 0-100, was at about 75 on the day the Camp Fire started, though the average for that time of year is less than 30; in fact, the ERC that day was a record for the highest flammability of that region in recorded history.

The fuels which facilitated rapid spread of the fire along with strong winds consisted mostly of closely-spaced oak timber and oak undercover that had not burned in recorded history (5). Figure 4 shows that Paradise is surrounded by forest on all sides, except for the roads out of the town. During the drought, the flammable material in these forests were drier than average and, as can be seen in Figure 5 (Dillon et al.), were classified as having a high

Introduction

The process of coming up with a resilient reconstruction solution will have three main steps: first, we will compile and filter out relevant information about Paradise before, during, and after the 2018 Camp Fire affected the town. This information will include certain ecological conditions relating to wildfires, such as the presence and humidity of fuels, that were present in Paradise leading up to the fire, as well as measures taken by Paradise before the Camp Fire to address fire resilience. There will also be data about how Paradise was affected, like which areas were affected the worst and why, and how existing fire-prevention measures held up in a real fire event. We will also include any information we find about what Paradise has done or plans to do since 51 Fall 2020 / Perennial

Pre-Camp Fire Conditions and Facts

(Top) Figure 1: Risk to resilience spectrum (Smith et al., 2016, p. 140). Used to guide our process of developing mitigation and resilience measures (Bottom left) Figure 2: Percent of Average Precipitation in California, 2017-2018 (Bottom middle) Figure 3: Energy Release Component (ERC) Northern Sierras, Jan 1-Dec 31, 2018 (Bottom right) Figure 4: Tree canopy to impervious surface cover in 2011 (made with itreetools.org virtual mapping tools)

or very high risk of a wildfire hazard.

A Butte County (where Paradise is located) report acknowledged the failure of designated fire evacuation routes in a 2008 fire event, including 3 of the 4 available routes being closed during the evacuation due to the effects of the fire itself (Butte County Grand Jury, 1). These roads that had to be closed had only a single lane going in either direction, sharp curves, and/or areas with high risk of a wildfire hazard in close proximity on either side of the road (3).

During the 2008 fire, the only road left open was single-laned and was listed as having “moderate” evacuation potential (5). The report recommended 2 new evacuation routes be designated, and existing routes be upgraded (7). By the time of the Camp Fire in 2018, there were five 2-lane roads and one 4-lane road designated as evacuation routes (Wyloge).

Chapter 7A of the California building code requires that all homes built after the time of the code have to implement fire-resistance-certified measures into the walls, floors, doors, decks and air shafts (Quarles et al. 16-18). Paradise had around 285 homes following this code by the 2018 fire out of the roughly 15,000 total homes in the city (St. John et al.).

tion routes, the 2018 incident proved to repeat what happened 10 years previous: half of the routes were blocked or closed during the fire, and the remaining three routes were available but traffic jammed (Wyloge).

Cal Fire data (“Burn Injuries” 5) determined that dry fuels to the Northeast of the city were the medium through which the fire reached the city so quickly.

However, most of the transmission of the blaze between houses within city limits was not related to vegetation, but rather to wind that carried the embers through the air. In the more isolated areas of the city where homes were farther apart, the dry fuels were the main transmitter.

Paradise Today As of April 2020, 81 homes had been rebuilt in Paradise according to the county records, with building permits for hundreds more (McDaniel). The Paradise Town Council has vowed to ensure that all new buildings will

Camp Fire’s Impacts on Paradise, CA During the fire event in Paradise, about 14,000 homes burned. The rate of homes that survived the fire was 4x higher among homes built after the code than before (St. John et al.). In terms of the evacua-

Figure 5: USFS Wildfire Hazard Potential in Paradise, 2018 (made with itreetools.org virtual mapping tools)

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strictly comply with the 2008 building codes that contained provisions for fire-resilient construction materials, as well as a promise to redesign the street grid (Siegler, “Disaster Recovery Reforms”).

A citizen testimonial taken after the fire revealed that people were concerned about the proximity of flammable fuels to power lines throughout the town even before the Camp Fire (Siegler, “Disaster Recovery Reforms”). Next to some of the lines is “a layer of pine needles and duff” and “overgrown brush,” as well as narrowly spaced trees (Siegler). What’s even more concerning, says the interviewee, is that the power lines are operated by Pacific Gas and Electric, the same company whose equipment ignited the Camp Fire in the first place (Siegler).

Wildfire Resilience Case Studies There are some regions of the world that have similar fire vulnerability to Paradise and have already employed fire prevention methods and tested them.

Yosemite National Park and Southern Australia have tried to stop fires at the source: both of these locations have extensive prescribed burning programs (Smith et al. 132). Prescribed burns are controlled, intentional fires conducted in areas with an excess of fuels in order to clear those areas and reduce risk of an uncontrolled wildfire. Smith et al. (2016) also lists that both Yosemite and Australia have relocated power lines from fire-prone areas so they don’t accidentally cause one themselves, and so any fires in that location don’t knock out the power (134). However, Southern Australia didn’t see much success in these methods due to that region of Australia being so vulnerable to fires that even mitigation measures often failed. Residents of Southern Australia have taken to simply clearing brush and vegetation in a wide radius around their

Figure 6: The United Kingdom’s reorganization of forests (Smith et al., 2016, p. 133)

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homes so there isn’t as high of a chance for transmission of fire to the house.

Northern Canada also deals with moderately high fire risk, but they use different preventative methods.

They instituted a restriction of access to fire-prone areas during fire season to reduce the amount of human-started fires (Smith et al. 135). They have a historically successful fire suppression system, but it is expensive and the Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy reported diminishing returns as of late (Smith et al. 135).

Discussion Discussing the Camp Fire’s Impacts The drought and high winds which created the dry fuels in and around Paradise cannot be controlled. However, the buildup of fuels near buildings can be prevented. Since transmission from the origin of the fire to the city was conducted through narrowly spaced brush that had not burned in recorded history, it can be deduced that the clearing of fuel mass in the forests that are at a high risk for wildfire hazards may reduce the time it takes for the fire to reach a populated area. This extra time could allow for more people to rescue their assets, help others, and evacuate. Additionally, the distance between buildings and these forests was obviously not far enough to prevent transmission. Similar to what Australian citizens do with removing brush from around their homes, a regulated distance between a built structure and continuous fuel loads could reduce transmission risks.

Looking back on the event, it is easy to identify what could have been done to prevent what ended up happening, but in reality, nobody can see every weakness in a system until that weakness becomes a failure. All we can do as designers is to learn from the past events to address the aspects of the event that didn’t work well enough. The combination of the drought, the abundance of fuels in and around the city, and the fact that most of the city’s structures were not following the current fire provision in the building code all render what happened to Paradise ostensibly obvious. Indeed, upon consultation of the US Forest Wildfire Hazard Potential, it becomes clear that a wildfire of a great magnitude was to be expected. However, the city of Paradise failed to implement sufficient measures to mitigate and prevent the harmful effects of the Camp Fire. Thousands of homes burned because they had been built before the fire code was implemented, causing dozens of people to die. Evacuation routes became gridlocked because, despite implementation of the recommendations from the county jury, half of the evacuation routes were

blocked and the remaining three were clogged with traffic, leading to even more loss of life. Clearly, in order to make Paradise more resilient, the street layout needs to be altered, and building codes need to be strictly followed.

Discussing Resilience Measures in Other Places Across all of the locations we studied with similar wildfire risk and which had implemented fire resilience or mitigation measures, we saw some overlaps in strategies, and among those there were a few which stood out as applicable to Paradise’s resilience plan.

Copying the prescribed burns in Yosemite National Park and Southern Australia would address the abundance of fuels around Paradise. Furthermore, Australia’s fuel clearing on the individual level seemed effective, so that could be applied in Paradise as well.

There was also overlap in Yosemite and Australia in their relocation of vital infrastructure, such as power lines, out of the fire-prone zones. As Paradise also has concerns about their power lines being affected by or even initiating further fire events, this strategy seems relevant to apply to Paradise’s resilience plan.

One method that caught our attention but wasn’t necessarily repeated in multiple locations was the United Kingdom’s strategy of re-organizing their forestry to create artificial obstacles for spreading wildfires. By clumping vegetation together and intersecting forests with roads, there are fewer continuous stretches of fuels in forested areas. This strategy pairs very well with Paradise’s need to rethink their street layout, which is why we decided to include it in our selections despite only being experimented with in one place.

Synthesis/Implementing the Findings into Paradise From the Paradise data itself, it seems like the most pressing problems that fit in the scope of this project are reordering the street layout of the town, building according to the fire provision in the building code,

and clearing fuels in the forests and near buildings.

Figure 7 shows that the fire approached from the East-Northeast direction, which means the propositions for new evacuation routes will focus more on getting out to the South or Southwest. Figure 8 is a topographic and street map of Paradise showing the currently designated evacuation routes. There is a ridge along the Western side of the city, so any Westward evacuation attempts have to either go South before going West, or try to go North. With all this in consideration, Figure 9 shows our proposed changes to the street grid of Paradise. Blue lines indicate new two-laned evacuation routes to be paved.

The new route labelled “1” would have to be built across a small ravine with a creek at the bottom, but would save a lot of time compared to going all the way around the ravine and heading towards the direction of the fire. Route “2” would also have to cross a ravine to the West and connect with the Highway 191 route. Green segments in Figure 9 represent evacuation routes that should be upgraded to have one more lane going in the outward direction. With all these evacuation route changes, the total amount of outgoing lanes in the evacuation routes combined goes from 12 to 20 and significantly increases the accessibility of evacuation roads for some parts of the city. In addition to these evacuation route changes, the purple segments represent where new strips of land should be located to break up areas of the town with large patches of continuous forest. These strips could take the form of either paved or dirt roads, or simply strips of land cleared of all wooded vegetation, i.e. trees, bushes, shrubs, and any other woody plants. All would provide breaks in the continuous forest and obstacles for fires moving through the area. These new roads in Figure 9 would also be required to have 50 feet of median on each side of the road with no vegetation, which could be satisfied if there were development alongside the road (as long as that development did not include trees or shrubbery).

(Left) Figure 7: Satellite imagery of the first stages of the Camp Fire, Nov. 7, 2018, as it approaches Paradise, CA from the East. Overlaid on a map of the region East of Paradise. (made with itreetools.org virtual mapping) (Middle) Figure 8: Street map of Paradise, CA with orange arrows representing designated evacuation routes (made with Google Maps) (Left) Figure 9: Street map of Paradise with proposed changes and additions (made with Google Maps)

Fall 2020 / Perennial 54

(Left) Figure 10: Tree canopy map of Paradise (made with itreetools.org virtual mapping) (Right) Figure 11: Proposed idea for tree canopy changes in Paradise (made with itreetools.org virtual mapping)

New buildings in Paradise would follow all requirements of Chapter 7A of the California Building Code in terms of fire-resistant construction materials to prevent combustion of buildings from external sources. New vegetation clearing requirements would also be implemented as follows: all shrubs and trees, aside from gardens and plants along the edge of a building, must be removed with a 20 foot clearance in every direction. Beyond that 20 foot line, any tree had to be as far away from that 20 foot line along a horizontal plane as the tree is tall; for example, a 50 foot tree would have to be at least 70 horizontal feet away from a building. This would prevent any burning trees from falling onto the property, and there wouldn’t be any way for burning vegetation to be in close proximity to the building. This 20 foot rule would extend to the power line infrastructure in the town as well.

preserved.

Evidence from the other locations supports the selection of fuel clearing as a strategy in Paradise, and adds the method of redesigned forestry to our plan.

In addition to the vegetation clearing recommendations listed above, we also propose changes to the forestry in the city. Figure 10 shows canopy cover (green) within the city bounds of Paradise (blue line).

What we suggest is an area East of Paradise (shown in Figure 11 as the highlighted area), from the end of developed properties all the way to the Western edge of Griffin Gulch (marked in red) to be cleared of all wooded brush. Instead, this stretch of land would become an open meadow or grassy plain. This would dramatically slow and weaken any future fires coming from the East-Northeast direction (as the Camp Fire did) as trees and shrubs were the main vectors of fire transmission in the Camp Fire. This would provide extra time for citizens of Paradise to evacuate while officials controlled the blaze. Additionally, in maintaining it as a vegetated area, the natural beauty of the land to the East of the town would be

Using data from government sources, case studies, and assorted reputable reports and articles, we developed a list of proposed wildfire resilience and mitigation strategies to be implemented by the city of Paradise, California following the Camp Fire in 2018. These strategies are: upgraded and added evacuation routes out of the city, additional roads or wooded vegetation-free strips of land intersecting large pockets of continuous forest within the city, a minimum distance away from buildings that wooded vegetation must be. and maintenance of the forests on the Eastern edge of town to provide a buffer zone from fires approaching from that direction.

55 Fall 2020 / Perennial

Evaluation of Research Methods Despite our data collection techniques being limited to internet searches, and no in-person research being conducted, we feel that our data was very comprehensive and fulfilled our intended research objectives.

However, it would have greatly benefited our research if we had been able to visit Paradise to see the terrain firsthand. It is difficult to gauge the scale of topographical features and buildings by looking at maps alone.

Future work involving these proposals would include actual implementation of the measures, or testing them at other places that experience frequent fires to see if it makes a difference in the town’s resilience.

Conclusions

Works Cited 1. Butte County Grand Jury. “Wildfire and Safety Considerations for Butte County General Plan 2030.” 2009, pp.

1-7, http://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/1/GrandJury/08-09/Grand_Jury_Report_FY08-09-Sec10.pdf.

2. “Burn Injuries.” Cal Fire. n.d. pp. 4-5, https://assets. documentcloud.org/documents/5628194/18-CA-BTU016737-Camp-Green-Sheet.pdf.

3. Dillon, Greg et al. “Wildfire Hazard Potential.” U.S. Forest Service, 2020, https://firelab.org/project/wildfire-hazard-potential.

4. Google Map, https://google.com/maps/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2021 5. iTree Landscape, https://landscape.itreetools.org/ maps/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2021.

6. McDaniel, Piper. “After the Camp Fire, Paradise is Still Home.” High Country News, 6 Apr. 2020, https:// www.hcn.org/articles/south-wildfire-after-the-campfire-paradise-is-still-home#:~:text=Homeowner%20 Carrie%20Keel%20rebuilds%20one,the%20Camp%20 Fire%20in%202018.

7. Quarles, Stephen L. and Kelly Pohl. “Building a Wildfire-Resilient Home: Codes and Costs.” Headwaters Economics, 2018, pp. 16-20, https://headwaterseconomics. org/wp-content/uploads/building-costs-codes-report. pdf.

8. Siegler, Kirk. “Rethinking Disaster Recovery After A California Town Is Leveled By Wildfire.” NPR, 28 May 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/05/28/724404528/rethinking-disaster-recovery-after-a-california-town-is-leveled-by-wildfire.

9. Siegler, Kirk. “The Camp Fire Destroyed 11,000 Homes.

A Year Later Only 11 Have Been Rebuilt.” NPR, 9 Nov. 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/09/777801169/ the-camp-fire-destroyed-11-000-homes-a-year-lateronly-11-have-been-rebuilt#:~:text=The%20Camp%20 Fire%2C%20named%20for,houses%20burned%20to%20 the%20ground.

10. Smith, Alistair M.S. et al, “The Science of Firescapes, Achieving Fire-ResilientCommunities.” US Forest Service, 2016, pp. 132-140, https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_ journals/2016/rmrs_2016_smith_a001.pdf.

11. St. John, Paige. et al. “Here’s How Paradise Ignored Warnings and Became a Deathtrap.” Los Angeles Times, 30 Dec. 2018, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/ la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html.

12. Wyloge, Evan. “Deadly Traffic: How We Evaluated California’s Wildfire Evacuation Routes.” Desert Sun, 25 Apr. 2019, https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/ environment/2019/04/25/california-wildfire-evacuation-road-capacity-traffic-analysis-methodology-camp-fire/3514552002/.

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The Effects of Grazing on Avena Fatua and Stipa Pulchra and Its Implications for Grassland Management in California AUTHOR: James Bowe

Abstract Restoration of native perennial grass species of the California grasslands was a long held goal for range managers, but after years of research this goal has been found to be fairly unattainable. In the California grasslands current state, invasive annual species like Avena fatua dominate the landscape and have replaced many native perennial grasses such as Stipa pulchra. Since grazing and disturbance in general are part of the California ecosystem, research into this area is essential to building an accurate understanding of the ecological dynamics of the California grasslands. In a common garden experiment, growth patterns of Avena fatua and Stipa pulchra were studied to see how grazing, simulated by clipping the grasses, would affect the two species’ above ground, root, and total biomass production. Clipping had a significant effect on both species, with both experiencing a significant decrease in root and total biomass. Additionally, the data showed that Avena fatua was able to produce significantly more biomass than Stipa pulchra over the three month course of the study. Grazing is known to be an option in the California range managers toolbox that can be used precisely to promote certain plant species in a desired ecological site, especially in regards to preserving and promoting native perennial species when abiotic conditions allow. Based on this paper’s finding, a system that applies light grazing pressure to Stipa pulchra seedlings and high grazing pressures on young Avena fatua seedlings can be useful in promoting the establishment of Stipa pulchra by limiting annual grass competition.

Introduction California used to be home to a vast native prairie with its main concentrations within the Central Valley floor up to the Sierra Nevada foothills and along the coast of the Pacific Ocean (Keeler-Wolf, 12). During this time, it is believed that these rangelands were dominated by endemic perennial grasses, such as purple needlegrass (Stipa pulchra), and forbs that were grazed by native wildlife such as the Tule Elk and Pronghorn Deer (Fick). Additionally, Native Californians would manage this land with periodic low intensity burns to maintain high productivity of grasses to attract wildlife and provide better hunting conditions by maintaining open savannas with minimal tree and shrub growth.

However, as the Spanish began to colonize up the California coast, starting in the 1700’s, non-native annual grass species such as wild oat (Avena fatua) began to enter the region and by the early 1900s these species were dominant in the region. Along with this invasion of wild oatscame a wave of Native American cultural oppression under the Spanish Mission system and later by the Mexican Government’s administration of the region (Preston, 260). This in turn decimated local tribes at the population and cultural level, leading to many of these tribes not being recognized by the US government after their takeover of California. Without the Native Americans’ traditional ecological knowledge, colonizers switched to fire suppression as a management tool and Native 57 Fall 2020 / Perennial

prescribed burns came to a halt (Keeley, 310). This in turn has been found to be correlated with higher incidences of shrub encroachment in modern California, which are less resistant to fire, and has also been found to favor annual grass species growth post fire disturbance (Keeley, 313). This leads many to believe that Native Americans could have played a larger role in the suppression of annual invasive species had they not been under such great oppression.

The decimation of California Tribes, along with the Euro-American philosophy of wilderness being a pure entity separate from man, would lead to a century of fire-suppression in the 1900’s that would give a great advantage to the non-fire resistant invasive annual grass species.

(Stephens, 212). Additionally, as the American government began setting aside land for conservation, grazing was highly suppressed as many land managers promoted equilibrium dynamics as well as Clementsian succession models that believed that there was an “ideal” state of an ecosystem when plants are able to freely grow. Suppression of grazing further harmed perennial grasses because annual species were able to outgrow the slower growing perennials that were adapted to grazing by wildlife (Menke, 23). Related to this, other research has shown that grazing of forbs in grasslands could reduce competition between forbs and native perennial grass species (Hayes, 1700). All these factors and more have coalesced to cause great ecological change in California and have resulted in the creation of California’s novel grassland ecosystem, with non-native annual grasses being the dominant species in the region.

In particular, there are two species that represent the two types of grasses that are competing for dominance in the California grassland ecosystem, purple needlegrass (Stipa pulchra) a perennial native bunchgrass and wild oat (Avena fatua) an annual invasive grass native to the Mediterranean Basin. Both species have specific traits that make them very welladapted to California’s mediterranean climate with each plant having unique traits that lead to different spatial distributions throughout the ecosystem. For example, as an annual grass, wild oat grows quickly during the main growing season of March to April and puts the majority of its resources into producing new seeds fast (Morrow, 228). In this race to produce as many seeds as fast as possible, these grasses grow their leaves quickly during the spring. Then as the dry summer begins, the plants die and release their seeds to be germinated when the rain returns in the autumn. In contrast, as a perennial bunchgrass, purple needlegrass grows more slowly during its first growing season, but the plant invests more energy in the establishment of robust root systems and crowns to make the plant more disturbance resistant as was needed in their pre-colonial environment (USDA NRCS). Additionally, purple needlegrass has specially adapted to grow on California’s unique serpentine soil, which, due to its high nickel content, is quite difficult for most non-adapted plants to grow in. Despite both plants’ ability to grow well in California, wild oats and other annuals still outcompete purple needlegrass and other perennial grasses with current land management practices, so many rangeland ecologists are trying to find out how land managers can better support the conservation of remaining native perennial grass stands.

For this experiment, the goal is to research the effects of grazing by livestock and wildlife on wild oat and purple needlegrass, with adapted methods based on a study by Huntsinger et. al. (48). More specifically, the research question being asked is how the timing of grazing during growth periods affects patterns of biomass production in Avena fatua and Stipa pulchra. To do this a common garden experiment was performed where half of each species in the greenhouse garden were randomly selected to be clipped midway through the semester to simulate grazing.

The goal of this experiment is to give broader context for managers to better understand the effects of different grazing times in the promotion of certain grass species desired in management.

Methods Seeds of wild oats (Avena fatua abbreviated AVFA) and purple needlegrass (Stipa pulchra abbreviated STPU) were randomly selected from wild populations within El Cerrito and Marin county California respective-

ly in Spring 2020. These seeds came from populations adapted to the San Francisco Bay area climate but were grown in a greenhouse at UC Berkeley Oxford Tract in a common garden experiment. As such, on August 5th, 2020 five seeds of each species were planted in 100 two gallon pots, which were pre-filled with paper towel at the bottom and Turface non-soil substrate up to 4 cm below the pot rim. Turface was chosen because it does not stick to roots as much as normal soil which makes root collection at the end of the study much easier. 50 of those pots were planted with several seeds of AVFA and the other 50 were planted with several seeds of STPU. Each pot was labeled with a number on a plant label to indicate species, orange for AVFA and purple for STPU, and half of the pots for each of the grasses were randomly assigned a hashmark on their label indicating that those plants would be clipped midway through the growing period on October 13, 2020. The 100 pots were then randomly arranged on a shared work bench to mitigate any possible confounding variables due to positionality such as temperature and light exposure time, but in general the grasses grew under light conditions typical to the San Francisco Bay area. In addition, all 100 pots were on the same watering and fertilizing schedule where they were watered and fertilized with 164 ppm nitrogen five times a week.

After the seeds had time to germinate and begin early growth, the plants were thinned to one plant per pot on October 13, 2020. Also on October 13, 2020 the grasses with hashmarked labels were clipped (AVFA, n=25) and (STPU n=25) with to a 4 cm stubble height to mimic grazing in the natural environment. These clippings were then placed in individual paper bags and numbered according to which pot they were clipped from.

Once all of the sample clippings were collected, they were placed in a drying oven at 65º for 48 hours to account for the variation in the amount of water within individual plants. After the clipping, the grasses were allowed to continue growing, being kept on the same watering and fertilizing schedule until November 19th 2020. On that date all of the grasses were clipped to the soil and again placed the clipping in numbered paper bags before drying. On the same day, the roots from each plant were gently removed from the growing medium, rinsed thoroughly to remove any excess debris, labeled, and then placed in the drying oven at 65º for 72 hours. To measure plant response to the clippings, both above ground and root dry biomass measurements were used to compare the difference between the clipped grasses and the non-clipped controls.

So once all parts of the grasses were dry, they were weighed and weights were recorded for each grass’ above ground and root biomass on December 3rd, 2020.

Finally, once all of the biomass data was recorded, the mean biomass for above ground growth, clippings and roots for each species were before being used for statistical analysis. For statistics, an ANOVA test ran in R Fall 2020 / Perennial 58

A. Root biomass (g)

B. Above Ground Mass (g)

C. Total Biomass (g)

STPU

2.14 (n=50)

2.49 (n=50)

4.63 (n=50)

AVFA

5.58 (n=49)

5.05 (n=49)

10.63 (n=49)

Total

3.84 (n=99)

3.76 (n=99)

7.6 (n=99)

Table 1: Average biomass of plants by species, disregarding clipping treatment. Anova test revealed that AVFA had significantly higher above ground, root, and total biomass when compared to STPU (p<0.05).

was performed to test for statistical significance with significant results having p values less than 0.05.

Results There were differences in the growth patterns of both Avena fatua and Stipa pulchra based on visual and measurement based analysis. The AVFA plants were found to have significantly larger final biomasses in root, above ground, and total biomass when compared to STPU. For aboveground biomass STPU averaged 2.49 grams while AVFA averaged 5.05 grams which Anova found to be statistically significant (p < 0.05) (Table 1).

In terms of final root biomass AVFA had a mean root biomass of 5.58 grams while STPU had an average root biomass of 2.14 grams which Anova found to be statistically significant (p < 0.05) (Table 1). Finally in terms of total final biomass, STPU had an average biomass of 4.63 grams while AVFA had a final mean biomass of 10.63 grams which Anova found to be statistically significant (p < 0.05) (Table 1). These results aligned with visual observations of the plants as AVFA had longer leaves and roots when they were removed for drying

purposes.

For above ground biomasses AVFA appeared to produce more above ground biomass then STPU under both clipped and unclipped treatments as indicated by Table 4. In the case of unclipped biomasses it was observed that AVFA had a mean biomass of 5.35 grams while STPU had a biomass of 2.91 grams (Table 4). Similarly, when the above ground biomasses of the clipped plants showed AVFA had an average mass of 4.76 grams and STPU had a biomass of 2.07, which were both lower than their unclipped counterparts (Table 4). Despite this apperenant drop in biomass post clipping in both species, Anova was not able to identify any significance that clipping reduced above ground biomass (p > 0.05).

Discussion

The data collected found that Avena fatua and Stipa Average Total Biomass Unclipped (g)

Average Total Biomass Clipped (g)

STPU

5.81 (n=25)

3.45 (n=25)

4.47 (n=25)

AVFA

12.09 (n=24)

9.22 (n=25)

2.92 (n=50)

Total

8.95 (n=49)

6.336 (n=50)

Root Biomass Unclipped (g)

Root Biomass Clipped (g)

STPU

2.90 (n=25)

1.38 (n=25)

AVFA

6.74 (n=24)

Total

4.82 (n=49)

(left) Table 2: Root biomasses based on treatment, in grams. Clipping was found by Anova to significantly lower root biomass (p<0.05). (right) Table 3: Average total biomasses based on treatment, in grams. Anova test found that clipping significantly reduced total biomass for both STPU and AVFA (p<0.05).

59 Fall 2020 / Perennial

Above Ground Biomass Unclipped (g) STPU

2.91 (n=25)

Above Ground Biomass Clipped without Clippings (g) 1.72 (n=25)

Clippings Biomass (g)

Above Ground Biomass Clipped with Clippings (g)

0.35 (n=25)

2.07 (n=25)

AVFA

5.35 (n=24)

3.68 (n=25)

1.08 (n=25)

4.76 (n=25)

Total

4.13 (n=49)

2.70 (n=50)

0.72 (n=50)

3.41 (n=50)

Table 4: Above ground and clipping biomasses in grams based on treatment.

pulchra did in fact display different growth patterns over the course of the three month study.

AVFA grew faster and larger than STPU in that time frame, which makes sense given that AVFA is an annual grass species that must quickly establish to produce seeds before the dry summer.

Additionally, the results displayed in Tables 2 and 3 showed that clipping had a significant effect on both species’ final biomasses, with clipped individuals of both species having significantly lower total and root biomasses. However, the data was not sufficient to reject the null hypothesis that STPU and AVFA would display different growth patterns in response to the clipping treatment.

Based on STPU’s natural history of being a native perennial grass species adapted to grazing, the original prediction was that clipped STPU would invest more biomass in its roots when compared to unclipped STPU and both AVFA groups. This prediction was also based on previous research that found that STPU has deeply penetrating roots up to 4.8 m that in turn play an important role in limiting soil erosion (USDA NRCS). However, this appeared to not be the case in this study as STPU, along with AVFA, had significantly lower root biomass after being clipped on October 3, 2020. One possible reason for this discrepancy for STPU’s results could be the short time scale that this study was performed on. Since STPU lives for multiple growth seasons, the root system most likely takes longer to establish when compared to annuals such as AVFA that must produce all their roots in one growing season. So perhaps a longer study would be warranted to judge STPU’s response to clippings, however because AVFA is an annual direct comparison of the two would only be possible in the shorter time frame of AVFA growing season as seen in this study. Despite this, STPU would most likely be able to display more of its well known root growth patterns over the course

of a 2 year study, but for AVFA two individuals would have lived and died in that same time frame.

Upon review of scientific literature, these results are not a complete surprise, as other studies have also found that STPU does not always adapt it’s growth patterns in response to grazing. In one study, researchers found that light grazing pressures from native mammals on the Central Coast of California did not have a significant effect on root or total biomass as well as STPU establishment (Buisson, 200201). The authors of this study did clarify though that because the grazers in their experiment were mostly small mammals such as rabbits, the results could be different in environments under more intense grazing from livestock species or larger mammal species. As such, perhaps the clippings performed in this study also fail to accurately mimic the effects of grazing, and perhaps a follow up study with grazers as the “clipping” treatment could provide more realistic data. Also, ecosystem level studies have found that established STPU stands suffer when there is a complete lack of grazing, which could support the idea that the time scale of this study was simply too short to accurately compare STPU and AVFA response to simulated grazing (Bartolome, 181-183).

Despite failing to reject the null hypothesis, this study supports known information that can be used to better understand the dynamics of the California grassland. One clear example of this paper’s data supporting previous knowledge is that of AVFA growth patterns as a cool-season annual grass. The data revealed that AVFA was able to grow significantly faster and larger than STPU over the course of three months, which is inline with the life history of the plant within California. Since AVFA grows most of its biomass in the short time window of spring to early summer once a year, it makes sense that natural selection would favor AVFA growth patterns that Fall 2020 / Perennial 60

are fast enough to set seed before the plant dies. This data therefore further validates the idea that intense grazing pressures and fire management early in the AVFA growing season can help land managers better promote native species such as STPU. Conversely, this study found that STPU grew at a slower rate than AVFA and had significantly reduced total and root biomass when grazing was simulated via clipping. As such, this information can be used by land managers to better inform grazing management practices that promote STPU by using lighter grazing pressure on young STPU stands when compared to already established ones.

Beyond supporting already known information, this study also provides possible new insights into the dynamics of California grasslands. One interesting example of this is when the ratios of root to above ground biomass of AVFA and STPU are compared. As stated earlier, it was predicted that STPU would invest a higher proportion of its biomass in root production when clipped when compared to the unclipped STPU control and the two AVFA groups.

However, the exact opposite relationship was observed in this study, with clipped AVFA actually having the highest proportion of root to above ground biomass and clipped STPU having the lowest ratio of root to above ground biomass (Fig 1).

While these findings were not tested by Anova, and therefore significance was not determined, they still could represent growth patterns that could provide a better understanding of California grasslands dynamics. If this pattern is also found in nature, under grazing conditions AVFA seedlings could outcompete STPU seedlings by investing more in their roots than STPU and in turn monopolize valuable resources, especially water. This theory would then work quite well with previous studies that have looked at how STPU competes with annual species such as AVFA. One such study found that established STPU stands can effectively compete against AVFA invasion, but when STPU is a seedling it can barely compete with faster growing AVFA seedlings (Robinson, 75). Another possible explanation for this relationship could be that STPU is relatively better adapted to reproduce above ground biomass after grazing when compared to AVFA. If this theory were true, perhaps STPU that is grazed is better able to produce above ground biomass lost to grazing in the wild in comparison to AVFA. This theory could be supported by the fact that clippings made up a greater percentage of the total above ground biomass for AVFA than in STPU. More specifically STPU clippings made up 17% of the final above ground biomass for clipped STPU plants while AVFA clippings made up 23% of the final above ground biomass for clipped AVFA plants (Table 4). Again though, this relationship was 61 Fall 2020 / Perennial

Figure 1: Normalized ratio of root biomass (brown) to above ground biomass (green) based on species and treatment. (Not tested by Anova)

not tested by Anova, but could still warrant further investigation as it could provide new insights to the benefit of range managers.

Based on the results of this study, the AVFA seedlings appear to be better competitors than STPU seedlings which support observed ecological dynamics of the annual dominated California grassland. The AVFA seedlings were clearly the better competitors as they were able to produce more biomass in every category measured and under both treatments when compared to the STPU seedlings. This higher biomass, especiallyroots, indicates that AVFA is able to quickly establish and in turn monopolize the limited water and nutrients of the California arid ecosystem. Additionally, since STPU seedlings take longer to grow, the seedlings would not be able to compete with AVFA seedlingsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fast growing roots that are able to better penetrate soils early on and monopolize water resources. This would be especially apparent in dry years in California as AVFA roots would be able to more efficiently collect limited water resources than young STPU plants that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have as extensive of a root system. Also, since clipped AVFA grew more biomass than both clipped and unclipped STPU (Table 3), it makes sense that grazing can be limited in its effectiveness of promoting native species such as STPU in California. This is because even if AVFA is heavily grazed, it will still have a more extensive root system that can monopolize water resources and out compete STPU. Related to this difference in species biomass production, these species can play different roles in carbon sequestration. Based on the results above, it appears that AVFA is better at sequestering carbon in the short term as it is able to quickly create a relatively large root system that then can be used to sequester carbon.

However, because AVFA dies every summer it is only able to sequester carbon for a short period of time and the residual dry matter left behind can pose a real risk of fire which can release even more carbon to the atmosphere, negating its carbon sequestration effects. In

contrast, while STPU was not able to grow as robust of a root network during the course of this study, as a perennial grass it is able to continue root growth for several growing seasons and therefore making it a better long term option for carbon sequestration. If given the right amount of time, STPU has been able to grow roots up to 4.8 meters deep (USDA NRCS) which can have a synergistic effect on carbon sequestration by not only putting carbon into the soil with its roots, but also by better preventing soil erosion that can release already sequestered carbon when compared to AVFA whose roots die in the summer. As such, STPU is most likely the better species for carbon sequestration overall because it is able to continuously sequester carbon through its roots based on the findings of previous research by other scientists.

Conclusion While this study failed to prove its original hypothesis, the data found provides new insight into the conversation surrounding California grasslands. As stated earlier, the data showed that AVFA was able to grow significantly more biomass than STPU in every measured category. This supports past theories that AVFA dominance was established in California thanks to its ability to outcompete native perennial grasses such as STPU by growing faster and monopolizing water early in the growing season. Additionally, this research provides a more nuanced understanding of how grazing may be used as a management tool to promote desired species within California. For instance, even when clipped, AVFA was still able to produce more root biomass than unclipped STPU averages. If clipping sufficiently mimicked grazing, which it might not have, then range managers should use intense grazing of AVFA early in its growing period, while using only light grazing pressures on seedling STPU stands to give them time to establish themselves.

In terms of experimental design, there are a few features that could have been adjusted to provide a better understanding of the effects on grazing on AVFA and STPU. One of the most obvious adjustments that could have been made would be having the study take place over a longer period of time of about one or two years. Due to the short time scale of this study, AVFA was able to easily outpace STPU in biomass production which could have played a role in the study’s inability to find a statistical interaction between grazing and species. Thus, since STPU is slower growing than AVFA, a longer study time would allow for a more direct comparison of mature STPU to mature AVFA. Also, if STPU was given a longer amount of time to grow thenperhaps we could better mimic grazing as well by having multiple clippings throughout the study, rather than just a single clipping. Another as-

pect of the study that could be adjusted to learn more about the effects of grazing is the ages of the STPU and AVFA. To do this, perhaps future researchers could compare AVFA and STPU plants with similar biomasses at the start of their study, and then clip them to see how relative plant maturity affects their response to grazing pressures. Similar to the last example, the researchers here could also use a longer time scale for their study and apply different amounts of clippings to better mimic the variance in grazing pressures seen in the field.

Works Cited 1. Bartolome, James W., and Barbara Gemmill. “The ecological status of Stipa pulchra (Poaceae) in California.”

Madroño, vol. 28, no. 3, July 1981, pp. 172-84.

2. Buisson, Elise, et al. “Reintroduction of Nassella pulchra to California coastal grasslands: Effects of topsoil removal, plant neighbour removal and grazing.” Applied Vegetation Science, vol. 11, 20 Feb. 2008, pp. 195-204, doi:10.3170/2008-7-18357.

3. Hayes, Grey F., and Karen D. Holl. “Cattle grazing impacts on annual forbs and vegetation composition of mesic grasslands in California.” Conservation Biology, vol.

17, no. 6, Dec. 2003, pp. 1694-702, doi:10.1111/j.15231739.2003.00281.x.

4. Huntsinger, Lynn, et al. “Defoliation Response and Growth of Nassella Pulchra (A. Hitchc.) Barkworth from Serpentine and Non-Serpentine Populations.” Madroño, vol. 43, no. 1, 1996, pp. 46–57, www.jstor.org/stable/41425116.

5. Keeley, Jon E. “Native American impacts on fire regimes of the California coastal ranges.” Journal of Biogeography, vol. 29, no. 3, 26 Apr. 2002, pp. 303-20, doi:10.1046/ j.1365-2699.2002.00676.x.

6. Keeler-Wolf, Todd. The History of Vegetation Classification and Mapping in California. University of California Press, July 2007, pp. 1-42, doi:10.1525/california/9780520249554.003.0001.

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Aztlán to Eden: Primitive Accumulation on the Grasslands of Arizona AUTHOR: Anjika Pai

Author’s Note: This essay is non-exhaustive in its coverage of issues surrounding race and ethnicity in Arizona. It is a product of natural curiosity, research that I completed after finishing a final essay for professor Peluso’s class on political ecology. I welcome any feedback or further research describing the intersection of the state’s role in grazing culture and racial formation.

View original submission here.

Introduction Arizona is home to over six thousand ranches, each contributing to a total of 880,000 head of cattle in the state (Arrowquip). To begin ranching, a farmer needs fertile grasslands for grazing and three to thirty gallons of water each day per cow—both difficult resources to find and access in a desert state (Rasby). Pre-colonial ranchers, including Native Mexican and American people, managed desert landscapes to maximize biodiversity and minimize reliance on any single crop, forming landscape mosaics to support ranching and other cultural activities (Peña 56). Biologists today regard the greater Mexico region as a Vavilov Center: a biogeographic region which played a major role in the domestication of wild plants, as well as the conservation of wild plant species (Peña 46). Aboriginal Mexican ranchers were responsible for the establishment of lucrative crops such as corn, beans, and squash (Peña 46). Planting these three crops together naturally replenished the soil’s stock of nitrogen and inhibited weed growth (Peña 86).

Additionally, communities utilized traditional use areas, followed commons rules, and promoted mutual aid in order to maintain their natural resources (Peña 71). Together, the ranchers’ collective actions developed a “cowboy ecology,” marked by a landscape which was once described as “one continual pasture” (Peña 89).

Early farmers in the American Southwest were guided by ideologies which emphasized respect for the natural world and centuries of accumulated knowledge on plant biology and weather patterns in the Sonoran Desert (Sheridan 34). Native people were taught by animal guides “to avoid being greedy and self-centered” (Peña 69). These lessons morphed into sayings such as La tierra es vida (“The land is life”) and Sin agua, no hay vida (“Without water, there is no life”) which describe the intrinsic link between hu63 Fall 2020 / Perennial

man life and the natural world (Peña ixx, 68). Mexican-origin people cultivated a land ethic which “instructs people to act as caretakers of the earth” (Peña ixx). They act with vergüenza, a norm which is similar to the aboriginal rejection of the capitalist system and the greed which accompanies it (Peña ixx). As Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo waves of colonization occurred, however, greed leached into Arizonan soil.

Since the start of Spanish contact, Arizona’s natural resources have been subjected to primitive accumulation, a concept introduced in Marx’s Capital to describe the simultaneous divorcing of labor and manufactured products, as well as the formation of a free labor pool. The ongoing primitive accumulation of ranching capital in Arizona most severely impacts the state’s ecosystems and Hispanic communities. After exploring the materiality of Arizona’s land, water, and cattle, I delineate each era of ranching in the state. I conclude by discussing the dominant narratives which have shaped Arizona’s landscape and the recent racialization of Hispanic laborers in relation to the cowboy figure. By integrating environmental, economic, and ethnographic studies of Arizona, I argue that barriers to capital which Hispanic ranchers face today arise from misrepresentations of their cultural history.

Materiality Before understanding the relations between the land, water, cattle, and people of Arizona, I will address the materiality of land and water, recognizing the biophysical constraints and the agency of nature (Bakker 46).

The name Arizona, an Uto-Aztecan word, means “place of little spring” (Arizona State Library). The state’s water sources are indeed limited, constricted to few permanent streams and between zero to fifteen inches of rainfall each year (Lewis 120). Perennial grasses cover valleys in wet years, but dry years observe empty, loose soil and stripped-down oak trees (Sayre 248, 249). Half of

Arizona’s area is covered by desert shrubland, which supports diverse plant and animal life like mesquite trees, prickly pear, and saguaro cacti (Lewis 120).

Easily-eroded valleys contain alluvial soil with minimal organic content (Lewis 120). Since the quantity and quality of land and water affect the survival of cattle, the materialities of the three natural resources are interdependent. Thus, Arizonan farmers strive to control each aspect of these ranching inputs to maintain their livelihoods. The abundance of one element could drastically change within a year, impacting the other two resources, as well as the social and economic structures of Arizonans. On this active, dynamic stage, Spanish, Mexican, and American forces began to change Arizona’s landscape through primitive accumulation.

Primitive Accumulation through Arizona’s Eras of Ranching Activity Establishment of Settled Grazing and the Formation of “Hispanic” as an Ethnicity (1697-1847) The history of settled grazing in Arizona begins with Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, a Spanish Jesuit who created missions from 1687 to 1710 in Arizona’s southern plateaus (Sayre 244). Kino’s 1697 expedition in southern Arizona introduced sixty head of cattle to San Luis de Bocuanos, eventually forming the first two cattle ranches in the state. The Spaniards, led by Kino, colonized grasslands with longhorns, uncastrated and “semi-feral beasts” which could maintain their own herd health in most seasons (Sheridan 84).

Native cowboys confined in the missions were tasked with branding these cattle—perhaps the first documented instance of the utilization of Native labor to manage colonial ranching (Sheridan 39). As a result, Jesuit missions were not self-sufficient. They required Native people’s labor to survive, a fact which tribes often used to negotiate gifts in return for their work (Sheridan 54). Yet despite these gifts, most missions exacerbated the power gap between Native communities and the Spanish elite. The cattle, cared for by Native residents, empowered missions, not the tribes themselves. In the example of Tumacacori, 5,500 head of cattle acted as the mission’s liquid assets (Sheridan 54). The herds were sold for twelve thousand pesos, providing the necessary funding to finish the establishment’s church (Sheridan 54). Mission officials also used violence to maintain sovereignty over Native communities (Sheridan 31). Under Kino’s rule, Spaniards punished rebel leaders by tricking O’odham tribe members to arrive at a marsh unarmed before slaughtering them (Sheridan 31).

The onset of settled grazing in Arizona introduced

colonial frameworks to the grasslands that were once home to Native American tribes.

Following Kino’s death in 1711, Apache tribes limited the influx of Spanish cattle to the Santa Cruz Riverbed for nearly eighty years (Sayre 245). At the end of the century, relations between Spanish settlers and Apache people improved, allowing secular cattle ranchers to expand into the Sonoita, San Pedro, and Babocomari Valleys (Sayre 245). From 1820 to 1835, Mexican estates and ranches began to replace Spanish missions (Lim 30). But Native people, still fighting for their homeland after the departure of Spanish colonists, disrupted the growth of Mexico’s empire. Consequently, the Mexican government offered citizenship to Indigenous villagers, undermining Indigenous land claims and political sovereignty (Lim 30). After the failure of this program, northern Mexican states began an extermination program which rewarded anywhere between a hundred and 250 pesos for dead or imprisoned Apache people (Lim 30). Native communities, however, continued to persist. Many federally-recognized tribes exist on reservation land within Arizona to this day, though they suffer the effects of benign neglect in the form of policies which ignore the undesirable situation that the federal government should be responsible for dealing with.

Despite the existence of Indigenous reservations on Arizonan land, years of erasing Indigenous sovereignty paved the way for eventually “collapsing Indigenous identities into Mexican-ness,” as historian Julian Lim writes (Lim 61). This process, spearheaded by both Spanish and Mexican governments, culminated in a turning point of Hispanic history in 1848, when the Mexican War ended. That year, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought centuries of conflict to the attention of United States citizens (Lim 61). The true history of the Hispanic community, complicated by the influences of Spanish, Mexican, and Indigenous territorial disputes, was incomprehensible for American nationalists (Lim 61). Eugenicists and nationalists latched on to the belief that Mexican and Hispanic people were simply the product of “the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population” (Lim 89). Thus, the concept of “Hispanic” as an ethnic category arose from white Americans who ignored complex relationships in order to deem the group “not white” (Lim 89).

Anglo-American Colonists and the Formation of the Hispanic Labor Pool (1848 - 1893) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, along with the Gadsden Purchase, provided the United states with over Fall 2020 / Perennial 64

525,000 square miles of land, including present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. The agreements marked the beginning of a new environmental era focused on extraction and introduced new ways of imagining territories in the American Southwest. On paper, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised to respect all property owners. Yet Article 10 of the original treaty, a section which stated “All grants of land made by the Mexican government… shall be respected as valid, to the same extent that the same grants would be valid, if the said territories had remained within the limits of Mexico,” was removed from the Treaty’s final revision (Sheridan 140). In the aftermath, less than half of the grants brought before the Court of Private Land Claims were confirmed, validating only five percent of 38,000,000 claimed acres (Sheridan 141). The U.S. judicial system, even if operating with good intentions, did not accept the customary rights and common property systems of Mexican and Spanish law (Sheridan 142). Additionally, courts privileged those who had “worked the land” but did not acknowledge Native methods of ecological management (Sheridan 142). By 1876, Anglo-Americans owned more than eighty percent of the grant’s area (Sheridan 142).

Prior to the Gadsden Purchase, land known as the Tumacacori grant included reservation space. As homesteaders flooded Arizona, at least four corporations and 120 homesteaders occupied portions of this grant by 1880 (Sheridan 134). In response, three suits from landowners arose to examine the legitimacy of reservations on the Tumacacori grant, all of which were valid under Mexican law (Sheridan 135). Ultimately, the involved court did not decide if the current homesteaders’ occupation of the land was legal; instead, they focused on the legality of the first auctioneer (Sheridan 135). After consolidating the suits, the Court of Private Land Claims claimed that Ignacio Lopez, the treasurer general of Sonora, did not have the right to auction public lands (Sheridan 135). That action could have only been taken by the national treasury (Sheridan 135). The three parties then took their consolidated case to the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in the Faxon v. United States decision which upheld the Court of Private Land Claims’ ruling (Sheridan 136). In official records, courts incorrectly claimed that the “land had been abandoned about the year 1820” (Sheridan 136).

Consequently, Spanish and Mexican communities lost both their right to Arizonan land and their history of occupation.

In 1855, one year after the Gadsden Purchase was signed, cattle arrived in Arizona in excess, escaping depleted rangelands on the Great Plains (Sayre 250).

The abandoned herds ran feral and grew exponen65 Fall 2020 / Perennial

tially; those who could control and brand these cows were free to establish their own herd with physical enclosures (Sayre 250). The cattle were left to returning soldiers who also profited from the surplus labor from an influx of Mexican immigrants during the 1870s (Knepper 135). The immigrants were given strenuous, dangerous jobs, what Anglo-Americans called “Mexican work,” and were paid a “Mexican wage” (Knepper 136). In 1876, Arizona began operating its first federal prison (Knepper 137). An analysis of Arizona’s Mexican-American population and the race of prison admits demonstrates that Mexicans were disproportionately imprisoned at the end of the nineteenth century (Knepper 139). The leasing of prison labor allowed industrial farms to profit from cheap labor, creating a greater divide between laborers and Anglo landowners (Knepper 140). Due to the excess of land, labor, and capital, the number of Anglo-owned herds began to grow.

Additional support for the ranching economy came from British investors, novel capitalists who poured almost 300,000,000 dollars into the ranching economy within two decades (Sayre 253). Joining British businessmen were wealthy Americans from the east, eager to “reenact the life of the landed gentry” from years past (Sayre 254). Eastern elites entered the grasslands of Arizona, eager to colonize a space which was described in 1857 as a space where there was “no occupation but labor” (Sheridan 118). Once the dry years arrived, however, these inexperienced ranchers allowed their herds to overgraze, leaving the land barren and eroded (Sayre 249). The number of herds expanded, as per conservative estimates, from forty thousand to 400,000 from 1870 to 1891 (Sayre 248). In the two years that followed, fifty to seventy-five percent of the cattle starved to death, causing one of the greatest environmental catastrophes of the nineteenth century (Sayre 249). The new settlers’ privilege provided them ranching capital and labor in the form of displaced Hispanic Arizonians, and their capitalist endeavors caused the destruction of the once open grasslands.

Continued Primitive Accumulation and the Anglo Illusion of Labor (1894 - 1932) The dispossession of Hispanic property continued into the twentieth century, marked by the loss of land known as the Baca Float in the Santa Cruz Valley. John Watts, an attorney who represented the Baca heirs who owned the grant, bought four portions of the float in 1871, accumulating nearly 300,000 acres (Sheridan 145). Eager to begin development, Watts inaccurately described Baca Float No. 3 as “entire vacant unclaimed by anyone [sic]” (Sheridan 145). After decades of legal battles over the exact location and contents of Baca

Float No. 3, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the Baca heirs no longer had a claim over the land grant and that the Float lacked meaningful occupation (Sheridan 166). In the early 1900s, Anglo capitalists evicted the float’s settlers, the majority of whom were Hispanic (Sheridan 167). The remaining Hispanic families who escaped eviction often moved to valleys, attempting to sustain their families on small plots of land (Sheridan 170). Those who could not became migrants, following the harvest seasoning and aiding farms from the Salt River Valley to California (Sheridan 170).

gated by CAP discounts, forced Arizonan farmers to participate in the water market and to monitor their consumption (Alley & Alley 44). While these measures recognized the impacts of economic activity on grasslands, the government failed to acknowledge the inequity of their regulations. Ranchers with the ability to manage externality costs continued to produce, and those without the capital to do so lost their livelihoods. Regardless of the condition of various classes of farmers, grazing lands, in the eyes of the state and federal government, were protected at the turn of the century.

Once the Hispanic community vanished, Eastern Americans descended on the property, forming the Baca Float Ranch (Sheridan 172). The “dude” ranch, formed by White settlers who longed to perform their masculinity through the reenactment of cowboy activities, reduced cattle ranches to mere backdrops for parties (Sheridan 173). As said in a magazine published in 1925, Eastern Americans flooded Arizona in an attempt to “meet nature in her ruggedness and still live a ‘white-man’s life’” (Sheridan 187). The money to support their booze and hotels arrived in the form of Texas cattle, and Arizonan stockmen expanded their ranges rapidly (Sheridan 182). Unfortunately, this basis for business left Arizona’s ecosystems vulnerable for the second time in fifty years (Sheridan 182). The end of World War I in 1918 ushered in a national agricultural depression. The reduced demand, paired with a severe drought which decreased available fodder, resulted in an increase in cattle mortality (Sheridan 182). Exacerbated by the stubbornness and ignorance of capital-driven colonizers, this crisis further altered Anglo-Hispanic relations through the codification of water and property rights.

Throughout this process of enclosure and commodification, Anglo citizens continued to benefit while Hispanic farmers formed a free labor pool. Shortly after the establishment of the Taylor Grazing Act, states began advocating for the Bracero program, an agreement with Mexico’s government which allowed American states to recruit temporary workers from Mexico. At the time, Arizona Congressman Carl Hayden advocated for the program, assuring the federal government that Mexicans would be restricted to agricultural labor and returned to their own country after a year of work (Plascencia 131). Bracero, derived from the Spanish word brazo, or arm, described the “body-men” of the economy (Camacho 63). The Mexicans involved in the program, as such, were valued only for the physical labor they could perform.

The program codified the belief that Hispanic people were input factors for capitalist endeavors, or arms detached from the minds of migrants (Camacho 63).

The workers were housed in converted chicken coops and warehouses, as well as former Japanese internment camps, keeping them close to industrial farms (Camacho 90). In Arizona, cotton labor camps utilized Mexican crew bosses to manage other workers (Mize 95). The bosses received slightly higher wages, but the growers continued to profit from the surplus without having to enact social control themselves (Mize 95). While the Bracero program was central to the development of Arizona’s cotton industry, the laborers were frequently used to bolster other farming giants (Plascencia 138). Hispanic people continued to exist and work on land which was once their own, unable to earn the right to conduct ranching activities themselves.

Federal Involvement and Discriminatory Practices (1934 - 2005) Two federal projects marked the transformation of Arizona in the twentieth century. The first major change was the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 (Sheridan 144). The act instituted mandatory fencing, effectively enclosing the remaining grasslands of Arizona (Sheridan 144). Cattlemen altered their perspective of the meat industry, decreasing herd size and selling their cattle by weight, not numbers (Sheridan 144). As anthropologist Thomas Sheridan proclaims, in that decade, “the era of the open range had come to an end” (Sheridan 144). The second policy began the construction of the Central Arizona Project (CAP), leading to the reallocation of water rights from the Gila River and the creation of the Groundwater Management Act (Alley & Alley 39). Signed into law by Governor Bruce Babbitt in 1980, the act regulated groundwater pumping for the first time in the state’s history (Alley & Alley 44). The introduction of water pricing, miti-

Following the termination of the Bracero program, some low-wage Hispanic laborers became sharecroppers but were often robbed of their fair share of water. One Hispanic farmer in Safford Valley recounted: “During times of drought; that’s when water bosses play favorites, and the Mexican farmers are the first to see their share of water reduced” (Vásquez-León 296). Furthermore, the Hispanic farmers’ production of chilies, white corn, and fruit, notably, not cash crops—prohibited them from gaining federal supFall 2020 / Perennial 66

port (Vásquez-León 294). From 1995 to 2005, annual farm subsidy payments averaged almost three thousand dollars per Hispanic farmer, contrasting with an annual average of over eleven thousand dollars per Anglo farmer (Vásquez-León 294). In 2014, while thirty percent of Arizona’s population was Hispanic, only five percent of farm operators identified as Hispanic or Latino (National Center for Farmworker Health 6). Without access to water rights and federal subsidies, Hispanic farmers were excluded from the Arizonan grazing economy.

Dominant Narratives on Arizona Grasslands Frontierism As described by environmental historian William Cronon, frontierism imagines landscapes such as Arizona’s as empty of humans and reveals an American desire to control the wild (Cronon 76). Following their success in the Revolutionary War, Americans had already begun to dream of westward expansion and the creation of structured towns beyond the Appalachians. In letters to other founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson glorified the self-sufficient farm as the model for a democratic society which could expand into America’s “seemingly uninhabited and limitless environment” (Lewis 8). The concept is closely related to Manifest Destiny, the belief that Anglo-American expansion was justified and inescapable.

Arizona was subjected to these visions of supposedly open landscapes which called for strong, white men to establish true civilizations. The Baca Float, for example, was originally envisioned as an Eden which presented the opportunity for work. During the Department of the Interior vs. The Baca Float case hearing, Watts waxed poetic about “valleys harmonious with the music of a thousand sparkling hills, mountains shining with untold millions of mineral wealth,” all of which “[wooed] the hand of capital and labor to possess and use it” (Sheridan 163). The Calabasas Land and Mining Company, led by entrepreneur C.P. Sykes, subjected the Santa Cruz Valley to romantic visions of frontierism (Sheridan 125). The valley promised agricultural abundance and luxury, and Sykes began to herd investors across the continent (Sheridan 125). These visions of Arizona were more than speculation and the formation of fictitious landscapes—they were promises of the future Anglo colonizers could have if they took advantage of Manifest Destiny’s westward expansion.

Anglo-Americans’ confidence in their capabilities stemmed from the racist assumption that Spanish attempts of forming a civilization would surely be out67 Fall 2020 / Perennial

shone by the product of American determination. John Goodwin, Arizona’s first governor, once announced to the legislative assembly: “The Aztec has been here, the Spaniard has retreated. The Anglo-Saxon stands secure. The tide of our civilization has no refluent wave, but rolls steadily over ocean and continent” (Knepper 138). So secure were the Anglo-Saxons in their occupation that they began to fabricate the image of the white cowboy. White settlers used ranches as a setting to relive a fictional lifestyle, reenacting cowboy activities in dude ranches. Their performances of ranching masked the contributions of favorable environmental conditions and cheap labor towards their profits (Johnson 438). Enshrined by figures such as President Roosevelt and novelist Maxwell Burt, the cowboy image became a source of unearned American nostalgia which ignored the original ranchers: the people of color who occupied the American Southwest prior to the Gadsden Purchase (Johnson 438, 439). The concept of frontierism bolstered the stream of capital which led to the two cattle collapses. The state could not simultaneously exist as a venue for capitalist conquest and as the origin of Mexican ranching practices, so the latter was erased

by Anglo-American colonizers to suit their needs.

Ethnic Distancing Throughout Arizona’s ranching eras, the formation of a Hispanic labor pool required viewing Hispanic people as other: foreign bodies. As previously described, “Hispanic” communities were the product of tribal, Spanish, and Mexican conflict and coexistence. Despite Hispanic Americans’ extensive history occupying Arizona’s rangeland, white leaders of agribusiness developed “foreignness” to label Mexicans as illegitimate and inferior (Ngai 132). As explained by historian Mae Ngai, “Casting Mexicans as foreign distanced them both from Euro-Americans culturally and from the Southwest as a spatial referent: it stripped Mexicans of the claim of belonging that they had had as natives, even as conquered natives” (Ngai 133). Additionally, Anglo-Americans took measures to segregate native communities from Mexicans, defining Mexicans as an inferior half-breed and speaking against racial mixing (Peña 77). The ethnic group, formed by narratives which supported the capitalist activities of Anglo settlers, suffered through economic and social segregation (Ngai 131). Whether born inside U.S. borders or brought in during the government-sanctioned Bracero program, Mexican-Americans were reduced to a “commodity function,” allowing Anglo-Americans to feel entitled to the land, labor, and capital that supported their ranches (Ngai 132). Within the framework built by white ranchers, Hispanic farmers had no historic claim over the land and water in Arizona, rendering countless individuals incapable of accumulating capital.

Hispanic Characters Existing as the “other” population within the United States, Hispanic people were molded into caricatures who not only faced legal barriers to capital but had few options other than manual labor for an occupation. Father Kino, Arizona’s original colonizer, believed that animal husbandry distinguished Christian communities from the “savage” hunter-gatherer nomads he encountered (Sayre 245). Spaniards used the term gente de razón (“people of reason”) to distinguish themselves as “non-Indians” (Sheridan 59).

Framing Native people as lesser, uncivilized beings, Kino and other Spanish missionaries justified their appropriation of land, water, and cattle. These racist sentiments persisted during waves of American expansion, as seen in the records of nineteenth-century Anglo pioneers describing Hispanic settlements as a “mere pile of tumble-down adobe houses” or a “God-forsaken place...with a miserable population.”

(Sheridan 111). In 1876, Arizona Governor Anson Safford discussed his belief that Mexicans were dangerous bandits, calling them “a scourge to civilization, a disgrace to humanity” and “wild beasts” who “should be swept from the face of the earth.” (Knepper 137).

Twenty years later, depictions of Hispanic Americans focused on the perception that they were a lazy population. The Arizona Gazette supported the use of prison labor in 1896, stating: “Hundreds of Mexicans commit crimes on purpose to be incarcerated in that prison, where they get plenty to eat and no work” (Knepper 142). Imagining Hispanic people in these ways removed their agency, ultimately removing the Hispanic influence on Arizonan grasslands.

Conclusion

chart your own course” (Nolan & Joy). This quote, like those found in writings from the nineteenth century, romanticizes the supposed potentiality of Arizona.

However, that “chance” was only afforded to certain races. Today, Hispanic farmers face the historic barriers set in place since the advent of colonial grazing: unfavorable land deals, a history of unequal pay, and limited access to land and water rights. Forced to join a free labor pool, many farmers cannot compete against Anglo Arizonians for resources as environmental conditions continue to deteriorate. The recognition of vaqueros may allow for fairly assigned water rights designated based on prior appropriation, or, at least, return power to the original ranchers of Arizona to recount environmental history.

The entanglement of various races, classes, materialities, and narratives complicates the grasslands of Arizona. The impacts of various modes of enclosure, beginning with Civil War-era fences and continuing today with discriminatory farming credits, extend beyond their detrimental environmental effects. Each additional land use change furthered primitive accumulation, separating Hispanic farmers from the means of production—the land, water, and cattle of the state—and using their bodies to form a free labor pool.

While actions such as the Gadsden Purchase and Taylor Grazing Act highlight contradictory understandings of property between localized and governmental actors, the resource conflict in Arizona exists because of racial category formation and differing concepts of ranching as a cultural practice. Primitive accumulation, enforced by international capitalists and the U.S. government, caused the racialization of farm labor in Arizona and, ultimately, the limited participation of Hispanic farmers in the state’s grazing culture.

Against their will, Hispanic communities became whatever the dominant capitalist desired them to be to further primitive accumulation. At first, they were savage beasts who had to be tamed with new frameworks of ranching. Then, their perceived laziness forced Anglo-American leaders to push them into labor. Most importantly, however, they could be erased completely in order to ensure that land fell into the hands of Anglo-Americans. They were tokens, pawns to be pushed around in order to maximize the extraction of natural resources.

The way America remembers its past affects how the nation may shape its future. The television show Westworld depicts a futuristic theme park in which visitors may interact with stereotypical cowboy figures against the background of the Sonoran Desert.

When speaking about the true history of this setting, a Westworld character reminisces, “The West was cruel, unjust, and chaotic, but there was a chance to Fall 2020 / Perennial 68

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Fall 2020 / Perennial 70

This is the second issue of Perennial: The Berkeley Undergraduate Environmental Journal, and it is the accumulation of many hours of hard work by our dedicated staff. We would like to thank the many individuals who worked on this project during the COVID-19 crisis and The Green Initiative Fund for their support in funding this project. Perennial was also accepted as one of the contributing teams to the Global University Climate Forum in support of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference 26 (COP26).

If you are interested in contributing to future issues, please check out our website perennial.berkeley.edu for information on joining our team, as well as how to submit work to Perennial.

With “Transformation” as our second issue’s theme, we want to highlight some organizations focusing on intersectional environmentalism, as well as those based in the Bay Area that are pushing for transformative change. This is by no means an exhaustive list: we encourage you to get involved with campus, local, and community-based organizations.

Intersectional Environmentalist California Environmental Justice Alliance Energy Justice Network Brightline Defense Center on Race, Poverty, & Environment Earthjustice Indigenous Environmental Network Communities for a Better Environment

71 Fall 2020 / Perennial

Spring 2021 Staff EDITORIAL Editors-in-Chief Jasmine Chen Celine Yang Senior Editors Da Eun Jung Grace Sandel Jessica Stubbs

DESIGN Design Director

Lilian Zhang

Members Ella Suh Krista Villegas Mia Tu Trisha Andrews

Copy Editor Jeremy Chang Staff Writers Andre Zendejas Ashley Soliman Christina Pelliccio Claire Sauter Fallon Funseth Jacqueline Cox Khaled Alqahtani Lamiya Gulamhusein Melissa Cervantes Miracris Villanueva Nicole Inaba Olivia Hemond Shani Sarah Lyubomirsky Shivani Ekkanath Sophie Park Teresa Campbell Tessa Stapp Verona Teo

FINANCE Finance Director Charity Liu Members Christine Wang Isis Liu Ryan Chen

TECHNOLOGY Technology Director Ryan Bada

Fall 2020 / Perennial 72

ISSN 2693-145 (print) ISSN 2693-146X (online) © 2020 Perennial: The Undergraduate Environmental Journal of Berkeley