Water Philanthropy By and For Communities

And I know, you know, one of the other big issues facing [chuckles] probably all of us in the West, and around the world, but the Western US does feel particularly prone to heat at the moment.

And so, uh, Janaki, I know I've really been enjoying reading your newsletter, and we will, you know, put links for that so people can sign up for it in our show transcripts.

But you've written a couple pieces re- recently that were particularly focused on heat, uh, during the hottest part of the last few months, and, you know, you've talked about the i- the heat impacts on farm workers in California, and, and I was surprised to see, you know, that farm workers die from heat exposure at 20 to 35 times the rate of other outdoor workers, right? We're not even comparing it to people who don't work outdoors.

We're talking other outdoor workers.

And, and a lot of those folks live in these unincorporated communities, um, that were originally built as farm labor settlements, and then they also don't have great tree canopy.

They don't have great public investment, tons of asphalt and soil, which concentrates the heat.

So can you talk a little bit just about the, the heat and how these communities are coping and, and yeah, just the, the impacts of heat on, on the Central Valley right now?

This Mediterranean climate is really good for producing a large amount of agricultural products, but in terms of sustaining communities, it's one that requires a great deal of intervention in terms of ensuring that there is access to safe water and disaster preparedness.

And none of those things [chuckles] over the course of the story of California, not once has there been a time that our state government or our federal government has looked inward, has looked, looked down and looked at these communities and said, "We're planning for all this agricultural profit, but we're not placing any of the same kind of decision-making power into, uh, these communities." So this is all to say, I mean, heat is just one of the many environmental challenges that are being contended with by these communities because they're suspended as raisins in the sun in the middle of California.

However, there are also places that right now, as we are in the process of looking forward, hopefully transitioning a significant amount of acreage in the Central Valley out of the kinda industrial, uh, water usage that has been compromising our groundwater resources and also hopefully with support from things like the Marigold Fund that are meant to highlight and actually reknit the social fabric that has been eroded by industrial agribusiness.

We have an opportunity to think, uh, bio-regionally to really look at how some of these communities that are full of human beings, that are full of heart and ideas and, and sometimes equipment and actual readiness to engage with their local environments, what- how would they reimagine their landscapes to be places that have the trees that the local cities have that they don't have?