For a blue state, we’ve done a pretty horrible job with our homeless and those living well below the poverty line. OK, we haven’t stooped so low that we have statutes eliminating water breaks for workers during heat waves as Texas has, but we are a major agricultural producer – the vegetable capital of the United States, which requires more direct, worker harvesting. I doubt that has been the motivation for the Ron DeSantis/Greg Abbott (Republican governors of Florida and Texas, respectively) cabal’s sending waves of busses of undocumented asylum seekers by the busload to California. The recent heat waves have already killed more people than we have been able to count. The settlement of the UPS near-strike featured an agreement to air condition the delivery vans that do not yet have that cooling feature, a hot topic as we have wave after wave of record-breaking heat.
And while it is possible to air condition vehicles, offices and even factories – if someone cares – that option is not available for most construction building or farmworker-stoop labor harvesting crops in the fields. They may wear broad hats with neck scarves, but as heat rises, that may just not cut it. But climate change has offered even more challenges to those working outside, especially in agricultural regions. When wildfires rage near agricultural fields, the air can fill with toxic smoke… the fires can also destroy the cropland itself, thus killing even meager jobs harvesting creates. Or once productive land can become water-starved and simply no longer produce crops.
When the opposite happens, record-breaking rains and snowmelts, dams can overflow or break, streams and rivers can breach their banks, sending destructive flooding that takes out crops and the modest homes or housing for those farmworkers, many of whom are American citizens. Small farmers can watch their modest livings simply wash away. Among the hardest hit are already marginalized, Indigenous peoples pursuing a way of life that embraced their family for a very, very long time. It happened this March in Monterrey Count on the north central California coast, where annually $4 billion worth of crops find their way to our dining room tables. Pictured above.
An old levee that contained the Pajaro River, built shortly after WWII, failed. “The poorly maintained levee proved no match for a waterway transformed by winter’s relentless succession of monsoon-like atmospheric rivers. The breach sent a tidal wave of mud and water through Pajaro, stranding cars, damaging hundreds of homes and small businesses and forcing the town’s 3,000-some residents to evacuate, just as it had nearly to the day, in 1995. The March floods inundated more than 8,700 acres of cropland worth $264 million, according to the Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office, bringing total damages from winter storms to $600 million.” Science/environmental journalist, Liza Gross, writing for the July 23rd Inside Climate News. Those whose homes were slammed, whose farmland was washed away, and those who worked the land saw their life change dramatically as floodwaters staked their own claim over them.
These weren’t the corporate mega-farms owned by well-capitalized conglomerates. The homes, the land and the hope they engendered crashed though the lives of locals, many Indigenous Americans, including farmworkers who plied their season trade across California’s productive farmland. These farmers have been pawns in what have become a combination of trade wars and climate disasters, with a touch of political in-fighting to make bad so much worse. “Indigenous farmworkers are finding themselves at the mercy of cascading climate disasters, bouncing from one hellscape to another like characters in a dystopian climate novel. But the catastrophic flood has made the devastating toll these disasters take on their lives and livelihoods all too real, with no relief in sight.
“Migrants dispossessed by decades-old free-trade agreements in the mountains of Mexico risked their lives to eke out a better living picking strawberries for dollars a day only to become dispossessed by climate change. They played no role in global economic policy or the climate crisis yet are reeling from the repercussions of both. Robbed of the means to make a living at home, they now struggle to survive life-threatening floods, heatwaves and wildfires without a safety net in one of the richest countries in the world. The federal government, which relies on the cheap labor of unauthorized workers to keep food prices low, has done almost nothing to help them, leaving a state saddled with a budget deficit and under-resourced local governments and nonprofits scrambling to do what they can.” Liza Gross.
We need these food crops. We need these farms. We need these farmworkers. The United States is the largest agricultural exporter on earth. We take care of those mega-farms, and they also have the financial ability to survive many of these disasters. But just as we incurred trillions of dollars of federal net deficit increases from the one-sided gift to the rich corporate tax cut of 2017, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives continues to push for reduced spending to fix life for those at the bottom of the economic ladder and is even pressing to reverse Biden-era legislation aimed at addressing climate change itself. Oh, they’d like further to cut taxes for the rich, the purported “job-creators” when they pay lower taxes, even as the underlying theory of creating jobs by cutting taxes has never worked. Or as I like to put it, “a rising tide only floats all yachts.”
I’m Peter Dekom, and it truly galls me as those Republican Congress-people, who voted against all these infrastructure and climate initiatives… and are attempting to repeal much of them… love to point out these new federal construction projects to their constituents as evidence of how they are working for the people who elected them.
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