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sustainability
Trust, Land, and Community Under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
Farmers in California's San Joaquin Valley need enough support to turn a forced transition into a livable one, where they can afford to retire acres while still keeping a foothold in agriculture and in their communities.
Apr 14, 2026
Until three years ago, AW, who requested that only his initials be used for identification purposes, was an almond farmer. Now, he’s a grass farmer. AW farms in Tulare County, California, the heart of the San Joaquin Valley and California’s most productive agricultural region, the source of more than half of the produce the nation consumes. Five years ago, he was growing almonds across his 300 acres, a profitable crop that sold at a high value on the market. Now, he’s growing cover crop, a mix of various grasses intended to keep the soil on his land healthy, but that doesn’t bring in income anywhere close to what AW was making when he was growing almonds.
Why did AW make this switch? Not out of choice, but out of necessity. California agriculture is tied to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a bill passed in 2014 with the goal of reducing groundwater overdraft throughout the state, an agriculture-driven environmental hazard that is depleting aquifers and causing subsidence. The main tension behind SGMA is that the act is expected to cause between 500,000 to 1 million acres of San Joaquin Valley agricultural land to come out of production before 2040, and the act does not come with a built-in support system to help farmers figure out what to do with their land when agriculture is no longer an option. Neither SGMA nor the Valley farmers who it’s hurting the most are at fault—farmers are simply employing decades old agricultural practices to meet national food demand and SGMA is simply trying to preserve the state’s water resources.
AW is one of the first farmers to feel the impacts of SGMA fully realized on his land. SGMA, although passed more than a decade ago, is just now taking hold across the state, and farmers are now faced with the difficult choice of farming under restrictions and the potential of facing fines, or not farming at all. The state’s agricultural economy is at a major influx point—how farmers, communities, organizations, and the government react to the challenges that are about to descend onto this region will influence how the agricultural industry survives and takes shape for the coming decades.
In the media and in public conversation, farmers are often portrayed as anti-environmental, shortsighted, and profit driven. But through interviews I conducted with over 30 San Joaquin Valley farmers about their experiences with SGMA, I found something different: people confronting extreme change, often alone, trying to make difficult decisions for the good of their families, their business, land, and their futures. Almost every farmer I spoke to described feelings of isolation as neighbors compete for water and limited state funding, and as collaboration and trust erode. Outside of a handful of small pools of money and technical assistance that have been rolled out by the California state government, there has been lacking wide-scale institutional support for farmers seeking to change land uses.
If we give people like AW the tools and backing to make this shift, the San Joaquin Valley can move from a story of loss to a blueprint for how rural communities across the country can adapt to a hotter, drier future.
To fill this void, California requires the scaling up of solutions that will help farmers remain in the agricultural industry while taking advantage of this wide-scale shift in the agricultural landscape to increase sustainability and prioritize the environment in their decisions and actions. Organizations based in the region, such as The Nature Conservancy, River Partners, and Sequoia Riverlands Trust, are working on a small scale to do just that.
These organizations aim to protect and preserve both habitat and agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley region while helping farmers navigate the landscape of SGMA. They work on habitat restoration projects, assisting farmers with conservation easements, and are constantly innovating on how to make certain solutions more economically viable for farmers. Alongside academic research partners, these research organizations are also exploring how to make certain aspects of agriculture more viable, such as an expansion of regenerative agriculture in the region, which would offer a path forward that ties farmers’ livelihoods to rebuilding soil, recharging groundwater, and restoring habitat and turning today’s crisis into a long-term investment in a healthier, more resilient food system. This work serves as a model of the support systems that need to be wheeled out at a much larger scale in order for farmers, the economy, and the environment to thrive under this set of new regulations. Its spirit of collective undertaking is exactly what the San Joaquin Valley needs now as it navigates the upheaval of SGMA.
What AW needs to help him navigate his transition from farming almonds is what the Valley needs: enough support to turn a forced transition into a livable one, where farmers can afford to retire acres while still keeping a foothold in agriculture and in their communities. That will require sustained investment in on-the-ground organizations, dedicated funding for land transition and habitat restoration, and policies that treat farmers not as villains, but as partners in reshaping one of America’s most important food-producing regions. If we give people like AW the tools and backing to make this shift, the San Joaquin Valley can move from a story of loss to a blueprint for how rural communities across the country can adapt to a hotter, drier future, bringing with them the promise of sustainability.
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Reclaiming a Disposable Planet
Tossing out the trash is something you’re just supposed to do, no questions asked, at least if you want to live a normal, respected life. But what if you're missing something wondrous?
Feb 21, 2026
Hey, want to read a poem with me? Warning: It opens several disturbing doors, the least disturbing of which is the “crazy old coot” part, i.e., me. Once you start getting lost in the paradoxes of life, you need to watch out. They could start coming after you.
But more disturbing is the paradox itself, which is both environmental and spiritual. And it’s right there on my front lawn. The life I’ve been given—the lives we’ve been given—are partially disposable, apparently. Mostly I took this for granted, but suddenly one summer afternoon, as I was pushing my hand mower up and down the lawn, something shifted in me. I started feeling... reverence for garbage? Tossing out the trash is something you’re just supposed to do, no questions asked, at least if you want to live a normal, respected life. Doubting this could be a tad problematic.
The poem is called “Buddha’s Lawn.” I wrote it a decade ago. Back when I still had a lawn to mow.
I mow the lawn and feel gratitude
my neighbors
haven’t pigeonholed me as a crazy old coot.
I’m stalled in my transition
from a lifestyle and sense of order based on
killing things,
like weeds, mice, whatever,
to one based on reverence for all stuff,
however weird.
It’s a cool day but
I work up a sweat.
On the lawn, I pick up a shred
of burst red balloon, a used napkin,
a transparent plastic juice container.
This stuff is all just litter
and the weeds are still weeds.
If I really let myself
see them differently,
I’d be the crazy neighbor, right?
Well, sorry (I apologize to myself.) I can’t help it. Once the door opens and a ray of awareness shines in, burst balloons, tossed straws, plastic grocery bags, discarded pop bottles, etc., etc., aren’t what they used to be. There’s an inner awareness that won’t go away. You might call it “litteracy”—an awareness of what happens next.
For instance, according to the Center for Biological Diversity: “In the first decade of this century, we made more plastic than all the plastic in history up to the year 2000. And every year, billions of pounds of more plastic end up in the world’s oceans. Studies estimate there are now 15-51 trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans—from the equator to the poles, from Arctic ice sheets to the sea floor. Not one square mile of surface ocean anywhere on Earth is free of plastic pollution...”
The analysis goes on:
Thousands of animals, from small finches to blue whales, die grisly deaths from eating and getting caught in plastic...
Hundreds of thousands of seabirds ingest plastic every year. Plastic ingestion reduces the storage volume of the stomach, causing starvation. It’s estimated that 60% of all seabird species have eaten pieces of plastic, with that number predicted to increase to 99% by 2050. Dead seabirds are often found with stomachs full of plastic, reflecting how the amount of garbage in our oceans has rapidly increased in the past 40 years...
Dead whales have been found with bellies full of plastic.
I can’t dismiss this with a shrug... just toss the plastic in the trash and go on mowing my lawn, being normal. I start to stare with curiosity and wonderment at the litter. And this is where the old coot starts looking, or at least feeling, crazy, at least until his sense of awareness expands: “The word ‘garbage’ means a resource nobody is smart enough to use yet.”
Hmmm. Really? I quoted these words in a column I wrote in 2013. Called (I kid you not) “Reverence for Garbage,” it talks abouts the documentary Landfill Harmonic, about a Paraguayan village built on a landfill. Reclaiming and reselling the trash was the residents’ primary means of survival. But they did something else as well. Inspired by a local musician, the residents also started making musical instruments out of the trash: “violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates.”
Real instruments were beyond expensive, far more costly than anyone there could afford. But children in the village learned to play the instruments hand-crafted from the landfill trash. And what was worthless became heavenly.
Is there a larger cultural takeaway pulsating in this story? Could it be that we value too little of our own planet? I wonder if maybe.. maybe... we should begin crumpling up our certainties and tossing them in the trash.
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The US Leads the Global Race to the Bottom—and Still Pretends to Be the Victim
Trump’s tariffs are not a departure from business as usual; they are an extension of it and will overwhelmingly benefit the world’s financial elite.
Apr 28, 2025
Global trade systems are not free, nor are they neutral. They were built to facilitate capital transfer and to transfer wealth upward—benefiting the rich while harming workers worldwide. This arrangement can feel too big, too abstract, and too disconnected from our experience. For these reasons, and as a sociologist across decades and schools, I have facilitated this race to the bottom activity to help students understand the problems inherent to our complex global reality.
In the Transnational Capital Auction: A Game of Survival simulation, students role play as leaders of countries with less wealth than GDP leading nation states. They are instructed that they rely on trade and economic development from wealthier countries such as the United States and powerful transnational corporations.
Capital flight occurs when transnational corporations move their factory or industry from one geographical area to another in order to seek better conditions for their bottom line, profits, or for shareholders. These moves highlight the antagonism between the working class and the owning class. For example, in the activity, teams gain points when they satisfy corporate demands: being lax on child labor laws and environmental regulations, maintaining a low minimum wage and corporate tax rate, and suppressing unionization of workers. This is not just a game with hypothetical conditions, it is a microcosm which echoes real-world socioeconomic and political dynamics.
Rather than denying our power and privilege in order to justify more bad behavior, we need to do our part to realign around policies that are internationally, socially, and environmentally sustainable.
We have seen this play out domestically and internationally. Sociologists have documented how corporations leave the United States to go to places more favorable to capital. For example, when an area develops unions, industry can flee to what it considers a safer space for business. In this way, capital for transnational corporations can accumulate faster when workers’ rights and environmental policy is lax. These conditions have led to countless deaths, especially among women and people of color, and have fueled global climate destabilization. These corporations are helped by policies and loopholes such as international tax havens like Nauru.
The human cost of this system is staggering. Body-catching nets were installed around Foxconn buildings because workers were unaliving themselves by jumping off their job site. Women, including mothers, leave their families and countries in order to work in other locations where the wages are higher.
The unjust arrangements are often complex by design. There are free trade zones or “special economic zones” in places like Jamaica, which allow companies to operate under a different set of laws than the rest of their country—sometimes with fewer worker protections. Meanwhile, local markets neglect or dispose of their natural resources because of the flux of imported goods dictated by trade agreements.
To be sure, the global working class harmed by these lopsided systems includes American workers who have lost their jobs, houses, and communities through capital flight. And yet, American consumers love the low prices these systems enable. The products we rely on—the food, the technology, the entertainment—these things are not created in a vacuum, and they are also not free. We have access to fast fashion and too soon obsolete technologies because people spend their lives working in conditions and receiving wages that we would consider un-American. Yet they are so very American.
The United States is no one’s victim. It helped create the race to the bottom and continues to benefit from its downward spiral. Trump’s narrative, justification, and chaotic enactment of tariffs are more than problematic. They are not a departure from business as usual, they are an extension of it and will overwhelmingly benefit the world’s financial elite.
Change is needed. The United States needs to reevaluate its relationship with itself and as part of a global community. We need reciprocal, resilient, and renewable structures in place. We will not get there by the same policies of violence, domination, and extraction that got us to the asymmetrical and disproportionate power that we have now. Rather than denying our power and privilege in order to justify more bad behavior, we need to do our part to realign around policies that are internationally, socially, and environmentally sustainable. We can all start by reflecting on our personal commodity chains, which tether us to global enterprise and its bottom rungs.
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