April 2024
I drove up the Central Valley of California to Merced, just north of Fresno. A valley town of nearly 90,000 people, in a majority Latino region, with a University of California, for which I was conducting an academic program review. It is surrounded by agriculture, but the reality is that along the 99 freeway, the valley is growing sprawl as much as it may be growing crops. The toxic mix of vehicular pollution, agricultural chemicals, and dust in the air due to agriculture often obscures the fact that the majestic Sierra Nevada mountains lie just to the East (Merced, gateway to Yosemite), and the coastal range just to the West.
Merced itself has a sad and struggling downtown, like many small towns in the US that have been surrounded by suburban development served by commercial districts dominated by parking and chain big box retail. Merced hosts the same pattern – overly wide boulevards where people drive fast between their single family homes where there is not walking access to anything, to the shopping center or the freeway. Downtown has a slew of failed businesses, including restaurants and coffee shops, second hand stores, a few hotels and government buildings. UC Merced, built on donated land like all UC campuses, is a few miles out of town, isolated and lonely. Slowly sprawl is catching up, but again, housing (this time more apartments and more dense) is built with no concurrent shopping, simply roads and more roads and blobs of giant stores surrounded by parking. Ugly, alienating and devoid of sense of place.
UC Merced feels, and is, largely disconnect from town and the Valley. The campus is an unimaginative set of LEED certified new buildings on an long axis. Many of the office/classroom buildings have no openable windows, and no sense of climate other than ‘efficient’ climate control. No overhangs, no shading for sun, no solar (except a token effort on the engineering building), no acknowledgement of solar orientation or views, or. . . again, place. Plantings are less than prosaic. There are no native plants, no trees for shade – and it gets very not in the summer – no shade arcades. I was a bit taken aback, and the campus dates from 2005, with a recent extension of dorms and administrative buildings. YET, it is to be a minority serving institution, to serve the central valley. But I guess, only to turn the students into STEM strong employees for Valley (and beyond) businesses, not to be thinker and creators of a new future that is place based and addresses the inequities, impacts and injuries of California’s corporate agriculture and toxic present. Depressing.
I was there to review (with 2 others) the Environmental Systems (ES) doctoral program. UC Merced, when it first was created, had no departments, so it created several doctoral programs, some spanning disciplines. The Environmental Systems doctoral program was seen as innovative, spanning Engineering and the Life Sciences. Today, each has become departmentalized, and wish to have their own doctoral program. It becomes harder for these doctoral programs to work when department have their own PhDs, and also, one has to question whether engineering and life sciences, today, really are meaningful way to address the future, given the turn of events relative to climate change and the growing understanding of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, including in CA.
The trip raised, again, for me, questions about the role of the university. What is the university’s job in the 21stcentury? How can researchers, with enormous resources, continue to ask narrowly based questions of say, impacts on nature without asking why those impacts? In whose interests? How do we move into a different path? What are the connections of colonialism and imperialism? Environmental systems are not just natural systems out there, people are part of creating the environments we live in, how do we begin to acknowledge them and bring them in, and forge a pathway to change, most importantly. These departments and the research rely on huge amounts of funding from – largely – federal sources. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), each seeking the latest most advanced technical ‘solution’ to a problem, often identifying problems that are only problems if they are so labeled. Very little is devoted to asking about human institutions, and the issues of how we are managing ourselves. Rather, better technologies are the ticket to the future. Quite blind. Not much on ethics, beliefs, history, and how science constitutes research. No work on epistemologies. . . and what happens when this funding runs out, say under a new administration at the federal level? Why assume it will continue ad infinitum along with the idea of continued growth, one relies on the other? This is of a world with no future change, no accommodating to human impacts and finitude.
To me, being a researcher at a university, or a professor, is an immensely privileged position, one which comes with a lot of responsibility for research that is not for myself and my promotion, or making my institution have higher rankings. Rather its about using the resources at my disposal to do socially responsible work. I have been remarkably fortunate with state funding the past decade or so, still, the work my research group does has to be cast as examining a technical issue in order for us to be funded and then to able to make analyses of the social, political, economic and other forces creating the situation we are analyzing ‘empirically’ and largely quantitatively. Numbers are the proof, though often the reality is known viscerally. It is a strange time.
The Central Valley of California was once an immense wetland in rainy seasons, full of life – birds, grizzly bears, ungulates – 2 huge shallow lakes, fish and dense oak forests along riparian corridors. Today it is ecologically depauperate, a sad place of extractive agriculture on an immense scale, reliant on cheap labor, cheap water, chemicals, fertilizers and subsidies. It is an export agriculture, perhaps not all that different than plantation agriculture that continues across the world. And now, of course, home of more and more warehousing and other end uses that serve the Amazons of the globe. What UC Merced is contributing remains to be seen, but not a lot to Merced itself, that much is evident.