New Factories in the Fields

Often advertised and imaginatively located as a pastoral paradise, California's Central Valley is in fact an industrialized agricultural juggernaut unmatched in the world. Such an environmentally invasive infrastructure inherently creates social and environmental injustices that refute the ever valuable idea of the California Dream, though these counter-narratives often go unpublicized and thus unaddressed. Among the greatest of these, intimately connected to farm labor and chemical farming, is the methamphetamine (meth) epidemic in the Valley. The social and ecological toll of its manufacture and use is immeasurable, and deserves a place in the mainstream consciousness in the name of justice for this land and its people. This region exists as much imaginatively as it does literally, yet it also sustains one of the deadliest realities in the nation. A new understanding of this land, inclusive of these social and environmental violations, must be pursued.