Urban Farms in Richmond

For my practice experience, I’ll be working with Self-Sustaining Communities in Richmond, CA this summer.  Aiming to establish a secure and healthy city, Self-Sustaining Communities has helped create and maintain three urban farms in Richmond and has distributed over 9,400 fruit, nut, and olive trees to residents.  With the vision of using urban farms as a “focal point to address food, housing, mental health, and other needed survival skills,” (http://www.self-sustainingcommunities.org/our-work.html) Self-Sustaining Communities continues these efforts to address food insecurity, poverty, and environmental injustice.

I wanted to use this first blog post to illustrate the need for this in Richmond.  Below are links to two pages at Richmond Confidential, a news service produced by the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.  The first is a map that includes the location of a number of environmentally hazardous sites throughout Richmond (there’s a lot!), and the second is a short article with a video about food insecurity in North Richmond and the farm project that some local residents undertook as a solution. (not my PE org). As you can see, urban farms can be a means to address more than just food insecurity.

http://richmondconfidential.org/2012/12/07/richmonds-toxics/

http://richmondconfidential.org/2011/05/27/planting-a-healthier-north-richmond/

Richmond, a city that is mostly inhabited by low-income people of color, is not a special or isolated case.  Study after study has shown that pollution in the United States is typically placed in low income communities and communities of color.  Overburdening these communities with environmental negatives, as well as their lack of access to environmental goods (like parks), is what is known as environmental racism or environmental injustice.  Laura Pulido’s article “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California” (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0004-5608.00182) is a great article that explains the role that structural and spatial racism plays in the creation of the social realities we see experienced in places like Richmond.  Specifically, Pulido discusses white privilege and the historical and current processes that have enabled whites to distance themselves from both non-whites and pollution.  These are themes that we touched on in GPP 115 as well when we went over topics like Hurricane Katrina and poverty in the United States.

I think the suburbanization of super markets, one factor in the creation of food deserts, is related to the processes Pulido talks about in her article.  As mentioned in the Richmond Confidential video, people in the Richmond area do not have adequate access to fresh and healthy food choices, which essentially makes Richmond (or parts of it) a food desert.  Urban farms address food insecurity and can be a part of the movement for environmental and social justice.

Also, since we are all interested in poverty alleviation, I wanted to let everyone know about the Raise the Wage: East Bay campaign I’m working on.  This is a campaign to raise the minimum wage for workers in the East Bay to $10/hour with a COLA so that it continues to rise with the cost of living.  Currently, the minimum wage for local workers is $8/hour with no COLA.  Changing the distribution of income from companies to minimum wage workers in this way would also be a step in the right direction to tackle environmental injustice.  You can support the campaign by liking the Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/RaiseTheWageEB), but if you want to do more you can contact me at: bsnyder@berkeley.edu

Brandon