CalEnviroScreen mapping tool reveals that California’s Central Valley, especially the San Joaquin Valley, faces some of the highest pollution burdens and community vulnerabilities in the state—driven by industrial agriculture, traffic, wildfires, and compounded by poverty, limited resources, and severe health impacts.
If you take the highway west out of the city of Fresno, concrete administrative buildings give way to suburbs, then to small fields, and eventually to vast tracts of farmland. As the great rind of mid-year light curls around the melon flesh of the Central Valley, endlessness becomes the landscape. In the triple-digit heat of the summer, the waterlessness of the place casts violet on the soil, the earth a crucible of the last aquifer. You’ll pass the occasional well pump, the occasional equipment field, but no other signs of domestic human life for miles. And yet, if you turn onto one of the many smaller roads, you’ll find, under unbelievable circumstances, people still live and love the planet here.
The Central Valley is an agricultural phenomenon, 20,000 square miles producing roughly 8% of the nation’s calories. Tens of thousands labor here in unforgiving conditions, while millions pass through without ever seeing what lies beyond the blur of orchards. Scattered across this landscape are rural, often unincorporated communities like Del Rey, Porterville, and Allensworth. Many began as tent settlements or railroad-era land schemes. They are worlds within worlds, home to generations of migrants who have been excluded from political power, capital, and basic infrastructure.
I am a botanist and a lawyer, drawn to these rural sacrificial landscapes, the fringe worlds that quietly sustain us. For over a decade, I’ve been observing the plants and people who make homes in these places. The same instinct that draws me to plant adaptation has led me into rural California to understand what blooms under pressure and invisibility. Careful attention reveals what is otherwise unseeable. I want you to come along with me.
Community and their garden: Cantua Creek, Fresno County, CA in the middle of Westlands Water District. This community lives on bottled water for their daily domestic needs as irrigation water is tainted and groundwater out of reach. The water district has a property-weighted voting structure: to vote or run in elections, one must be a landowner within the district. The Marigold Fund seeks to resource communities like this to own and steward land.
Migration is constant in the Central Valley. Scanning the radio while driving Highway 99, you’ll hear Hmong, Punjabi, Tagalog, Armenian, and Mixteco — languages torn by military occupation and thrown into the dust to coexist. The people who cover the length of the Valley retain vital links to their villages of origin in Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, with diversities extending beyond nationality to language, regional attachment, spiritual orientation, and cultural practice. Cultural cuisines are densely packed in one glorious stretch of land, each preserved in a cocoon of segregation. But in the 111-degree Fresno summer heat, those divisions often melt away. You can find handmade dumplings behind a Tulare County Johnny Quick, paneer tacos at the truck stop in Dinuba, and lacy pupusas served alongside cold papaya salad on the way out of the Fresno city limits. They’re all made by hands marked by the same sun.
These people face some of the highest pollution burdens in California, from pesticide exposure to polluted drinking water and extreme heat. Resilience is demanded of people who have been denied the most basic conditions for survival. There is nothing natural about that. I became a lawyer with a belief in environmental justice, and with the understanding that survival should not require this level of adaptation. I kept returning to the Valley, and what I’ve found is that new worlds are already being built there. You just have to know where to look.
The Marigold Fund for Unincorporated California grew from that realization. Formed over more than a decade of organizing by agroecology practitioners and farmworker leaders, the Fund supports community-led stewardship of land, water, and local economies in unincorporated California. We resource cooperative farming, community composting, groundwater resilience efforts, and other land-based projects led by farmworkers, small farmers, and Tribal communities.
Family of Antonio Chavez in the small city of Kerman, CA harvest marigolds and amaranth. Read more about the Chavez family here
The Marigold Fund is about rewiring who gets to shape the future of land and natural resource governance in California. It is about resourcing people at the edges and recognizing them as the authors of the next chapter for this state. It celebrates their power to cross boundaries, grow in unlikely places, and live between the world we inhabit and the one we’re yet to know. Marigolds.
In my newsletter, you’ll hear stories from the Fund, written by me and my friend and companion in the California chasm, Twilight Greenaway. Sign up for her newsletter here! Twilight is an award-winning journalist focused on food systems, agriculture, climate change, and environmental justice. You’ll also find other stories and curiosities about rural California, plants and their people, and passages to earlier moments in time. Maybe even the wayward poem.
This is an invitation. Whether you’re a chef, eater, farmer, policymaker, funder, resident of the Valley, or someone who is searching for a way to live meaningfully in this moment, there’s something here for you. The future of California is already being revealed in the shadow of collapse. Welcome to the marigold world.
Stay in touch by sending me an email: janaki.anagha@gmail.com
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