Over the course of Trump’s presidency, immigration policies are among the strictest the country has experienced. The effects of this are felt strongly on U.S. farms, which have relied on foreign migrant labor for decades. While the H-2A program, a special farm worker visa, is in place to support migrant laborers, there are not enough visas to meet the need of the expansive farming industry.

Who is taking their place? The incarcerated.

Multiple states have passed anti-immigration laws that mirror federal regulations and emulate Arizona’s much contested S.B. 1070. The result is a sudden scarcity of migrant laborers who no longer risk the border crossing due to fear and distrust of public institutions. To fill the shortfall, Idaho state Senator Patti Anne Lodge authored a bill in 2014 that allows Idaho farms to use prison inmates as labor, having seen first-hand the untended and rotting fruits across her state orchards. Putting prisoners to work, she believes, will be a form of rehabilitation for the inmates: “ninety-five percent [of prisoners] do get out, and they are given a better chance to come back into the community and become productive, accountable people.” Senator Lodge sponsored a second bill that passed in 2018, expanding the program to more agricultural sectors.

Critics have denounced Senator Lodge’s perspective on the prison-to-farm program. They argue that the program is a shocking return to convict leasing for agriculture, a post-Civil War practice that replaced slaves with incarcerated people. The practice was abandoned by both federal and state governments in the 20^th century after becoming infamous for the brutal conditions imposed on majority black inmates.

The current farm-to prison program is not unique to Idaho. There are currently over 30,000 incarcerated people working on U.S. farms, many making less than a dollar a day. The private prison system is pocketing the profits of their work. California’s correctional industry, for example, made over $2 million from such agriculture and food programs between 2015 and 2016. Businesses are profiting too: the Arizona Corrections Industry has a $5 million labor contract with Hickman’s Family Farms—the 4th largest U.S. egg producer—and a $2 million labor contract with Nature Sweet which established a base pay for inmates of $2.00/hour.

You might think the same laws that banned nineteenth-century convict leasing would apply here. You’d be wrong. While the current prison-to-farm programs have been admonished by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), proponents of the programs argue that there is no racial bias behind the program, corporal violence is prohibited, there is sufficient food and housing, and work days don’t exceed 8-hours. Thus, it is different this time.

Taking a look at who makes up the incarcerated population, it might not be so different after all. Compared to white Americans, African Americans are incarcerated at 5.1 times and Latinos 1.4 times more frequently. These numbers are the result of decades of racist and minority-targeting policies from Jim Crow to the 1994 “tough on crime” law to stop-and-frisk. In Georgia alone, where prisoners labor to harvest Vidalia onions, 60%of inmates are black and 35% are white. While the national demographics of inmate farm workers are not readily available, given the breakdown of the larger prison system, it is likely predominantly non-white populations.

What’s clear is that farm labor is delegated to groups that have been historically exploited. The problem of Idaho’s unpicked apples isn’t a farm labor shortage, but a documented worker shortage. If workers were given the opportunity to work safely with authorization and without fear of deportation, Senator Lodge would not have seen a landscape of unproductivity and abandonment. What’s more, the benefits of “fresh air” and “hard work” for inmates, touted by Lodge and other legislators, shouldn’t be considered replacements for programs whose primary focus is to improve inmates’ lives—high school and college education, vocational training, and alcohol/drug dependency, counseling, rehabilitation, and awareness programs. Prisons should put rehabilitation first, not the profits of industrial farms and private prisons.

As Sarah Evans of Food First, a research, education, and activist organization aimed at addressing food justice, writes, “Fair wages, worker protections, and dignity is the answer to labor shortages, and should be the bedrock of a just food system.”

You probably wouldn’t expect to find a 350 square-mile lake in the middle of California’s Sonoran Desert. 

Neither did I. When I visited Joshua Tree National Park, I anticipated lizards, cacti, and expanses of sand. But on our last day camping, after trekking up to Keyes point for a view of San Gorgonio Mountain and the San Andreas fault, something in the distance caught my eye. 

“Is that… water?” I asked my friend. 

We were confused. Might it be a mirage? Only after finding cell service again were we able to confirm our sighting: A lake exists in the middle of the desert.

The Salton Sea. We knew that we had to go. 

A quick detour south, we zipped down Route 86 passing through towns with cutesy names like “Desert Shores” and “Bombay Beach.” We expected to find an off-brand Palm Springs, or maybe an Indio with water. Up until this point, the desert towns of the Coachella and Imperial Valleys had impressed us with their charm. 

But a few miles in, we knew that something about the Salton Sea was off. The air was thick. The visibility was terrible. We had to turn our wipers on to brush off the dust caked onto our front windshield. We passed two other cars on the entire four-hour excursion. Then there was a smell unlike any I’ve ever smelled before — rotting fish with sharp notes of drain cleaner and old eggs. Yuck.

When we arrived, Bombay Beach turned out to be a 1960’s ghost town. Desert Shores wasn’t much different. The drive-in movie theater was packed with abandoned (now vintage) cars. Old diners and restaurants were reduced to ruins. The fancy Yacht Club lay crumbling under its own weight. A single flag, bleached white from 60 years of desert sun, blew gently in the wind, somehow still clinging to an upright flagpole. The flagpole, as the last remaining vertical structure in the town, seemed aware of its own irony.  “Looks like someone has surrendered,” we joked. 

If there’s one word that sums up the Salton Sea, it’s post-apocalyptic. The ritzy resort-town lifestyles of the Salton Sea’s past are long gone now, and what remains is a desolate shell of what once was. Why? 

It’s the same reason that my friend and I turned the car around and headed home sooner rather than later: We couldn’t stand the thick air, the mysterious dust, and that god-awful smell. Environmental degradation drove people away. 

To understand what happened, you need to know how it all began.  The Salton Sea never should have existed in the first place.

The story begins with the Salton Basin, which is the second-lowest point in North America. It sits 226 feet below sea level and it had been bone dry since around 1700. 

Then enterprising Americans started tinkering with the region’s water cycle. In 1900, the California Development Company diverted water from the Colorado River through a 60-mile canal to the Imperial Valley for farming operations. It was an audacious project. But it worked. The irrigation canal supplied water to the growing desert agriculture industry starting in 1900. Then, five short years later, the plan backfired. 

In 1905, it rained a lot in the southwest. The rain flooded the Colorado River, breaching the new irrigation canals, and flooding the Salton Basin. For two years much of the Colorado River flowed into the desert, not toward the ocean, and the Salton Sea was born. The engineers at the California Development company did not foresee how unpredictable weather events would lead to disaster. That led to one of the biggest engineering mistakes in American history. As a result, the largest lake in California is located in the driest region of the state.

Real estate investors saw this unique landscape as an opportunity– perhaps the Salton Sea could be the best of both (dry and wet) worlds. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, they developed the area into a prominent resort destination, hence the towns of Bombay Beach and Desert Shores. With the arrival of hotels, casinos, and upscale waterfront properties, Hollywood’s elite flocked to the area for the luxury desert-riviera experience. The Beach Boys docked their boats at the North Shore Yacht Club. Just down the street, Frank Sinatra and Sonny Bono partied amongst the desert palms. Look closely and you could spot President Dwight Eisenhower playing a round at the Salton City Golf Course. But the “miracle in the desert” was short-lived.

Ecology cut short the Salton Sea’s heyday.  With no natural outlets, what flowed into the lake stayed in the lake.  The slow trickle of runoff from Imperial Valley farms fortified the water with a polluted concoction of fertilizers, pesticides, and selenium, leading to toxic algal blooms. The lake is also becoming saltier as water evaporates in the dry heat. This was a death sentence for aquatic life. You can still smell the consequences from miles away. It’s no wonder that everyone packed up and left after 1970.

The obvious solution for fixing a lake that shouldn’t have been there in the first place is to let it disappear. It wouldn’t be hard — the lake should dry up in about 50 years if people let it be. But the haphazard actions of the agricultural industry complicate things. 

This complicating factor is dust. As the water in the Salton Sea evaporates, the lakebed underneath becomes exposed to air. A century of toxic sediments, accumulated from industrial and agricultural drainage, are suddenly one wind gust away from becoming airborne. The dust we encountered on our windshield makes sense now. 

The threat of toxic dust storms is a scary one. Once the dust is inhaled by humans, it can cause asthma, bronchitis, and other pulmonary diseases. It’s already affecting the vulnerable low-income communities of color at the northern and southern tips of the lake: residents of the Imperial Valley are three times as likely to have asthma as other Californians.  Even worse, experts say that toxic dust storms have the potential to intensify as the lake continues to dry, and could reach Los Angeles or Las Vegas. 

What is so complicated is that it is agricultural run-off that holds the dust at bay.  That makes agricultural runoff a can’t-live-with-it, can’t-live-without-it problem for the Salton Sea. On the one hand, it’s the only thing keeping the water levels high enough to prevent a major public health disaster. On the other hand, it’s polluting the water and turning the Salton Sea into a toxic lake. 

Various government agencies and non-governmental organizations have been trying to find a feasible solution for years. 

There was a glimmer of hope from 2003-2017 when the Imperial Irrigation Authority struck a deal with the San Diego County Water Authority. The agreement was that San Diego would help Imperial Valley farmers build up agricultural infrastructure to improve water efficiency,

lessening their demand for irrigation water. In turn, the Imperial Valley farmers allowed the water they saved to flow to San Diego as drinking water. With agriculture operating efficiently and San Diego getting the excess, there was less runoff flowing to the Salton Sea, threatening to lower the water level and expose the drying lakebed to the desert wind. This exposed sediment, accumulated with decades of toxins from agricultural runoff, could cause deadly toxic dust storms. To prevent an air quality disaster, the agreement required that for 15 years, the Imperial Valley allow some of its share of the Colorado River to flow into the Salton Sea. It was a win-win solution. The agreement wasn’t renewed after 2017 because the Imperial Valley didn’t want to bear the burden of keeping the Salton Sea under control– the local government doesn’t have enough money or resources to continue pouring their water into a body of water that generates no revenue. Now, the Imperial Irrigation Authority is looking to the California state government to take over mitigation efforts.

The situation is bleak at best. Water levels in the Salton Sea are dwindling, and freshwater is scarce for the majority of California. The state government is struggling to find a feasible solution. Some are beginning to say that it’s too late.

As we turned north and headed for home, my friend and I pondered our brief venture into the post-apocalyptic world of the Salton Sea. Utterly stunned, we couldn’t help but feel like stumbled on the skeleton hidden in California’s closet. 

What worries us most is that the Salton Sea may not be an artifact of the past, but a harbinger of the future. All over the state, people are growing crops in the desert, extracting and propelling water around California like it’s Gatorade at a football game, just like the irrigators did in 1900. Will these plots of irrigated dryland result in the accidental creation of a 6 million acre-foot lake and the looming threat of toxic dust storms 100 years into the future? Based on what we learned from the Salton Sea, perhaps. Will problems of some kind arise? Absolutely. 

When I started writing about the Democratic presidential primaries, there were eleven candidates running for the nomination. By mid-March, the pool had dwindled down to two: Senator Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden. Since I started writing this piece, Sanders suspended his campaign. While that means Biden effectively has secured the nomination, voters still need to be informed on his platform. Studies show that the environment, specifically climate change, is one of the top issues for many Democratic primary voters.

Multiple environmental non-profits have created ‘scorecards’ that make clear just how differently Biden and Sanders approach environmental issues. Intended to be easily digestible, these reports breakdown the specifics of each candidate’s stances and assigns an overall score or grade. But how useful are these scorecards to the environmentally minded voter? I decided to explore this question by examining focus, methodology, and consistency of four scorecards published by four well-known environmental organizations: Center for Biological Diversity, the Sunrise Movement, 350 Action, and Greenpeace.

The focus of the organization producing the scorecard impacts the issues included in the scorecard. 350 Action, a nonprofit focused on climate action, assessed the candidates on four climate-related categories. Greenpeace also kept a narrow focus on climate policy. The Sunrise Movement was even more specific by only evaluating Biden and Sanders on their approach to the Green New Deal. Taking a wider approach, the Center for Biological Diversity looked more broadly at environmental issues, including wildlife, public lands, and environmental justice, in addition to climate change. These different approaches have a lot to offer, but the Center for Biological Diversity offers the best overview of multiple current environmental issues. If you want more specifics on climate policy, the Sunrise Movement breaks down everything and anything related to the Green New Deal.

The scorecards differ in their methodology too. Assessments include letter grades (A, B, C, etc.), points, and check marks. Each are simple enough to get their point across, but how are the organizations coming up with their scores?

While they back up their statements with research, I did not find a concrete grading rubric for the scorecards. This makes it hard to know why a candidate got a C instead of a C+ for their stance on fracking, for example. This may feel like an small detail, but it does ultimately influence how meaningful the final scores are, so readers should keep this in mind.

If you want more information than the final scores, each organization backs up their grades with evidence pulled from candidates’ websites, speeches, tweets, past legislative initiatives and voting records. The Sunrise Movement scorecard was especially research intensive. Their scorecard has four main categories, sub-categories within those, and even more sub-sub-categories. It scores candidates on 61 different topics relating to the Green New Deal on a scale that adds up to 200 potential points. More information for each score can be found by simply clicking on it, although like the other organizations there is little explanation for why they assigned the number of points they did.

Despite these differences in scope and methodology, all four scorecards come to similar conclusions. Bernie Sanders surpassed Joe Biden on each scorecard. Green Peace gave Sanders  94/100 (an A) while Biden received 72/100 (a C-). This trend continues for each organization with the exception of the Sunrise Movement scorecard where Biden scored only 75/200, or an F-. This may not be too surprising though, because Sunrise is a youth-led organization. In a Yahoo! News survey, only 18% of 18-29 year olds ranked Biden as “very favorable” compared to a 41% ranking for Bernie. For all the variations in topics, methodology, and grading criteria, these four environmental organizations all came to a consensus that Bernie Sanders is the most environmentally progressive candidate.

Regardless of the final conclusions, none of these scorecards are the be-all-end-all source for the environmental stances of the candidate. By focusing on the heavily displayed conclusions, readers may miss the supporting evidence found in external links and separate webpages. For example, in the 350 Action scorecard, you wouldn’t know that Sanders has already taken action to open federal investigations on the fossil fuel industry unless you read the “Sources and Research” document at the bottom of the page. Ultimately, these types of scorecards are valuable overviews that supplement readers in their own research on politicians. It may seem pointless to research the only candidate left in the race, but it’s important to know the facts and keep politicians accountable, whether you voted for them or not. To learn more details about Biden’ environmental past, present, and future, I suggest you dig deeper into his online platforms, voting records, and campaign finances.

Chandra Williams in the Crossroads Cultural Arts Center. Photo by Ashley Funk

Hot, dry air whips in through the open windows of the speeding car, while fields of white expand past both sides of the highway. On the radio, another Blues song plays, and the histories of these fields come to life.

The Blues grew out of these cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. As a means of resistance against the brutality they faced, African slaves would sing their broken histories and chant their pain. Here, in Clarksdale, Mississippi– known as the birthplace of the Blues– these legacies of oppression and resistance are very much alive. Every year, tourists flock to Clarksdale to celebrate the history of the Blues, enjoy the community’s endless hospitality, and taste its Southern cuisine. Yet, over 40 percent of the community lives below the US poverty line. Breaking down this statistic, nearly half of Clarksdale’s black residents live in poverty, compared to just over 10 percent of white residents.

Soon, the fields recede to the white-picket fences and mansions which line the grounds of the country club and golf course. A few miles further into central Clarksdale, families living in small, dilapidated wooden houses can barely afford electricity. Driving into Clarksdale, the divides between rich and poor, white and black, are obvious.

While it’s easy for some to harbor on Clarksdale’s struggles, Chandra Williams sees the city in a different way: “This could be a healing mecca,” she says confidently. Chandra is the visionary director of the newly formed Crossroads Cultural Arts Center (CCAC). Although Chandra recently moved to Clarksdale for the position, she has called Mississippi home for the past 15 years. As a talented artist and educator, she is passionate about using the arts as a force for healing communities and individuals. Her business card reads “Teacher of Transformation”.

Before her position at the CCAC, Chandra taught art for nearly a decade through the Brilliant Easel Art School, which she founded. Through the school, Chandra worked with Mississippi public schools and mental health facilities to empower individuals, primarily youth, through the arts. Chandra sees art as a way for individuals to connect with themselves, their cultures, and their natural world. In addition to her degrees in drawing, printmaking, and education in informal settings, Chandra has a certification through the Audubon Society in wetlands education. She uses these experiences to ground her work in transforming individuals and communities, and hopes to continue to do the same through the CCAC.

From the outside, the CCAC looks like an uninhabited warehouse. It fits right into the rest of town where run-down buildings are supposed to add to Clarksdale’s charm. But on the inside, the CCAC is an arena of endless potential, with wide-open rooms, a stage, and beautifully painted murals hiding behind every door. Chandra dreams of making the CCAC a space where people can heal through arts rooted in history, culture, and community.

Specifically, Chandra wants to use the CCAC to transform the way black Americans see themselves and their culture. “We’re suffering from an identity crisis,” she explains as she tells the story of a young man she knew who committed a crime and served time in prison, just because he thought that was the only way he could be a rapper.

One of Chandra’s guiding life philosophies is that art creates reality. “Art is made for our senses. The image or sound that we sense creates a thought in our mind, and that thought drives what we think is reality,” she says. Right now, one of the dominant realities being created by art, specifically music, links young black men to crime and violence. “The black image needs to be changed for ourselves, for everyone, especially for black boys,” Chandra explains, “Lives are depending on it.” Here, in Clarksdale, where violent crime rates are more than double the US average, her message rings clear.

To Chandra, the natural environment plays an essential role in restoring identity and grounding the arts, especially in the rural community of Clarksdale. “In society, there’s inequality, but in nature, everyone is equally powerful,” she says. “But before I came to Mississippi at 22 years old, I had never seen the uninterrupted earth.”

To prove her point, she eagerly shares another one of her many stories. While teaching at an alternative school, a group of her students thought she was “cool” because she grew up in the urban cultures of Chicago and St. Louis. But when she finally did step into the Mississippi woods for the first time, she was scared. “What’s cool is to be safe on the earth,” she said to the kids. Even though they didn’t grow up in city streets, they had other valuable gifts from growing up in a rural community. They could do things like hunt, grow food, and be comfortable in the natural world. For the first time, these black youth growing up in rural Mississippi realized that what they had was powerful.

“It’s like a bird in a cage versus a bird in a tree. There is so much more a bird can do to transform into its greatest self when it can grow in its natural environment,” she explains. “We need to return to our natural selves to get away from this social environment that has imposed so many limiting ideas about who we are.”

Chandra believes nature provides methods for change that she wants to explore through the CCAC. Many people try to change society through protests and changing legislation, but those methods often focus on problems rather than solutions. “They involve opposition, and such, we end up putting our energy into things that we don’t want rather than creating what we do want,” she says. “But there are natural ways of change that don’t require the approval or resources of an institution.”

To her, one of these natural methods of change is through art. Not only is art inspired by experiences with the natural world– whether that be the woods or city streets– it also gives power to individuals to create reality. Even though a lot of artwork today is controlled by the entertainment and music industries, individuals can create and distribute artwork freely– and with innovations like the internet, sharing art is easier now than ever before. Within a small town such as Clarksdale, the potential for sending a widespread message through artwork is even stronger.

Through the CCAC, Chandra hopes to reframe black identity by telling the history of African and African-American culture in Clarksdale. She wants to highlight the roots of the Blues, which are inspired by the descendants of the Fulani people of West Africa who, according to her, “used the Blues to sing their family trees.” She envisions a space for people to create art to reconnect to their culture by creating black American forms of art, such as bottle trees and one-string guitars. It is a program she hopes will inspire black youth in Clarksdale to connect with themselves, their gifts, and their natural environment.

Through this work, Chandra hopes that the community of Clarksdale can begin to recognize its strength as a predominately black, rural community with a deep history connected to cultures across the globe. Chandra hopes that through the CCAC, she can inspire individuals to transform into their greatest selves so that they, together, can build a stronger community. Not only can the work of the CCAC work to reinspire Clarksdale, but the message can spread to the rest of Mississippi and beyond. Through her vision and the CCAC, Chandra holds strongly onto one belief: “Mississippi can change America.”