Water, Land, and Power in the Central Valley | Towards an Ecologically Sound and Just Agriculture

Mark Arax will draw from his chronicles of California over the past three decades to address the future of agriculture in a time of climate change. Arax has been called a “21st Century John Steinbeck” for his books that pry open the soul of California. No writer has devoted more pages to the story of California agriculture—small farmers and big farmers, conventional farmers and organic farmers, the migrants who work the crops—than Arax. A two-time winner of the California Book Award, he eloquently chronicles the “culture of extraction” that has leveled valleys and drained rivers and lakes. He confronts a peoples’ defiance of drought, flood, wildfire and earthquake that has invented and reinvented California and now imperils its future. Arax’s books include In My Father’s Name, a memoir of his father’s unsolved murder, the essay collection West of the West and the bestselling The King of California, which was named a top book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. His newest book, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, is being hailed by critics as one of the most important books ever written about the West which has also become a national bestseller.

Janaki Anagha is the Director of Community Advocacy at Community Water Center. Prior to this, she worked in the San Joaquin Valley of California advancing agricultural and environmental policy towards justice for communities bearing the burden of California’s food system, including forming Community Alliance for Agroecology and working at California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. in Fresno enforcing environmental justice and worker protections such as access to clean drinking water for unincorporated farmworker communities. Janaki has assisted in curriculum development for the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems undergraduate degree at UC Davis and has farmed in diversified and orchard crops across the state. Janaki holds a J.D from UC Davis School of Law and a B.S. in Agricultural Development from UC Davis. She is a co-founder of the California Farmer Justice Collaborative.