Toxic Tour: San Joaquin Valley

California’s San Joaquin Valley--the heart of the great Centray Valley--is in crisis. Catastrophic flooding across the Valley during the winter of 2023 prompted evacuations, destroyed infrastructure, and threatened two of the region’s major industries: agriculture and oil. The only hospital in a county of more than 150,000 people closed. Tiny rural school districts serving some of the state’s most disadvantaged children face looming financial cliffs. These crises are shaped by the region’s histories of domination by industrial agribusiness and its attendant ideological resistance to unionization and environmental responsibility. They are also shaped by the challenges of addressing environmental injustice in rural spaces: more than 300,000 residents of the Valley live in small, dispersed unincorporated communities with no direct voice in their local government. Finally, the San Joaquin Valley highlights the challenges of effective environmental governance in discursively marginalized regions when many of the hazards come from elsewhere—like air pollution blown in from the Bay Area or sewage imported from Los Angeles.

In spite of these challenges, however, the Valley is also home to vibrant communities with long traditions of resistance against all forms of injustice. The Californian environmental justice movement was born in a successful campaign against a hazardous waste incinerator in Kettleman City. Farm workers across the Valley have organized for labor and immigration rights for decades.

This "toxic tour" attempts to capture the many dimensions of the San Joaquin Valley in nine stops. Each stop tells the story of a particular place and issue, providing both a narrative and additional material to explore. You can follow the toxic tour here by clicking on the blue arrows on each page, or by clicking on the numbers to jump to a particular stop. For educators, we have developed a simplified version of this toxic tour on ArcGIS StoryMaps here.

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